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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Must-Win Battles: How to Win Them, Again and AgainMust-Win Battles: How to Win Them, Again and Again

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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Must-Win Battles: How to Win Them, Again and AgainMust-Win Battles: How to Win Them, Again and Again

Learn More Buy

What Is an MWB Journey?

An MWB journey is an ongoing process, during which two things are happening simultaneously. One is that the top team is learning to behave as a team, with shared objectives and a common agenda. The other is that a series of MWBs are being identified, fought, and hopefully won. Each battle will move you closer to your overall vision, but because new battles will emerge over time and corporate objectives may change, this part of the journey will never end; there will always be the next battle to win. And although your senior managers may indeed become a team, as executives come and go the team will always be at least partially in flux and will need continued attention to reinforce the shared agenda and expected behaviors.

Before setting out, you need to prepare for the journey, as outlined in Figure 1.1. This requires making an assessment of the starting conditions facing your business. We discuss these shortly, but the key point is that not all MWB journeys are the same, and you need to tailor yours to the particular conditions that you face in your business. You also need to determine if you and your leadership team are ready to lead such a journey. It will not be "business as usual," as we explain in Chapter 3.

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.1 The MWB journey roadmap: an overview.

Phase One entails running a kick-off event for your team. This typically brings together the most senior managers in the company for up to a week in an offsite location to identify, through intense discussion and debate, the company's MWBs. The event ends with the selection of the MWBs and the senior managers who will lead them, and each member of the top team publicly committing to support all of the chosen MWBs. This first phase of the journey tends to be short and intense.

Phase Two involves the motivation and mobilization of the broader organization to win the chosen MWBs (and, later, the battles that take the place of those won). For any given MWB, this phase might last as long as several years, during which the organization must take ownership of each MWB, assemble and mobilize the resources to fight it, and win. But each MWB will follow a different course—some will move quickly and achieve early victory, others may lose their way and need to be re-energized or redirected. This phase demands stamina and persistence on the part of the company's leaders, because it is very easy for the organization to lose focus on the MWBs as the evolving pressures of day-to-day business throw up potential new priorities. And people who do not support the must-win battles will do their best to slow things down and derail MWB activities. Such intransigents need to be identified and dealt with.

Each phase of the MWB journey involves two subjourneys, one emotional and one intellectual. The intellectual journey is necessary to ensure first that you select the right MWBs, and then that you choose the right supporting battles that need to be won to ensure victory in the main battles. The emotional journey should lead first to a new level of openness that will underpin the creation of a top management team that truly functions as a team, and then to a series of focused teams committed to winning each of the MWBs. Depending on where you are starting from, you may find one of these subjourneys longer and more difficult than the other, and the exact balance between the subjourneys needs to be tailored to your particular needs. One size does not fit all, when it comes to designing MWB journeys.

We believe strongly that these subjourneys need to run simultaneously. Some leaders are inclined to say, "Let's do the team building first and then we'll get to choosing the battles later," whereas others want to do the reverse. Our experience is that these approaches do not work well. Team building that does not focus on real issues does not take you very far, and MWB choices that have no emotional commitment to the result are a waste of time as they result in decisions that are never whole-heartedly implemented. And as the boxed commentary suggests, there is growing evidence that emotions and reason cannot be readily separated.

Emotions and Reason Are Inseparable

We recommend that your MWB journey place as much emphasis on generating emotional energy and commitment as on intellectual rigor. Why? Surely executives, in fact any business person, should be as rational as possible and make decisions based on reason, i.e. intellectual weighing of the pros and cons.

Although we like to think this is what really happens—and have "programmed" executives for decades to try to put emotions aside—it's not. Huge advances in neurological sciences in the last decade or two suggest that emotions and reason are inseparable.3 The processes by which we think, experience situations, and respond to the dynamics in our environment are governed by a mix of emotional and rational responses. When we build experiences that we can apply to future situations, whether climbing a mountain or managing a change process in an organization, those embedded memories have emotions intertwined with "hard" facts. Think about how you responded when one of your team questioned an important aspect of the deal that you thought you had all agreed on, in front of the CEO of the prospective joint venture partner. Chances are, you had to control your anger and surprise before you could respond sensibly to this suggested change in plan (even if it was a good one). How much will you trust that person ("this traitor") in future?

Such experiences leave "markers" in your brain that can act as shortcuts in future situations when you see similar patterns. Despite millennia of evolution, we still have the fight-or-flight instinct when we feel under threat—emotions are driving. Apply a similar concept to business experiences and you get "gut feeling." Gut feeling is increasingly recognized as an important component of leadership. Because the situations leaders face are complex and often ambiguous, requiring the management of people and relationships as well as big-picture vision and planning, they rely on instinct to help them create shortcuts through the complexity. Many leaders are very good at recognizing patterns that activate, often unconsciously, experiences they have had before. These help them make choices faster and more surely than they might otherwise have done.

But—and it's a big but—using these shortcuts can block as well as promote courses of action. Say the person who had embarrassed you at the meeting came to you with a new suggestion. How thoroughly would you consider it? If your relationship had not improved, odds are that you would not look at it in as positive a light as if someone you trusted had made the suggestion. The point is that the brain's shortcuts include your emotions as well as your rational side. Unless you recognize these dynamics, it can be difficult to be open to new perspectives and opportunities.

And it's not just being open with yourself about your emotions. Another key learning from psychology and neuroscience is that everyone has his own view of the world. Our information gathering is selective and biased by our own interpretations of events, which is based on our experiences, values, and beliefs, all of which have emotional and rational dimensions.

We each see the world differently—and this impacts the way we do business. So it is important to be open with the people around you, about emotions as well as intellectual ideas, and about how these impact your view of the world. Unless you understand how your world view colors your interpretations, it can be hard to find common ground with others.

Business people need to stop acting as if they can subjugate emotion to reason. Without recognizing and managing the impact of emotions, decision making and action will be impaired because we don't always challenge our shortcuts as we should, or appreciate that others see the world very differently.

The key is to recognize emotions as an equal partner of intellectual rigor and idea generation. If we succeed in doing this, the ability to foster strong relationships between people and to leverage the experience of the group and organization will not only improve decisions but also drive shared commitment to action. The MWB process is one way to recognize this interplay of emotion and reason—and get it into the open where it can be managed to greatest effect. Because you probably have the same marker in your head as we do: People make or break a strategy.

We now consider each phase of the journey in more detail.

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