Supporting the Strategist leader
Supporting the leaders
First we have a look at what the leaders will be doing to get the team to the starting gate
Overview of Leaders preparations
To get ready for your 100-Day Challenge, the leaders chose you as coach and are busy with two things:
Buy-in from leaders in other departments and/or organisations so they are willing and able to support and cheer the team along during the 100 days.
A team of 10-12 people, selected based on the particular issue you plan to focus on, and ready to charge ahead on Day One of the Challenge.
Three Steps to Get Ready for the Race
Since these are sequential steps, let’s do an overview of the three steps here in a chevron style if we can. Then, with each section below, we can show the chevron with the relevant steps lit up.
1. Develop a short list of focus areas
This may seem simple, but it can be quite tricky, and it is profoundly important for 100-Day Challenges. In some business schools, a whole course is devoted to this topic. It gets at the critical distinction between vision and strategy, between results and activities, and between means and ends.
In business, this distinction is less tricky than in social impact domains. The main purpose of a business is to make a profit. Without profit, the business will eventually shut down. The profit equation is simple: revenues need to exceed expenses. So in a business, 100-Day Challenges typically focus on increasing one of the sources of revenue, or decreasing one of the expense items.
So in a business, possible focus areas for 100-Day Challenges would typically look like this:
- Increase revenue from an existing segment of clients
- Generate revenue from a product that targets a new segment of clients
- Reduce the cost of a product that is sold to a price-sensitive segment of clients
At times, the focus areas are one step removed from revenues and expenses. They focus on one of the drivers of revenue or expense. For example:
- Increase pricing at contract renewal time, without losing profitable clients.
- Increase client retention rates (this generally reduces costs, as retaining clients is generally less expensive than acquiring new ones)
- Accelerate the time to market of a new critical product (the sooner it gets to market, the faster it begins to generate revenue and, hopefully, profit)
In the social impact sector and in Government, this distinction is not as straightforward. Reducing costs is often a critical success factor. But the equivalent of revenue in the social sector is impact. And this depends in how success is defined and varies from one sector to another.
100-Day Challenge focus areas in the social sector and in Government typically involve ways to demonstrate impact in the sector, and these could be quite situational.
For example, in the education sector, focus areas could be:
- Increasing access to schools
- Reducing drop out rates
- Increasing registration of girls in schools
- Improving maths scores among matriculating students
Each focus area targets an issue that exists in the community (for example – girls are not registering in schools), and it challenges a team to create a better version of current reality, in 100 days.
Caution: avoid “Activity Challenges”
Notice that the focus area does not specify how this will be accomplished. Even if you are convinced that the way to increase girl enrollment is through awareness campaigns, your challenge to the team needs to remain at the level of impact (for example, increasing enrollment), not strategy, actions, or solutions to get there (for example, awareness campaigns).
Leaders in the social sector find it difficult to restrain themselves from telling 100-Day Challenge teams to focus on a particular solution or activity. Please do your best to resist this temptation.
The next exercise is aimed at driving home this distinction.
2. Convene the relevant leaders and make 4 decisions
3. Prepare the Challenge note to the team
Nadim i will copy the rest of what the leaders would be busy with once i have cleaned it up
Working with the Leaders
The Leadership Team has identified the behaviour, practice or policy that they’d like the team to work on during the 30-Day Challenge. And they have identified the team.
Here are the tasks you will need to help the Mentor complete, as early in the week as possible:
Prepare or finalise the Challenge note. Keep it simple. But make sure that the specific focus area is mentioned.
Sometimes, leaders have a temptation to ask the 30-Day Challenge team to focus on too many things at once. If that is the case, try to convince the Mentor to prioritise one or two of these, and to reflect this in the Challenge Note. You can share the example of 30-Day Challenge goals with them to help them prioritise.
Make sure the Challenge Note is addressed from the Mentor to team members, with a copy to other leaders and make sure that the team members receive it by the middle of the week. The Challenge Note will be their official invitation to the Lift-Off Workshop.
Go over the list of team members, and make sure they are fit for the task. These for example would include representatives from human resources, operations (or the shop floor), maintenance, IT and the union. Make sure there is some age and especially gender diversity on the team and that team members have have shown interest in the topic. You can help the mentor solicit volunteers from the various departments to participate.
It is important though to keep the team size manageable. 4-8 members is an ideal size for a 30-Day Challenge team.
If you have the time, you can talk with the identified team members to make sure they have the interest and the time to participate. If they do not, they can recommend alternative members from their departments.
Prepare the baseline data related to the focus area, so it can be shared with the team before or at the Lift-off Workshop.
Preparing for the Lift-off Workshop
In the latter part of Week 2, you will focus on getting ready for the Lift-Off Workshop.
You want to make sure that you can download the slides and the facilitation guide for the Lift-Off Workshop. These will be available to download from the Week 2 Lesson. But to be on the safe side, we are sharing the Lift-of slide pack for you to peak at. This way, if you have trouble downloading them, you can join the Office Hour on Friday to get help on this.
