Coach to the Contrary

Please answer this question:

Your company’s sus­tain­able, com­pet­i­tive advan­tage when respond­ing to mar­ket­place changes is based on which of the following?

a. Busi­ness Vision
b. Busi­ness Plan
c. Finan­cial resources
d. Cus­tomer rela­tion­ships
e. Prod­uct dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion
f. Tech­nol­ogy efficiencies/effectiveness
g. None of the above

Answer: G

Items A through F can pro­vide you with a place to start and the bal­ance and sta­bil­ity you need to main­tain. But do any of these ensure qual­ity and speed of response to mar­ket­place change?

Think about it this way. Prod­uct life cycles have sig­nif­i­cantly short­ened, speed of infor­ma­tion is almost instan­ta­neous, mass cus­tomiza­tion has grown to just about cover every­thing, we have con­tstant con­nec­tiv­ity. Given this con­text, while “A-F” are crit­i­cal in defin­ing and shap­ing a com­pany, none of them (even when taken col­lec­tively) are suf­fi­cient to enable a com­pany to strate­gi­cally respond to change.

After being in the coach’s seat for all these years, I have come to the con­clu­sion that the ONE most potent fac­tor in achiev­ing a sus­tained com­pet­i­tive advan­tage is this:

A company’s strate­gic response (both qual­ity and speed) is directly cor­re­lated to how well con­flict is man­aged at the top.

So impor­tant, yet so often ineptly managed.

I see this play out over and over again…leaders who do not man­age inter­nal con­flict well at all. The result? When con­flict at the top is ignored or poorly han­dled, the com­pany becomes exceed­ingly more pas­sion­ate with and about itself than it does with their competitors.

Over time, if lead­ers and their employee’s pas­sion becomes more about them and their com­pany, you end up erod­ing the effec­tive­ness of “A-F,” no mat­ter how well devel­oped, mean­ing­ful and use­ful they were from the start.

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