Strategy in Practice: Boardroom, Business and Behaviour

Jon Wragg

I'd like to welcome everybody to this Ltt Group webinar.

These webinars are fireside chats with real specialists in their area. We have done different areas and today's for me is really important.

And really today is Strategy in Practice. It is titled Strategy in Practice: Boardroom, Business and Behaviour.

And actually, we know that the word strategy seems to get lost in business sometimes, especially whether it's as a startup. And I'm very lucky. I'm very lucky to have a good network around me and that today's guests are more than happy to talk about strategy from experience.

So quick introduction for those that haven't met before. So I'm Jon. I am co-founder of Ltt Group and we are now entering our second year.

So we are a startup. However, I've been in the world of corporate sustainability and supply chain for quite a few years. And now it's about moving that into the world of commercial sustainability for SMEs so that they can win tenders and things.

Alongside me today is the wonderful Alex Thornton, founder of Amethyst Consulting. Alex works with senior leaders and teams to move from constant firefighting to clearer, calmer strategic execution. And that's amazing.

As far as I'm concerned, it's everything that we'd like to talk about today, especially from a behaviour point of view as well, Alex. And I think you'll agree with that, that the behaviour is a key part of your work. And then also joining myself and Alex is the wonderful Tony.

Tony Longden has a fantastic longstanding career. I'm not going to say the number, Tony. It's a number.

I'm not going to say that. But it's a longstanding career, everything in executive leadership and CEO level as well and C-suite. But currently sits as an NED, a leadership coach and a commercial transformation advisor.

Honestly, I cannot stress how lucky I am to have such a panel. So both of you, thank you very much for joining. Thank you.

Tony Longden

Thanks, Jon.

Jon Wragg

No, no worries at all. I think we've talked about this, Tony. We've talked about this, I think, and especially in my world right now of moving from an executive C-suite member to start up.

I think strategy and strategic vision is really important. And you do get bogged down into something we'll talk about later, which is the operational side. But one thing I want to touch on first, and I think it's really important.

And Alex, I'd like to come to you first, ladies first on this. But in your view, what does strategy actually mean in practice? We talked earlier about behaviour.

But what does it actually mean in practice as far as you're concerned and the way that you coach?

Alex Thornton

Thank you. Firstly, absolute pleasure to be here. Hello, everybody.

It's lovely to have everybody on this call. I think strategy as a concept and as a word has sort of got a bit overcomplicated. And I'm a simple girl.

I like to keep things simple and practical. For me, strategy is basically a clear plan of action to get you to your goal, to get you to whatever the vision for an organisation is. And importantly, because of that, you need to have you to have a goal.

OK, that's such a simple sort of silly thing to say, really. But that vision or goal or mission or whatever you want to call it, it has to be clear. It's got to be measurable.

You've got to know when you've got there. And preferably in my world, it's got to be something that's quite compelling that actually your people in the organisation go, do you know what? Should we do that?

That would be exciting. I'd want to be part of that. And then the strategy in practical terms is basically your kind of theoretical plan of what do we need to do?

What equipment do we need? What kind of people do we need to get us to that bigger picture thing? And I say theoretical because nobody's ever tried to get to your vision for your particular organisation before.

They might have done something similar, but actually it's just a set of concepts of if we do X, Y and Z and we choose these priorities, we would hope that if we followed that plan, we'd get there. And that's kind of it. Simple, practical terms.

It's basically what do we think everybody should do every single day?

Jon Wragg

OK, I like that you put in there simple, practical terms. I think that's the thing. I think simple is one of those things that it really depends on your skill set.

I think it's and I agree with what you just said then. I think a key part of that is direction as well and trying to keep on that direction. I think a lot of people think goals is just a financial goal that they have a say a financial target or a KPI target.

But actually quite a few of them very rarely touch on how they're going to get there or what it's going to take to get there. Whether you like you touched on technology or whether that is financial incentives or whether that's people and actually hiring to grow. Do you, before I just come on to Tony, do you feel that strategy, do you feel it is a long term view?

Do you think it's also a short term view or is it all of them in between?

Alex Thornton

I think, yeah, you know, your vision has to be something that is it's not something you can achieve in the next two to three weeks or a few months. Otherwise, it's not challenging enough and it's not actually going to make a difference and it's not compelling. I would normally say and normally advise a vision should be three to five years.

Anything longer than that, you kind of get to this point of 10 years. Well, who am I? Who am I going to be in 10 years time?

I don't know. I don't know who I'm going to be at 53. I don't know.

So am I going to still care about that? So I tend to sort of try to say, look, you can have a bigger picture, sort of like, wow, amazing goal for an organisation. But actually your vision and your immediate needs to be something that's quite tangible for your people.

So then I would suggest that your strategy almost needs to be you have no idea what's going to happen in two years. You know, the world is such a crazy place. So have something that's a little bit more specific for the first year.

And that's what I call a business plan, to be honest, where it's really clear. It's got your KPIs, it's got your strategic objectives and your people can go, oh, my goodness, that is what I need to do every single day. I get it.

OK, so, yes, it's long term, it's short term as well. But then we're diving into the kind of operational delivery side of things of what people are actually doing every day. But I think you might ask us more about that later.

So I'm not going to tell you too much about that.

Jon Wragg

And I'm sorry, I kind of veered off there with regards to that. But you were talking, in answer to my question, you were talking about technology, you were talking about people. And I do think that it's really important that, and we will touch on this, but the strategy for me has to be long term.

Now, whether that, how long that is, does depend on the company size. It does. But I also know that right now, and Tony, I'm going to come on to you with regards to this.

I do know right now that it is a struggle for business. It really is. And it's that kind of, I mean, something I'm hearing in networking events quite a lot of is, how can we possibly stay on strategy when we're getting bombarded with costs going through the roof and everything else?

That kind of throws some strategies out of the window. But Tony, obviously, I asked to say the question to Alex, and I'll come to you now with this. For you, with your large corporate background, working your way through your career, you've sat at high end executive level and also now at NED level, which is a big difference.

A non-exec is very different to obviously chief exec. But what does it actually mean in practice for you, strategy? What do you want to see right now in your career?

What have you seen in your career as really working well in practice? I think practice is the key for this question.

Tony Longden

Well, delighted to be here, first of all, Jon. Thanks for the invite. I'm with Alex on simplicity, just a basic lad from Sheffield that ended up working hard and having a good attitude.

So we'll probably get on to culture a little bit further in some of the questions. But I'd boil it down, as Alex did, very simply in what you do within that three to five year time frame, but also what you don't do, you know, because there are so many strategies that, you know, and I came across this in practice in businesses that I was involved in, in leadership roles and ultimately running. And now as a non-exec, which are on this growth trajectory.

And you talked about it's not just the P&L and it absolutely isn't. You're spot on there, Jonathan. But there's often a strategy is linked to a P&L income or balance sheet goal, you know, whether it's a privately owned business, whether it's a PLC, whether there's an equity funding base to it.

So the strategy gets you from, you know, let's use a simple number, a turnover of X or a sales number of Y to Z. And then what your strategy is, is often boiled down to where you're going to be different from the competition. And I'll do two examples to try and draw that out of how I've seen it work in practice.

One, I came across on my feed today. So I was like, got up this morning thinking about, what am I going to say when Jonathan asks these questions and Alex chips in as well. And John Caudwell came up on my feed and he was obviously the guy that set up Phones 4u.

It wasn't always a phones guy. I think he's in his early mid 70s now. And he started off in various jobs, but set up a car sales business.

So he was doing selling used cars essentially. And the mobile phones were launched in the sort of mid to late 80s. And he saw an opportunity of something new that he wanted to do better than everyone else.

So he had a very simple strategy, buy mobile phones for X, sell them for more because there would be a growing market. And then he got super frustrated over time. So his strategy evolved to think about, well, if I want to buy them more easily and sell them more easily, I need to control more of the supply chain.

So as his strategy evolved, he controlled and evolved it to own more and more of the supply chain. Well, the rest is history. He sold the business for, I think, about one and a half billion.

But he talked about evolution and a very quick example. What does strategy look like in practice? It's.

For me in the business, the last business that I was CEO of and now I'm a non-exec of, it was about having a three year plan to grow income in our balance sheet. And we had a name for it and we'll probably touch on culture later so that everybody knew what it was in the business, so that in practice it wasn't just the CEO or the board's idea. It was something that filtered down into the DNA of the business.

So a good strategy in practice is known, talked about and articulated by every single body. And as a leader, senior leader or as an exec in a business, you should test the knowledge of your strategy regularly to make sure that the people that are helping you deliver it, whether that's strategically, from a thinking perspective or operationally, are working with it closely. So checking the people balance points is good in practice if you want to succeed.

Jon Wragg

I know. Thank you very much for that. I find myself right now because of how we've set up our business and the SMEs that we're working with.

And I'd like to be very clear that our standard clients tend to be somewhere in the region of five million to 50 million right now, because that sustainability commercial pressure is there. One of the first things that we identify, and it's not just a sustainability point of view, it kind of comes into strategic and operational as well, is there tends to be a strategy and then a policy. And then the further down you go to senior leadership team, to development teams, that just fades away.

And there seems to be many, many companies out there at board level. And it's not just whether it is the financial strategy, the long term strategy, the brand strategy, whatever it is. They're great at board level.

They're discussed in board meetings or they're discussed in the exec team. And then that doesn't really get passed on to the next level down the senior leadership team. And then it just dilutes down.

And for me, that's where strategies fail because they're then not being operational. And we'll talk about that in a bit. And I do think, actually, we'll come on to that now.

Actually, it feeds in quite well.

Tony Longden

I didn't articulate what you stop doing. Just just give 10 seconds on that, because, yeah, again, most businesses will have a limited capacity in terms of people, technology. Let's call it bandwidth in general across the business, whatever size it is.

So if you're going to do all this new stuff, because that's your strategy to support growth. You've got to understand the current effectiveness of your business and stop doing some stuff. And again, I see that in all sorts of businesses that have come across partnerships.

Because at the end of my career was I was insurance distribution. What are you going to stop doing to do all this new, exciting, effective stuff that's going to that's going to deliver the growth that you aspire to? So step back and think about that.

Sorry, I should have added that earlier.

Jon Wragg

No, no, no. It's a really good point. I think pushing forward for the growth that that long term direction, that the forward direction that Alex then touched on and technology and people.

Well, actually, a lot of that costs money. It does. It costs investment. So if you've got an unlimited capex, fantastic.

And you've got actual money that you can get to. Actually, there's very few businesses in that position. So if you are going to change your strategy or even look to develop your strategy, you do need to think about what's going to change and actually where you're going to get that money from as well.

And I do think it's it's that's really key. And I think one thing and I didn't want to really make. Originally, sorry, when we came up with the idea of this webinar, it was going to be strategic and operational.

What's the kind of difference? And we had a talk and Alex and yourself and said, no, let's talk more about how strategy defines a business and how it can develop a business. I do think it's important to clarify the difference between strategic thinking and operational delivery.

Both are essential for me. How I've gone through my career. It's knowing which role you are playing at a given time.

I think right now where I am, I am both strategic leader as a co-founder, operational leader as the head of the consultancy side of it. And I have to wear those many hats and luckily they cover my hair and loss of hair and things like that. But actually wearing the many hats is great.

I think Tony, you've just sort of touched on it there. How let's let's come away from the corporate side of it. Let's come away from the many teams with lots of budget and lots of money.

How can a small business looking to grow, looking to take that next big jump, whether it's 20 to 30 million, 30 to 40, 50 to 60, they're huge jumps, or even one to two and really go over that hurdle. How can somebody really make sure that they are playing those roles or they know who's playing those roles and clearly staying on that? How can it how can a capable leader really pull that together?

Tony Longden

I mean, I was lucky in my career that I got lots of support and training. So that was watching good leaders in practice or leaders from other businesses. So if you're a small business, you might not have lots of strategic senior executives experience to go to.

But you can see there's so much material out there. You know, I went I went on courses, you know, and. Didn't do an MBA, but I went on a strategic leadership course that was very much designed to to take you from senior leader, where you're doing exactly as you said, Jonathan, you're you're executing operationally for a very high percentage of your time.

And understand the difference between that and the more strategic direction you need to take as you become aware of executive goals and executive roles that you might want to pitch yourself for whatever level of business you are. And one of the best ways that that it was explained to me on a course was the think do balance. Right.

So operationally, you are doing, doing, doing. And we all have to do all the time. So it doesn't you know, when you have this new strategic lead, it doesn't mean to say you sit yourself in a room and you spend 100 percent of your time thinking because that that isn't isn't going to work either.

But you should definitely and they did an exercise on this course, which which I still do on a monthly basis today, which was look back over your diary of the last month. How much time did you spend doing? And a lot of it is about, you know, everybody's a busy person about diary efficiency.

How many meetings did you actually not need to go to that you were there? Yeah. Somebody invited you.

It's a nice bunch of people. It was something you're interested in. Let's go.

But actually, it's not adding any value to the strategic direction of the business. So that comes back to the stop doing your stuff and then create space for you to think because that's where the innovation comes in. That's that builds a much more positive strategy in the first place because you've had time to think about where you want to go.

And another good guy. And people can look him up, Andy Fell, because there's lots of, he's called Andy Fell. Look him up on LinkedIn.

He gives lots of free content about having an appointment with yourself. So book time in your own diary to think and then have the discipline because everybody else overbook you in appointments to spend time thinking. And thinking could be just that quietly in your office, in a room.

It could be going out for a walk or a run or whatever, whatever you fancy. But it it it could also be going to industry events or or meeting other leaders in your industry that are doing something different and exciting. It's a fine time to supplement your own thinking with expertise from elsewhere.

Jon Wragg

I think that leads on lovely to how I believe Alex will answer that question as expertise elsewhere, having our own consultancy and where consultancy as well with regards to Ltt, but in different fields. I massively believe in the educating yourself. There are you can be a specialist in your area without actually knowing that much.

If I'm being honest, we've all met leaders like that. I like Tony. I've been very lucky in my career to have exceptional leaders and and be part of exceptional teams and have exceptional mentors.

But for me, though, those guys are the ones who have really pushed me to educate myself and push myself further. But also get out there and understand not only the clientele, but what's happening in the industry and other industries as well. Alex, we met a networking event that was just by accident.

Tony, Tony, we met a networking event. But with regards to that, it was one of these things where you meet you chat on paper. We have nothing in common and then you're quickly talking.

You think, actually, we've got a lot in common here and we can talk and we can actually help we learn from each other. Alex, Tony just touched on the think do balance and education and obviously looking for outside help as a consultant. How do you balance that?

So say somebody comes to you, they're a new client. And what's the first thing you look at is, is it how they're operating, how their strategy is right now? What for you, what is the difference between strategic thinking and operational delivery?

And how do you really balance that and advise that in your world?

Alex Thornton

I think it comes down to the questions that you're asking as a strategic leader or as a leader or as a manager, really. So for me, I think operational delivery, the question is always starts with the word what, what do we need to do today? And then if you're thinking in terms of strategic sort of world, strategic thinking, it's more around the will or how or are we?

So it's that future focus. It's instead of today, it's tomorrow. So things like, are we working on the right thing in the first place?

Jon Wragg

I'm just laughing at that. Obviously, our company's Ltt and it stands for Looking To Tomorrow. So thanks for that.

Alex Thornton

So things like, yeah. So will this action that is being undertaken over there? Because I completely agree with Tony, the do think kind of concept.

Will that action take us to where we want to be towards our goal? And how far along our strategy or our goal? How close are we to the end?

But I think there's an important question of, do we need to revise the strategy? So Tony amazingly touched on evolution. A strategy is not a thing that you just write and that it goes in the CEO's drawer.

And then you kind of pull it out again on the board days and you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's here. We've got one. It's how well are we doing at it?

How far along are we? Is it actually was our theoretical concept of how we get to the shiny North Star goal? Is it was it was it true?

Was it accurate? And I love what you said about education and then going and speaking to other people as well, because what are they doing? Because like I said, it's not nobody's ever done your vision before, but someone's done something similar.

You know, someone has doubled their profits or whatever it might be. So I think it's about remembering what questions are you really asking today? If it's what can I solve as a senior leader, you could probably delegate that down to someone.

Instead, think more around, are we doing the right things? Are we moving ourselves towards the vision and goal? And do I need to communicate this a little bit more to my people?

Because I completely resonate with what Tony said as well about everybody needs to be involved with this. This is not a thing that just senior leaders sort of that they're strategic. What strategy is, is what everybody does every day.

And then the leaders go, how far along are we on it?

Jon Wragg

Basically, I, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I just wrote something down there. So in your to keep it as simple as possible.

I am a simple guy and I try and keep things simple myself. Would you say that the what question is operational and the will, how and are we is strategic? So those questions are strategic questions and they tend to be and the what is an operational question.

Alex Thornton

I'm trying to oversimplify. I don't mean it's really simple, but yeah. Generally, there are questions to ask if you're trying to think, am I being operational or am I being strategic?

Jon Wragg

I think, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I've narrowed it down to a very, very simple form and it's far more complicated. But I think. I think one thing and you talked about evolution and we're now 13 months old as a company and we've evolved three times.

And bearing in mind, I had this idea five years ago. It went nowhere because it was the wrong time. The legislation wasn't there and it just had to stop.

And then I went back to a PAYE job and then we started again at the right time as far as we're concerned. And that's quick evolution. We're a startup.

We can be mobile. We're not actually manufacturing anything or we've not invested in capex and things like that. But what I do see when we go into businesses is strategies that have failed because they've not been turned into action.

You mentioned earlier that a strategy just isn't a piece of paper that goes in the CEO's drawer. It is not just something that comes out at the quarterly board meetings or at the annual financial review or with your accountants. When you see strategies fail and fail to go into actions, what do you think is the main or a main reason for that?

Why a strategy fails to deliver or go into action?

Alex Thornton

I don't know if there's one. I'll probably give you three. Firstly, the bigger picture goal is too vague.

So there isn't clarity around what that really genuinely looks like and what it means to your people. It's just, I don't know, be the best X, Y and Z. That's a lovely thing to achieve and have as a priority.

But how do you ever know if you are? So can we be a bit more specific on the actual goal?

Jon Wragg

Just on that, when you're setting out a strategy, do you think sometimes people get hung up on values more than strategy? Like having those big, shiny values over what actually your strategy is? And values can be quite vague.

You tend to have them if you've got a nice office, they're on your wall or they're on your website. But they're not your strategic vision, for example.

Alex Thornton

No, your values are there to help you to make decisions. So they're almost like, this is how we behave here. So they are things like, you know, I don't know, we're sustainable, for instance.

OK, so that helps you to decide.

Jon Wragg

Don't get me started on that one.

Alex Thornton

That helps you decide, do I want to choose this particular project with a client or do I want to choose this one? Well, this one's more sustainable. However, if this one is more profitable, you need to be clear on your values help you decide, but they will have to be prioritised.

So I use priorities in a strategy rather than values. Values are a little bit more around how we behave here. And anyway, don't get me started on values.

The reason I see strategies fail is exactly what Tony said. It was there's a missing element. So people spend so much time, so much money, so much energy writing these vision and strategies.

And they go up on the wall and then they become fancy, expensive wallpaper because the missing piece is you then have to stop doing things. Just like Tony said. And what that means is you have to stop.

OK, I'm going to rephrase that. You have to check what your job descriptions are. What are your people doing every single day?

Because I guarantee there are things that people are doing in your organisations everywhere that are not in service of the new updated vision and strategy. They might be close, but they're not actually needed anymore. So we need to have those conversations.

We need to have those consultations. And sometimes, well, oftentimes what people have been doing for the last five, 10, 20 years, the same bit of their job, even though they're really good at it. Some of that might not be needed anymore for the current vision and strategy.

And so you've got to help them to let go of those bits, even if they really like it or they're really good at it. It's just not needed anymore.

Jon Wragg

No, no. Yeah.

Alex Thornton

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Wragg

I mean, yeah, I know. But I've seen that. I've seen that in my career.

I've seen strategies change. And then all of a sudden you see a new influx of people come and go because the people who are currently working in your business don't align to the new strategy. Well, no, you feel that they're not trained, right?

You haven't communicated it right. You haven't shown them how they fit into the strategy in your exist. And actually that comes at huge expense.

And quite a few times you see strategies fail on that. I think if it's OK, I'll just I'll come on to Tony with that.

Tony Longden

Yeah.

Jon Wragg

When strategic priorities are unclear and accountability is not clear, Tony. What happens? Does the strategy then just end or do you need to go back to the drawing board or what kind of thing with regards to that?

How can that translate into real action? Instead of being busy fools, I think.

Tony Longden

Yeah, no, it's a really good question. I think I think it boils down to that cultural piece again. And people understanding why the strategy is the strategy, because if if they don't get it, they ain't going to they ain't going to want to execute it.

So it might be the big new thing. Alex is spot on about expensive wallpaper, by the way. There's so many buzzwords, strategies on whiteboards, fancy posters that they're just there because somebody sent them.

But the people that are executing the strategy that even whether it's operational, not strategic, don't understand why they're doing it. And if they don't buy in. Why?

They're probably not going to. Even if you tell them how to do it, work out the way to do it. So I think, you know, there's the famous Drucker quote, isn't there?

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I'm not I get it, but I'm not a super fan of it because you need both to execute a successful strategy. And everybody needs a strategy because of the pace of change these days, particularly with.

God, it's taken us 33 minutes to mention AI, but things are moving so quickly that you need a strategy. But you also need a positive culture to embed that strategy through the DNA, as we were saying, of the business. Yeah.

When strategies fail, it's because people don't understand the why. And sometimes also the how. So they might have.

Right. We need to do this because our business needs to change. And if we don't change, we're not going to succeed.

And there's a huge risk to the business and all of us. Then you need you need to make sure people know the how and then and then you need to re-communicate it. So the what of the strategy is being done religiously and you report back.

How are people performing against those strategic goals or milestones that you've got? If people feel connected to it and they see successful results or even if results aren't quite where you want them to be, at least then they can adapt and buy in mentally. I think, you know, that's that's that's so important.

So, yeah, I think that Alex was spot on about the reasons why strategies fail, but most of them are connected to the wrong strategy, badly communicated and not embedded into the culture.

Jon Wragg

I think the dreaded two letters that you mentioned and I've tried to refrain from mentioning of AI. There's a reason for that. One of the guests on here is an absolute AI specialist, so I'm not going to even begin to mention and I'm sure if I did, he'd be the first to send me an email.

But ultimately. There was a real influx and at one point I sat across many boards and I had many board seats before we set up Ltt. But AI just flung across everybody's desk.

We need AI. It's not a strategy. It's not.

And nearly every one of those I'd like to think has now learned from that because all of a sudden there was panic rush. It became quite toxic. But also at the same time, well, we've seen what's happened in supply chain hacks and things like that because of data clarity and blah, blah, blah.

You need strategy. You need policy. I think for me, a key part of strategy.

And it also slightly links into my world is governance. I do think that actually, if you're going to create a strategy, I think the leaders, senior teams and boards need to behave well on that strategy. They can't just kind of be screaming top down that this is the new strategy.

Whether it is AI, efficiency, optimisation, whatever it is ultimately and where it's going or monetary growth. If people do want to be genuinely strategic and really take that next step into being strategic, Tony, how do you think governance, accountability, discipline, how do you think those things actually come into that strategic thinking? Because there's no such thing as a generic strategic thinker.

The three of us as speakers, we do strategy a lot and we think about it slightly differently. But how do you think those things do play a key part?

Tony Longden

Hugely, hugely. Again, early part of my career, somebody used this quote. It wasn't in the context of strategic thinking, but it was in it stuck with me was without discipline, you are lost.

Right. So if you've got a plan, a strategy, unless you're disciplined and the team and people around you are disciplined and bought in, then. Then you ain't going to succeed.

So if you if you sort of translate that quote into where boards and senior leadership teams sit, it is absolutely around governance. And so if you're a senior team or a board, then you absolutely have to think about all the board papers that are coming in front of you and how they relate to the strategy rather than glib operational updates. Now, there are some needs for glib operational updates at board level.

I'm not abolishing them, by the way, but that the balance of the board papers has to be right. And, you know, we've all sit on boards and I even the board that I'm a couple of boards that I'm on now, they are far too operationally focused and not enough aligned to the strategy and what strategy and what's getting in the way of it. So, yeah, governance for governance sake, no.

Governance, particularly where you've got, you know, and I worked in heavily regulated businesses. You have to report on your core metrics, your customer metrics, your risk metrics, as well as your financial and commercial metrics. But there has there has to be a senior significant part of your governance approach that is linked to that strategy.

Jon Wragg

I see that right now quite a lot in family run businesses, founder led businesses, where the business had quite rapid growth. And obviously, the founder or the family that started grew it in the right direction. But now they went to that next big hurdle.

They are still very much stuck in the weeds of this is how we grew. This is what we did. So we do need to know the day to day and are looking whether it is day by day shifts, week by week, month by month, quarter by quarter, instead of, well, how does this affect the long term strategy, especially if there is a blip, whether that is in sales and finances, manufacturing or efficiency or whatever.

If there's a blip, I find operator founders. Sorry for the founder operators and founder led businesses and family run businesses. They tend to panic and not have that discipline that you talked about and not really have that governance as much.

Alex, obviously, you train, you train great teams, you train teams in strategic thinking, strategic visions and things like that. How do you really see training like you do really benefit a team that I've just talked about then? I mean, obviously, Tony comes from a large corporate world.

I've sat on corporate boards, but right now my focus is really smaller businesses with growth. Talk to me about that, really, about how should leaders really behave differently if they want to be strategic or genuinely strategic?

Alex Thornton

Yeah, it's a great question. It goes back to Tony's, you know, what are we stopping doing, really? And I think to give us a little bit of maybe leeway as human beings, human beings are solutioners.

We like to see something that, OK, that, oh, I can fix that. There's a problem there. Let me do something about it.

And we are primed. And I can talk about this in terms of the behaviour side of things. Human beings are primed to find solutions and to find problems to solve and fix.

And in fact, we're primed so well evolutionarily, we get a massive dopamine hit. So every time we take something off the to do list, it's like, thanks so much. I feel good.

I feel valued. I feel important. I feel like I've done something.

I feel like I'm making a difference to my team. And so human beings, we've got to remember that we human beings are primed for this. You suddenly get promoted into a strategic leadership role or you get put on a board.

Sorry, you get appointed on a board and everything to do with those normal dopamine hits of operational delivery are suddenly not your responsibility anymore. And in fact, as a strategic leader, you need to enable others to do and you do not get that dopamine hit anymore. Or OK, really great.

So what I talk about a lot with my with the people I'm working with is how can we find you a new way of dopamine hitting you? But it's strategic. And that's often comes with the measurement, the enabling, that sort of stuff.

So we've just got to switch the mindset. I think it's something that we don't talk about, about that emotional kind of. It's a punch in the gut, really, because everything you've normally been praised for your now is now not part of your job in the same way.

So it's really tough. It's a real mindset shift. It's almost an identity shift.

So the other thing is that we talk about being brave, basically, and making the changes that you really genuinely need to do. So we have to sort of train ourselves and work with people to help senior leadership teams make the tough decisions that they need to make. You know, you mentioned sometimes we need to people won't be aligned with the new strategy.

Sometimes we've got to let people go and there might be good people. They might have been really, really good at their jobs. They're just not quite what you need now.

That's tough. That's really hard. Leadership and management and executive leadership particularly is often being able to tolerate the discomfort required to lead successfully and to hold people to high standards in the account and accounts that you need them to achieve.

You're doing something together as an organisation that is tough, that is challenging, that requires growth, that requires commitment. And it's uncomfortable. We are not in our comfort zone.

Otherwise, we'd be doing what we were doing before. But that's not the point of writing a new vision and strategy. We're going to do something different, but it's going to be better.

But it might be a bit uncomfortable along the way. So that's what we talk about quite a lot other than just the normal stuff. How do you actually lead in an executive way?

And how do you communicate? How do you how do you even conceptualise the ideas of creating a strategy? Because you don't know.

Jon Wragg

Yeah, I mean, I love that. I absolutely love it. And I think this is recorded.

We're going to chop this up, do social media and things like that. A lot of my network is naturally the sustainability world. It is.

I would say that and I often say this a lot, sustainability as an industry is sort of where HR was in the early 90s, where it's kind of a nice to have. It's been a corporate level legislations pushing it further down. It's now going beyond that because it's part of the purchasing process and things like that.

But what that means is the board level leadership people are actually these not tens of thousands of them out there right now. It's actually quite small if they're coming through. There is a big jump into operational delivery.

And I think I'd like to really go for when sharing this people in my network. So I don't want people to decide if you're in a company and a job comes available for a strategic role. Don't think you can't go for it.

But I think you need to understand what that means. Forget if there's a pay packet, forget if there's a fancy job title, a nicer office. Forget those things.

I think it's understanding what that means. And you're far better at giving advice than I could, both of you. What advice would you give somebody stepping up from operational leadership into a strategic or board level role?

And I don't mean a step by step plan. I just mean if you were to look at your career, if you were to look at mistakes you made or anything training you give, what's that one bit of advice that you would give? Alex, I'll come to you first.

Alex Thornton

Thank you. Again, can I do one? OK.

I'll do a few if I may. Firstly, I echo your words completely. Do not be afraid of it.

Every single person in this world has acted strategically. Whenever you have a goal in your own life, you've put together a plan. That is a strategy to meet that goal.

Yes, it's much more complicated at exec level in massive organisations or even in two or three people organisations. Yes, but ultimately you can do it. So believe in yourself.

Secondly, I would say stop measuring your value by how much you personally achieve. So that's, again, that dopamine hit piece. I'm going to echo something that Tony said.

Lock in that strategic thinking time. It's going to be the one thing that just ekes away and gets like, oh, I'll just pop a meeting in or I'll just, oh, yes, someone's knocked on the door. Lock it in.

It's the most important thing that you can do and change your questions from what needs sorting to what can only I do. That's a great one. Will this move us towards the big goal?

And what can I enable others to achieve?

Jon Wragg

That's fantastic. Honestly, for myself and for my network, we could take a lot from that as well. Tony, as well, the same question, really, if you were not looking back on your career right now, but what is that?

One thing, two things, Alex did three, so you're more than welcome to do three. But those things that you would say help somebody progress from that operational thinking to that strategic mindset, strategic thinking.

Tony Longden

Alex is a consultant, so she always answers questions with three things. It's like a Bible. So seeing as I've worked with a few consultants, I will copy Alex and consultants lead and give you three things.

What can you do practically today? So if you're looking towards a strategic role and this this is probably a little bit company size dependent, but if you're in a decent sized company, mid to large, there will be a strategic project going on. Ask to get involved.

Volunteer. Not somebody that's going to just do all the work, but sit on the project committees to learn how the strategic plan is being executed, but also maybe have a little bit input on yourself. I mean, if somebody volunteers for something that even if it's a very senior leader you're asking, they're very rarely saying no.

So have the courage. Alex talked about being brave. Yeah.

Ask to get involved in something. That'd be one. Two is to learn more about strategic thinking and how to do it.

And there's bucket loads of material out there. If you can get funded to go on the right course, do it. Because it takes you out of your current state and gets you more into thinking about the state you want to be in.

So that would be the second one. And the third one is and I didn't do this well enough. So this would be a learning until too late.

Hopefully I sort of got there in the end. Your stakeholder map has to change. Right.

So the people that you internally and externally within your business that you operate with to get stuff done today needs to be different. So think about what your stakeholder map is. And this is, I think, do thing again and change it.

So you're operating at a more strategic level. So think about who you have coffees with, where you can get that input internally or externally and change it. And then when you get value from these people, you know, because people like helping people and giving advice.

Again, very rarely do people say no. Keep booking them in, you know, and maybe. Everybody should have a mentor, right?

But mentor changes to somebody that can give you that next level strategic thinking.

Jon Wragg

I mean, I think that's all six of those from both of you are really good and they have really good advice. I really like the be brave. I really like that.

There is huge. There's huge potential out there within companies that there are. I think sometimes people think that they need to instantly go outside when they change a strategy and look for that.

My advice is look inward first. They'll save money, but they're already on the journey with you. Can they develop and actually increase that journey as well?

And therefore you get you will get far more out of those because they're already bought in and they've already had a career and things like that. I think too many people fall in the trap of this is the strategy or we slightly tweak the strategy. So now we need a bigger, better version of what we've got internally.

That's not always the case. It's not so. So I do believe that whether that is sustainability, whether it's operational, whether it's whatever department you're looking at that.

And I think the one thing that you've both touched on is. Improve your communication as a person as well. I think if you're going to go from, I think when you're operational, you tend to be used to reporting up.

And therefore you're used to giving a level of detail. So you've said that sometimes operation and you give too much detail and you don't. That's not always needed, but you want to be seen as how good you are in your job.

Actually, if you take that step or you want to be able to actually communicate down as well. So don't all of a sudden forget how to communicate. If you've been used to communicating and you've been used to communicating operationally.

You need to actually be able to communicate strategically down as well and keep that. Make sure that everybody understands it. Don't just send one email and then assume everybody's got it.

And that's it. You don't have to talk to him again for 12 months. Make sure they understand it.

Make sure they're on the journey with you. And then trust me, then you will become a far more effective strategic leader. And I think that's the real key.

What you can then do is actually develop a strategy as you build it. And look, we've come to the end. We've got a very short time.

I could talk to you both for a very long time about this and pick your brains all day long. I would like to give the people that are here the chance to ask questions. However, I know that not everybody loves to ask questions on webinars, especially recorded ones.

So you can reach out to myself either via LinkedIn or via email. And my email address is info@lttgroup.uk. Alex, I assume people can reach out to you on LinkedIn if they if they want to.

Alex Thornton

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Or feel free to email me, alex at amethystconsultancy.co.uk.

Jon Wragg

Fantastic. Tony, would you rather people get in touch with you on LinkedIn because you don't want your email address bombarded?

Tony Longden

LinkedIn is perfect. Yes.

Yeah.

Alex Thornton

Yeah.

Jon Wragg

There we go. OK. Yeah.

Tony's got a corporate email address.

Tony Longden

Yeah, we never give those out.

Jon Wragg

Yeah, no, it's fine.

Tony Longden

Yeah.

That's my corporate email addresses without too much.

Jon Wragg

We'll cut that. We'll cut that out of the recording, Tony. Don't worry about that.

So if anybody's got any questions, I'll just let them type or if they want to come on. If not, I'll just give it one second. OK.

There's no questions. OK. But I'm sure we will get at some point.

And like I said, they can reach out to whoever it is. We've had LinkedIn messages already. So thank you for that, for taking it offline if you do want to do it one to one to one. So what do I need to do now?

I need to say thank you. I need to say thank you so much to every single person that attended and every single person that's watching this recording. I also really, really want to say thank you to Alex and to Tony for joining me, for letting me pick your brains, for giving great answers to my quite simple questions.

Honestly, thank you very much for being so open, for detailing. And I'm sure that there will be a follow up to this webinar because I can already see messages coming in saying thank you so much. If that's everything, I will say thank you very much to everybody and take care.

Alex Thornton

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Bye everyone.