chapter 6
How do you encourage long-term thinking?
- Increasing the team’s ability to focus on the long term
- Increasing the team’s awareness of the need to be more strategic and considering the impact of decisions and actions
‘The more you chase the Holy Grail of short-term performance, the less you get in long-term results.’
Walter Cabot
Self-assessment
Before reading the chapter, do the following quick self-assessment.
How would you rate the following in your team?
The ever-changing team
Bridget had been going at great speed for a long time and just needed some breathing space. She had asked her assistant to put one hour of thinking time into her calendar. The hour had come and as she rushed into her office, five minutes late for her appointment with herself, she closed the door behind her. A closed door was rare for Bridget, who always wanted to make a point of being accessible.
Bridget was in charge of logistics for a global e-commerce giant. The speed of growth was immense and this meant her division was changing constantly. The kind of changes they saw included a constant stream of new employees as a result of growth as well as high staff turnover. On top of that, the growth meant that people needed to get their head around new processes and business partners at regular intervals, which also continued to change. This rapid change meant they were only able to see what was in the next month or so. They had seen so many people coming and going that they were almost living week to week. And this was a long-term problem for Bridget and the business. It was causing some self-doubt for Bridget.
There are so many changes that it’s only the win of the day that gets the focus. The long-term vision is still valid but people seem to lose track of it. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I talk about it, they are still only dealing with their daily tasks – which I of course want them to do, but we are missing something. I have this inner conflict, I feel frustrated about the lack of future focus, yet I know I have to get the job done. I can feel this inner tension building up. I wonder what it is like for others if this is what it is like for me.
Bridget stood up and walked across the floor to be able to look out the window and get a different perspective.
The conversation I just had with Larry was interesting. He pointed out that people just talk about today and not the future, as they know it’s going to change next week anyway, so what’s the point?! And something tells me that he’s not my only direct report who is experiencing this. I am somehow observing the same thing. I keep trying to get them to lift their heads up and see the bigger picture but I’m not getting the response I want. Maybe I just haven’t communicated enough about what it is we are trying to create as an organisation. They need to understand that if we are going to move away from the narrow, blinkered work mode that we are now in, we must operate and behave differently.
We have a lot of eyes on us now. Our growth is attracting investors, which means that we most definitely need to get everything right in the here and now. We cannot afford to have anything other than operational excellence, while we work towards sustaining those results for the future. People just need to understand this and help me make it happen. I am getting frustrated with them.
What else do I have to do?
Bridget looked at her watch. She had only spent 30 minutes of her allotted thinking time, which she had already been late for, and decided that this was all she could afford. There was another crisis looming and as usual, it took priority.
Exploring the problem
In the example above, Bridget is clearly frustrated by the lack of long-term focus in her division. She feels as if she has talked about it extensively but it has not had the desired effect, it has not changed the way people think and operate.
Short-term mentality
The constant change driven by growth drives a short-term mentality where people are just trying to get their daily job done. Balancing the steady flow of new employees with the perpetual process changes, means that any longer-term thinking is stifled, which is even demonstrated by Bridget herself. She’s not aware that her own behaviours are counterproductive to what she is trying to achieve, and this is a big part of the problem. Although she is saying that she wants her employees to think about the bigger picture, she is not practising what she preaches. Even her allocated thinking time, where she wanted to take a step back to solve the issue for the future, gets cut short due to another emergency.
Constant change
Larry’s message is a diluted version of what his employees are actually experiencing. By the time the information is given to Bridget, Larry has tuned the intensity of the issue down by only conveying the facts and none of the emotions. As employees are expressing that they do not see the point in what they are doing, they are also indicating they are on some level giving up, which is demoralising and can cause people to leave, making the steady flow of new employees even greater. It creates a vicious circle. This also creates constantly changing teams and changing dynamics in those teams.
The reasons for team members having short-term focus
Monthly and quarterly reporting
Short-term reporting of results is necessary in any organisation. However, too much short-term reporting will result in team members concentrating on the short-term results only and not considering longer-term effects of actions.
Difficulty seeing the long-term bigger picture
If team members can’t see the big picture (long-term vision/ambition of the company), it’s difficult to understand how actions today will drive the future results. It can feel complex and theoretical and hard to grasp, quite literally.
Not enough focus on the marketplace
Not giving time to the strategic business thinking and the impact of the external marketplace and the competition, forces people to just concentrate on the tactical tasks of the day.
Speed of change
When circumstances constantly change, team members may not see the point in looking ahead, as they just expect things to change again.
Emergencies and burning platforms
Many organisations have a culture of ‘firefighting’, where urgent issues out-trump important ones on a regular basis. Team members will then naturally pay attention to ‘whatever/whoever shouts the loudest’. This leads them to focus on putting out the fires in their own area and not to think of the bigger implications. People are just busy and this also becomes part of the culture, where people take pride in being busy and do not want to be seen to ‘slow down’ and reflect on the bigger picture.
Goals and rewards
If the team is measured on its short-term results, this is naturally what people will go for. What is measured gets done. If team members are not rewarded for thinking long-term, there is no encouragement to change behaviours either.
No clarity of purpose
If the team doesn’t understand its purpose, it’s hard to see the big picture and see where they fit in, hence hard to consider the impact of what you are doing today and the effect it will have on the future. If you don’t have the whole story from all team members, how each role contributes, the tendency will be to focus on your own tasks in isolation.
The impact of short-term focus in teams
With a short-term focus, there’s a risk of each member only taking an interest in what they need to get done today. Short-term firefighting can create a culture of rushed and reactive work. Then there is potential for errors or even burn-out.
- All decision-making is dependent on the ability to assess outcomes. When long-term focus is missing, it’s hard for a team to make decisions as it can’t judge the consequences of them. Then important decision-making slows down or doesn’t happen at all.
- There is risk of greater conflict due to team members not considering the ramification of what they do on other team members and the team as a whole, as they rush to meet their individual short-term goals.
- There can be frustration as team members may not be able to see what their work leads to, when they are missing the big picture. This can lead to members withdrawing, getting their heads down, being less engaged, hence creating less cooperation and not being as effective as they could be. This ultimately affects all business results.
The impact of short-term thinking on the business, customers, employees and stakeholders
It’s costly to not consider the big picture, the longer term – or have proper planning and thought-through solutions. The costs amass when people work in isolation and/or are unaware of how their individual work has a knock-on effect on colleagues, customers, business partners and other stakeholders.
Short-term thinking is by its nature focused on tasks here and now, so people may be busy with activities but losing the purpose and therefore not taking responsibility for the end results. Everyone is busy but not necessarily on the right things, in the right order and for the right reason. It’s rare that people schedule the necessary uninterrupted time to think through plans and actions and what they will lead to.
Let’s look at an example.
A call centre used a scorecard where one of the measures was the length of a call. The aim was to keep calls as short as possible in order to be able to take more. This measurement, although well intended, encouraged employees to rush customer calls to get good individual ratings. The consequence of this was unsatisfied customers who had to call back because their issue hadn’t been resolved as the employee had not understood the whole issue the first time around. This of course also generated more calls.
The impact was a negative customer experience, which could lead to attrition, as well as a direct cost linked to calls that could and should have been avoided. This example also highlights what happens when employees only look at isolated issues rather than trying to understand the whole picture of the customer’s story, or the impact of their own actions.
As this example demonstrates, one of the biggest consequences of short-term, small-picture thinking is how the organisation is perceived by those who experience this mentality and what that perception can lead to.
And if the long-term strategy keeps changing and the organisation doesn’t seem to make the links to why it is changing then the customer can be affected in yet another way. If the customers don’t understand why these changes are happening and the links are not made for them to help them understand, they may become disengaged and ultimately take their business elsewhere.
Here’s another example of how short-term thinking dominates a workplace.
A hospital had a target in their accident and emergency department that meant they had a short waiting time as a goal. Hospital staff were very aware that this was sometimes an unrealistic target so they had to use ‘work-around’ methods to meet this target. At times they moved patients to another area outside of the emergency department just so they could say they achieved the target. In reality that did nothing to solve the long-term issue, it just created a short-term work-around. And it did not help to improve the patient experience or the efficiency of processes.
Solutions
Long-term, big-picture thinking, or taking a holistic view, is not something that just happens automatically. It needs to be given attention. In the example with Bridget, she had the intention to resolve the short-term thinking issues, but she allowed her time to be hijacked by the crises of the day.
Long-term thinking can be encouraged and created.
Let’s get specific on how to do it.
Solution 1: Balanced short- and long-term reporting
Put greater focus on both short- and long-term reporting of goals and results. They are both important to understand business success and need to run side by side.
Solution 2: Develop people’s ability to think long-term
Develop people’s understanding of cause and effect, and of what impact actions and behaviours have on stakeholders and results. A quick and simple way to do this is to look at your to do-list and ask yourself what the short and long-term implications (+ or −) of those actions will be. The following Impact Grid gives you a framework to start with.
Solution 3: Study the competition and the marketplace
Share your market intelligence as a team; learn from each other. Read business news. Talk to other people in the business to learn from them. Join external networks. Study your industry. Study your market. Study your competitors.
Ask yourself questions like:
- What is going on out there that I need to know?
- What is going on out there that we need to know about as a team?
- What else do we need to be thinking about that we currently don’t know that we don’t know?
- How strategic are we versus tactical? Let’s take our ‘to do’ list and ask ourselves: does this fit in the strategic or the tactical? Where should we be spending our time?
Solution 4: Be a ‘time owl’
Be wise like an owl about how you spend your time.
Are you focusing on what’s important or are you simply responding to what’s urgent?
Plan your day, your week, your month and your year(s). Value your own time and that of your team. Schedule regular time for reflection and strategy to make sure your actions are relevant and effective in the long-term. Force yourself to look ahead – and stick to it.
Schedule time for the important priorities, rather than just moving through each day and doing the urgent tasks that appear. By doing this you ensure you lift your head up from the daily tasks and consider the bigger picture.
If you are the team’s leader, remember that you set the tone, you are the role model – others will do what you do. So ask yourself: how am I spending my time?
Solution 5: Team goals and rewards
Set both short- and long-term team goals. Short-term goals keep team members focused on what needs to happen now and long-term goals give the bigger picture. When you have both, you start to think more about what you are doing, considering the impact of your actions today into the future. You think: how is what I am doing today going to take me towards that bigger goal? You should be able to see the red thread from what you are doing today right to the future long-term goal, and how it contributes to the organisation’s overall vision and purpose.
Figure 6.2 The red thread
Linked to the goals, reward and recognise people for long-term thinking. This will encourage the very behaviour you want.
Solution 6: Communicate the overall purpose.
Make absolutely sure that everyone knows the purpose of the team.
- Spend more time together to make the purpose actionable at a team level.
- Make the red thread clear, from each person’s role/task to the team’s purpose, to the overall purpose/vision of the organisation.
- Sometimes you may need to be explicit about the red thread and the links. You may need to explain and link it to make it understood by others. It is an easy assumption to think that people implicitly understand those links. Make it explicit so there is no ambiguity. This also helps people to see the links for themselves next time.
Solution 7: Invest in team time
Invest in team time, even if the team is changing. When having a fast-changing team (like in Bridget’s story), it can be tempting to not take the time to bond as a team, thinking that the team will just change anyway. But unless you do, you’re in danger of speeding up turnover even more. It can be as simple as a quick check-in as a team for 15 minutes to align something or you may need to invest the right amount of time for a really big change. In teams, chunky emotional change topics are sometimes given a very short timeslot on the agenda, like 30 minutes. This is better than nothing but you will not gain real buy-in and understanding to the long-term change if topics are shoehorned into a tight agenda. You may think the team has had the discussion but if they haven’t connected to it at an emotional level then it is less likely to happen. Any lasting, real transformational change happens at an emotional level.
Solution 8: Take a long-term view on your team members
If you are a leader; no employee is ‘yours’ forever. People are ‘on loan’ only and your responsibility is to help them develop, to make more of those resources you’ve been loaned. Be generous, consider that you have a collective leadership responsibility to think long-term with the resources that you have, even if they won’t always be with you. And if all leaders take that collective responsibility then you will reap the rewards through your future employees too.
Solution 9: Make the big picture understandable
Break the big picture into smaller, understandable, actionable pieces, while still keeping the big picture. Show how the smaller pieces fit in. Take one chunk at a time and explain and show the links. Take a step-by-step approach to build a picture from today to the future and show others how you make those connections. Draw a chart, talk about it or tell a story to help make it understandable and get people to make meaning of it.
Stories help people to connect at a powerful, emotional level.
Let’s have a look at what Bridget could have done instead, had she deployed these solutions.
Bridget got back to her office just in time for her scheduled strategic hour. She enjoyed these moments of uninterrupted time that she had made into a habit, and for this reason she made sure they were a priority.
There are as always so many changes, that we are in danger of it only being the win of the day that gets the focus. I can see that we are starting to change this though. More and more people are referring to the long-term vision and showing that they are taking responsibility for contributing to it. I know that I have spent much more time thinking about this myself and talking to the teams about it, and it’s working, I’m pleased to say. I feel good about the progress we have made.
I remember how Larry used to share how tired his team were of change and how it affected both engagement and people’s mood.
We have some good traction going here. We are getting the daily tasks and tactics right. I like the way the team are stopping and making the links to the future. I was asked to attend one of the meetings last week. I watched the team hold a crisis meeting. They put all of their conflicting priorities onto a flipchart then decided to prioritise them using a chart they have used before but they added a section for long-term impact! I was very happy to see that, so I told them. They seemed thrilled with my comments. I must admit it made me feel better too.
She spent the rest of her time reflecting on what changes she had seen and also focused on the five-year future plan she was creating. She was remaining honest honest to make sure she didn’t fall into the trap of the crisis that kept shouting at her from her desk.
Bridget looked at her watch. Her hour was up. She could have spent more time but knew that there were other things that needed her attention too, so she resolutely got up and headed for a skip-level meeting with her shipping staff. It was time to fill up on intelligence about the current realities of international shipping.
Behaviours of team and leader
Under ‘Solutions’ above, we have listed a number of ‘how to’ actions. These solutions work best when carried out with these supporting ‘how to’ behaviours. The actions on their own will get you only so far. With the right behaviours you can more effectively encourage long-term thinking.
Thoughts and feelings of team and leader
On average, a person experiences around 70.000 thoughts per day.1
Many of those thoughts are habits that affect a person’s mindset or outlook.
What we think affects how we feel, and how we feel affects how we think.
When wanting to encourage long-term thinking within a team, actively replace thoughts and feelings that are counterproductive to that. Here are thoughts from the story, their impact on feelings and how they can be changed.
Summary
Holistic view
It’s crucial for businesses and business leaders to be able to take a holistic view, to see the big picture and understand how all parts of the business jigsaw fit together. For a team this means being able to think beyond your own area and recognise how you fit into the wider organisation, and impact the customer experience and the value proposition as a whole. This includes sustainability thinking, which is the ability to contemplate triple bottom lines for long-term business success: People, Planet and Profits (not just the standard bottom line of Profit). The Impact Grid in Solution 2 above includes this thinking.
Taking a long-term view of the business includes being able to assess impact, make decisions and take actions that are not just about an isolated, localised issue.
Busy busy
Everyone is busy, but just being busy is not good enough. If you’re not busy with the right things at the right time, you’re just wasting time. Long-term success requires long-term thinking, which starts with taking a step back and reflecting on and considering the bigger picture at regular intervals.
Reflection questions for the reader
- Do I spend enough time reflecting on the long-term aspects of my team and our work? Is that enough?
- How much time do I spend on strategy versus tactics?
- Is my team busy being busy? If so, could we, through better long-term thinking, be doing less and achieving more?
- How clear is my team’s purpose?
- Does my team have balanced goals?
- How do I encourage people to think long-term?
Self-assessment
After you have implemented the solutions in this chapter, answer these questions again to see the progress you have made.
How would you rate the following in your team?
