Sticky Sticky Notes

Your Primary Embedding Mechanism is Strategic Leadership

I was searching our offices for a sticky note. For context, I’ve been in one of my “digital” moods for about a year. I vacillate between organizing my work digitally or analogically about every six to 12 months. I really want to be all digital: it makes the most sense. But, like the seasons, I drift back to paper, pencils, pens, and some sticky notes regularly.

Today, though, the office was experiencing a sticky note drought. When I finally unearthed a stack of them under a pile of papers and folders (probably left when the digital spring blossomed with promises of higher efficiency), the first five or so had stuck to them. I tried to stick one to my stack of papers, neatly paper clipped (what am I thinking: I’ll never go fully digital…). It clung there for a nanosecond, then fluttered to the floor.

The sticky note lost its stickiness and was essentially useless to me.

The last time I wrote, I made this point and suggested that strategic managers must employ embedding mechanisms to make transformations stick. Moreover, most of the sustained changes I’ve witnessed stuck because of the cultural changes around them sticking. To review, these mechanisms involve primarily strategic leadership and, secondarily, structural / system changes. Next time, I’ll pick up the latter, which I’ll call framework changes. This time, I want to discuss leadership embedding mechanisms.

Leadership is…

Well, it isn’t a position. Some people like to call a set of managers “leadership.” While that works colloquially, it won’t work for this essay. Leadership is the process someone uses to influence a group to attain a shared goal (Northouse, 2019). Therefore, if we are talking about leadership as an embedding mechanism, we need to frame it up as what managers—specifically strategic managers—do to influence or inspire followers to leave the old way behind and move to the new way.

Strategic leadership is…

When strategic managers—managers who guide the direction, culture, strategy, vision, and the nudges and jostles to keep the organization transforming. Strategic leadership is the influencing processes that strategic managers use to keep transformation alive (Samimi et al., 2020). Let’s face it, you are constantly changing and transforming, regardless if you are aware of it. Think of it as a continuum where your organization is in motion constantly. Transformation is then “always-on” (Hemerling, 2015, para 1). Accordingly, organizational strategic leadership must also be enduring.

Back to Embedding Things

According to Schein and Schein (2017), strategic leadership embedding mechanisms include what leaders are paying attention to; how they react to various crises that threaten the transformation; how they allocate resources and status; how they recruit, promote, select, and excommunicate; and how they deliberately role model by teaching, and coaching. I don’t know how the glue got on the first sticky note, but I’m guessing someone found a way to apply it. Like sticky-note-glue-appliers, strategic leaders can make the transformation that changes their cultures adhesive, improving the probability that the change will stick by paying strict attention to these mechanisms. I will elaborate on a handful related to my expertise: operational excellence.

What Leaders (influencers) Pay Attention to (Control, Measure) and Emphasize

When I say operational excellence, you say… Defining operational excellence is an elusive undertaking. When I say operational excellence, I mean a strategy that produces a positive organizational culture and positive performance by using positive leadership to operate standardized management processes (improvement, production, and strategy management). For my less-than-exhaustive coverage of my model, read this.

In my operational excellence strategy, I make leadership a domain for transformation: to achieve operational excellence, managers must use a positive leadership approach. Leadership is influence, and leaders are influential. When a positive leader pays attention to something, they signal to their followers that the object of their attention is important. Importance colors the way followers make their decisions.

Leaders pay attention to things in various ways. They may create structures to control and measure. For example, I know a hospital CEO who wanted every complaint reported and the number of complaints measured and checked monthly. They set a target and aimed to reduce complaints. The CEO was telling the organization that patient and family satisfaction was important. The organization followed. The same organization currently has a robust patient experience strategy, including assigning all administrators time to visit patients and their families to see how their stay is going.

Additionally, leaders signal importance when they emphasize one thing over another. Hospitals that make safety their first operational priority have better success in patient safety performance. However, the emphasis goes beyond setting the priority: the organization learns what leaders emphasize when making decisions, choosing “this” over “that." Decisions that move the needle happen amid the daily experience where managers choose, for example, solving safety problems before solving cost problems.

How Leaders React to Crises that Threaten Transformation

Followers are very sensitive to leaders in the middle of a crisis. They watch leaders carefully to see how they are reacting. Despite taking flights for work, I used to fear flying, sometimes several times per month. Once, amid what my mind told me was violent, plane-downing turbulence, I looked across the aisle at a pilot who was shuttling from one airport to another on my flight. He was fast asleep with nary a concern. Once he did wake up, shifted a little, then closed his eyes and went back to sleep. That was my silver bullet: if he could relax, this mustn’t be that bad! I watched his reaction and regulated my own thinking based on his leadership (influence).

Likewise, how a leader reacts to a transformation-threatening crisis is telltale. If the leader suspends the transformation indefinitely during the crisis, they just tell the organization that the transformation isn’t necessary for survival. Leaders who use the crisis to rally the transformation work tell the organization that the transformation is vital.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals nationwide faced grave situations: volumes and protocols and employee illness filled daily with chaos. Many hospitals began to set up Hospital Incident Command Structures (HICS) to manage the battlefield-like daily experience. One CEO, well into an operational excellence transformation, opted not to enact the HICS protocol because his organization had widespread linked and aligned daily huddles where team leaders could escalate problems daily. Adding the HICS protocol seemed superfluous. While other organizations were changing their daily experience radically while trying to manage the crisis, the CEO calmly doubled down on his OpEx structure to manage the crisis. His hospital had struggles, but the organization stuck together to weather the storm.

How They Allocate Resources and Status

This mechanism is logical: if the leader isn’t resourcing the transformation, it won’t stick. Follow the money: strategic leaders spend on what they deem important. Often this spending bends to the will of forces that may be directly opposed to the transformation. A well-fueled change isn’t crowded out with other costly initiatives.

Resources also include people: change requires work. People dedicated to guiding and constructing the change have to be added to people taking part of their time to make changes.

When leaders strategically fund and dedicate time to a transformation, they help the organization see its importance.

Even organizations with slim margins can follow this principle by simply carving time out for every manager in the organization to work on the change.

Another important but sometimes obscure leadership move is assigning status to communicate importance. Leaders who assign high status—another proxy word for importance—to those closely linked to the change are linking effort to significance. Leaders can also assign status by celebrating individuals or groups that exemplify the change.

How They Recruit, Promote, Select, and Excommunicate

Recruiting, promoting, selecting, and excommunicating (firing) people represents the people resource value chain. Organizations that have a strategy do this well and with an eye toward maintaining a culture that works; thus, if your transformation is strategic and has cultural ramifications (all transformations do, some more pronounced than others), aligning this value chain to get people who fit into the organization to stay. Equally important, getting those who don’t fit to exit on their own is nuanced but vital.

Let me put some detail on this concept.

One innate positive leadership trait is collaborative problem-solving. In an operational excellence strategy, there is no room for individual heroics. Solving complex problems requires leaders to gather the right people who are more interested in the team’s success than individual glory.

That’ll hire.

Leaders serious about transforming and making it stick will design their people value chain so it finds and promotes people who exemplify the change’s principles.

How They Deliberately Role Model by Teaching and Coaching

As a young Naval officer, somewhere along the line, I learned that leadership included setting an example for others to follow. I spent decades trying to exercise this one principle, showing the teams I served what I thought were the behavioral and attitudinal norm standards. There were moments along the way when I realized that my example alone wasn’t enough. My followers needed to grasp why I was acting and leading in the manner I was. When I would slow down to teach them the reasons behind the action and to coach them—listen for humble inquiry and ask them questions that caused them to think more deeply—the changes in them were more profound and sticky.

The principle here is that strategic leaders must teach their organizations how to change and, perhaps more importantly, why to change. Moreover, they have to make room for one-to-one or one-to-few exchanges that create space for coaching followers in the transformation, often nudging them in the right direction. I can think of a powerful example.

I had a client CEO who scheduled an entire week once a quarter to visit operational excellence team areas containing a visual scorecard, daily meeting artifacts, and problem-solving boards to observe nearly 150 teams doing their daily meetings. He would schedule the visits with the team’s operational “chain of command,” including their executive manager and the CEO’s direct report. During these exchanges, the CEO only praised the team leader and members. After each visit, the CEO would teach and coach his direct report, giving them the now ubiquitous three-to-one feedback: three positive observations and one improvement. He always ended the post-visit debriefs with this question, “How can I help you succeed?” At the end of each day, the CEO and his operational excellence executive would spend an hour or more reflecting on the themes they observed and setting course corrections for the change.

When I’ve shared this story with other CEOs, some shudder at the thought of carving four weeks a year—a full work month—out of their tightly packed and managed schedules to visit their organization’s team nodes. Is it worth it? The CEO I mentioned, and his strategic leaders led his organization to a sticky transformation, measured by their performance in consistently reducing serious safety events and employee injuries for a decade.

Pick your metaphor: you reap what you sow; no pain, no gain; etc. Only strategic leaders have the power and position to influence to this depth.

Wrapping This One Up: Fresh Sticky Notes

Strategic managers exercising strategic leadership are positioned as primary embedders for change that reaches the culture level. This type of leadership is positive and transformational, two related models worth studying. Strategic leaders make sticky changes by paying attention to the measures and controls that frame the transformation. They do it when they stiff-arm the pressure from emerging crises to protect the transformation. They also do it when they shape and do quality control on how people come to, stay, rise in, and leave their organization. Finally, they do it when they use teaching and coaching channels to live the change in front of others.

I came across a sticky note in my office just now! It has one word on it: Listen! I had stuck it up at the beginning of the pandemic to remind me to be a better listener during virtual meetings. I have the habit of re-pressing it before just about every meeting. The habit helps me remember to slow down and listen, an attitudinal norm I’ve been cultivating for years. I tried pulling it off, but it was leaving a mark on my monitor—evidence that sticky reminders leave marks. I just pressed it back down again: I still needed the reminder.

Strategic leaders practicing these mechanisms run their fingers over their organizational sticky notes: the signs, symbols, and artifacts of the change—reminders for the organization to follow and reference. Some will try to pull the reminders down, but if strategic leadership embed

s them, it’ll probably leave a mark…for the better.

Next time, I’ll discuss the secondary embedding mechanisms, focusing on structures first and then systems.

References

Hemerling, J. (2015, 2020-07-17). A Leader’s Guide to “Always-On” Transformation. BCG.com. Retrieved November 27 from https://www.bcg.com/publications/2015/people-organization-leaders-guide-to-always-on-transformation

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: theory and practice (Eighth Edition. ed.). SAGE Publications.

Samimi, M., Cortes, A. F., Anderson, M. H., & Herrmann, P. (2020). What is strategic leadership? Developing a framework for future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 101353. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.101353

Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.