Creating the Burning Imperative

On top of everything else you have to do, and all the other demands on your schedule, make the time to implement the building blocks of tactical capacity. The starting point, and indeed the foundation, is the Burning Imperative with its components of headline, mission, vision, values, objectives, goals, strategies, plans, and operating cadence. Experienced, successful leaders inevitably say that getting people aligned around a vision and values and focused on urgent business matters are the most important things they have to do—and often the most difficult during their first 100 days.

The Burning Imperative is a clear, sharply defined, intensely shared, and purposefully urgent understanding from all of the team members of what they are “supposed to do, now” and how this Burning Imperative works with the larger aspirations of the team and the organization.

The Burning Imperative must have a shorthand summary or headline—most likely containing a strong, action-oriented verb. This is a brief statement, or tagline, that reminds team members of the entire range of work—from mission through strategy to plans, and the statements behind each step—and specifically of their commitments and responsibilities in relation to that work. For example, “Establish a Burning Imperative by Day 30.”

A Burning Imperative is different from a shared purpose. The difference between the two is timing, intensity, and duration. The shared purpose drives the long term while your Burning Imperative drives the next phase of activity, now, on the way to the long term.

Remember the Apollo 13 example of “Get these men home alive.” Clear. Sharply defined. Intensely shared. Purposefully urgent. It trumps all petty concerns. It didn't replace the overall shared purpose of exploring the universe to increase man's knowledge. The Burning Imperative moves the team forward to that longer-term shared purpose. That's what you're aiming for.

We all saw the same thing in northern Chile in 2010 when 33 miners were trapped for 69 days 2,230 feet below the ground. Almost no one thought that the rescuers would ever retrieve the bodies, let alone pull them out alive. But after 17 days of being trapped underground without contact with anyone, the miners sent a message to the surface that they were all alive! Instantly, the Burning Imperative was set: “Get these men out alive!” No one had a plan on how to get it done when the Burning Imperative was set, but the rescue team, with help from people around the world, invented a way to get those men home safely. That is a Burning Imperative at work!

Don't Hesitate to Burn Rubber on the Way to a Burning Imperative

The Burning Imperative drives the primary focus of the leadership team every day. More than any single other factor, this is what distinguishes highly successful teams from teams that flounder and fail. More than any other single factor, this is the key to surviving and thriving in and accelerating a complex transition. This is the heart of tactical capacity. Teams with a clear Burning Imperative can be more flexible in their actions and reactions because each individual team member can be confident that his or her team members are heading in the same direction.

Not everyone agrees on how fast you should move to get this in place. The argument for stretching out this process is that the risks of picking the wrong Burning Imperative are greater than the risks of moving too slowly. There have certainly been cases where this has been true. If things are going well, there's less urgency to change things.

However, failing to build momentum early can create problems of its own. If some negative external factor intervenes before you have started to move forward (e.g., you lose a key customer or a vital team member leaves), you may fall into a debacle. We all have seen that the pace of change is accelerating as information flows more and more freely. In that environment, even if things are going well, competitors are going to converge rapidly on your position.

You need to move quickly. Today, it is better to get moving and adapt as appropriate. How fast should you move on this? Fast. Get this in place by the end of your first 30 days.

Harold was 100 days into his new role as vice president of marketing for a $1 billion manufacturing company when his boss asked him to pick up business development as well. (Harold had handled the initial steps of his complex transition well indeed.) So Harold hit a restart button with the new team, pulling them together for a Burning Imperative workshop.

The company had experienced serious problems from an unbalanced pipeline in the past but had been unable to frame the problem and the solution. The team members agreed that their Burning Imperative had to be one that drove them to “create opportunities beyond the current horizon.”

After robust discussion, they determined that to achieve their goals they needed 10 new high-level prospect meetings, 10 new contracts, and 10 final deliverables accomplished within the year. The team created a tagline for the Burning Imperative: 10-10-10! They also gained agreement on the underlying mission statement, vision, values, objectives, and goals as well as the strategies, plans, and operating cadence that flowed from those. Everybody walked away from the workshop with an absolutely clear and precise sense of the role the team was to play in driving the Burning Imperative. The rallying cry was “10-10-10!” and everyone was energized by his or her personal call to action in support of that.

What emerged from this Burning Imperative was clear alignment across all three main parties—business development, senior management, and delivery team. Each group had to work across all parts of the pipeline, with delivery helping business development with new prospect meetings, business development helping the delivery team lock down actual delivery (managing expectations and timetable), and senior management paying close attention to the balance and rhythm of resources and pitching in directly as needed.

What was extraordinary was not so much what they did, but how fast they got it done. From the moment this team first came together until the time the chief executive officer (CEO) approved the plans, only 30 hours had elapsed. To achieve this, the team followed the outline as detailed in the Burning Imperative workshop (Tool 5.1) at the end of this chapter. On its completion, one member of the team said, “I've been here six years. It's the first time I've known what I was supposed to do.”

Burning Imperative Components

The components of the Burning Imperative are headline, mission, vision, values, objectives, goals, strategies, plans, and operating cadence. Together, these drive the team's actual plans and actions.

1. Headline: The all-encapsulating phrase or tagline that defines your Burning Imperative.
2. Mission: Why here, why exist, what business are we in?
3. Vision:Future picture—what we want to become, where we are going.
4. Values: Beliefs and moral principles that guide and underpin attitudes, relationships, and behaviors.
5. Objectives: Broadly defined, qualitative performance requirements.
6. Goals: The quantitative measures of the objectives that define success.
7. Strategies: Broad choices around how the team will achieve its objectives.
8. Plans: The most important projects and initiatives that will bring each strategy to fruition.
9. Operating Cadence: How the team is going to implement, track, and evolve plans, together.

People often confuse the difference between a mission and a vision. Sometimes people just combine the two. But they are different. A mission guides what people do every day and why it matters. It informs what roles need to exist in the organization. A vision is the picture of what future success will look like. It helps define areas where the organization needs to be best in class^* and helps keep everyone aware of the essence of the company.

Similarly, people confuse objectives and goals. Objectives connect qualitatively with the vision. (Example: Move past competitor A to become the preferred provider in the market.) Goals must be quantitative. They must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound (SMART). (Example: Increase revenue by 10 percent in each product category in each of the next three years.)

Teams will often resort to a tagline referring to a goal (such as “10-10-10!”). But as the leader, you need to make sure you keep connecting this with the objective. (Ensure a stable pipeline of new business and deliver reliably against it!) Sometimes the mission works as a headline. Sometimes the vision or priorities work. It doesn't matter. All that matters is getting everyone on the same page.

Make It Happen

How do you build the individual elements—mission, vision, values, and so on—and roll them up into a Burning Imperative? You and your core team need to invest time and work into conceiving, shaping, articulating, and communicating each element and then helping translate these into a unified Burning Imperative that works as a headline for the entire plan and that focuses individuals on their particular roles and responsibilities. It may seem daunting, but once it gets going and the team connects with the project, it develops a momentum and urgency of its own. The light clicking on for the team is one of the most exciting and memorable feelings that you and your team will ever have.

There are different ways to do this. If you don't have confidence in your team, a consultative approach tends to work best. In this case, you would draft a first-cut Burning Imperative and then get everyone else's input one at a time. This way you never lose control of the conversation.

The workshop tool in this chapter (Tool 5.1) is designed to help you and your team reach consensus on your mission, vision, values, objectives, goals, strategies, plans, and operating cadence.

The operative word is co-creation. You probably already have some of the components (mission, vision, objectives, strategies, etc.) in your head. They may even be down on paper. Your team members may have told you that they agree. But, do they know them off the top of their heads? Do they (did they ever) really believe them? Are the components current? Inspiring? Do they create a sense of urgency and drive purposeful action? Do team members really see what they're doing as a Burning Imperative or just as something nice to do to pass the time? Your job as a leader is to make sure that everyone on the team can genuinely answer yes to those questions.

Bryan Smith lays out different ways of rolling out ideas: telling, selling, testing, consulting, and co-creating.¹ In most cases the best approach is co-creating. The rewards of creating together are so immense and so memorable that the process alone is the strongest antidote to silos, confusion, and indifference. You don't want the team members thinking that their mission is just a slew of buzzwords that you threw at them. Sadly, that is the destiny of many so-called Burning Imperatives.

The premise behind the Burning Imperative workshop is to co-create the Burning Imperative with your core team so that all share it. After the meeting, you should test the Burning Imperative by letting others in the organization consult with your core team. They may have perspectives that will lead to slight tweaks. You should be open to wording changes and some new ideas during the test, but be careful to preserve the meaning of the Burning Imperative that you and your team co-created.

Do not make the mistake of attempting to let your entire organization co-create your Burning Imperative. In general, the ideal meeting size is between five to nine people. Groups of fewer than five people struggle to find enough diversity in their thinking. Groups of more than nine struggle for airtime. Additionally, if the co-creating team is too large, you're likely to end up with something that is acceptable to most and inspirational to none. By co-creating with just your core team, and perhaps one or two other key players, you can lead the team toward more inspirational ideas.

Done right, a Burning Imperative workshop is an intensive session with a lot of personal sharing and dialogue. Expect to learn a lot about your team members and colleagues. Expect them to learn a lot about you. It is possible that you'll end up with a Burning Imperative very close to what you came in with. It is more likely that you won't. Even if you do, there's power for all in the learning. As T. S. Eliot says in “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration.

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.²

Workshop Attendance and Timing

In the real world, you'll be taking over an existing team with existing priorities and existing schedules. It is unlikely that your team members will have planned to take out two days from their current work to sit around, hold hands, and sing folk songs. First point, this is real work, and the Burning Imperative workshop tool is focused on real business issues. It ends up being a strong team-building exercise, but as a by-product of the work. Even so, there will be some team members who are reluctant to adjust their existing schedules to accommodate this workshop, particularly if you push to hold it sometime in your first 30 days.

Stick with the plan. Find the date in your first 30 days that works best for most people, and then give the others the option to change their schedules or not. This approach has two advantages:

1. It keeps things moving forward in line with the 80 percent rule. Not everything is going to be perfect. Not everyone can be at every meeting. You and your team will move forward as best as you can, helping others catch up and adjusting along the way.
2. It gives you early data about different team members' attitudes and commitment. Everything communicates, and everything communicates both ways. By inviting people to a Burning Imperative workshop, you are sending a powerful message. Their turning it down because they have something more important to do returns a different message. How you handle overt resistance will be an important early test of your assimilate, converge and evolve, or shock (ACES) model (Chapter 2).

Follow through Consistently

Follow through and then follow through again. Pulling people together, investing the time in this, and then not living by it is worse than not doing it at all. A strong Burning Imperative is a covenant of honor. Once you put it in place, you must live it if you expect people to follow your lead. You must follow through on your commitments. You must support people who flex standard procedures in pursuit of the Burning Imperative.

Gerry was a volunteer with his local life squad/ambulance service. One day he heard an accident while raking leaves in his front lawn. He ran down to the end of the street and started treating the victims, enrolling bystanders to summon the police, life squad, and help in other ways. Two of the victims walked away and two had to be taken to the hospital.

After the run to the hospital, Gerry was at the station helping to clean out the ambulance for the next call when the life squad captain walked in.

“Gerry, I noticed you were on the scene of this accident without your red life squad coat on.”

Gerry explained why he had gone straight to the scene without putting his coat on, going to the station, and riding with the ambulance even though he had been on call.

“But wearing your coat is important so people can identify you as a life squad member.”

“Good point. I'll be careful the next time…. Wait a minute. How did you notice I wasn't wearing my coat?”

“I drove by.”

“Are you telling me you drove by the scene of a two-car accident, saw that I was the only life squad member there, and you chose to come by here and remind me to wear my coat the next time? How about stopping to help!”

It doesn't matter what words they actually used. The underlying Burning Imperative of every life squad, ambulance team, or first responder of any sort must be “Help people in need.” This life squad captain was not living the message. You must.

If you are unclear about the differences between all these things and how they work together, stop. Go to www.onboardingtools.com for a more detailed explanation. It will be well worth your time to get familiar with these basic building blocks.

Focus

Let's talk about the power of focus. The best way to lead your team to the desired results is to drive a message you are passionate about with as few points as possible and ideally one main, overriding imperative. So what's your team's focus? It's a lesson masterly reinforced by Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling.

Pivot to Strategy: Summary and Implications

The Burning Imperative consists of:

1. Headline: The all-encapsulating phrase or tagline that defines your Burning Imperative.
2. Mission: Why here, why exist, what business are you in?
3. Vision: Future picture—what you want to become; where are you going?
4. Values: Beliefs and moral principles that guide and underpin attitudes, relationships, and behaviors.
5. Objectives: Broadly defined, qualitative performance requirements.
6. Goals: The quantitative measures of the objectives that define success.
7. Strategies: Broad choices around how the team will achieve its objectives.
8. Plans: The most important projects and initiatives that will bring each strategy to fruition.
9. Operating Cadence: How the team is going to implement, track, and evolve plans, together.

The Burning Imperative is the pivot point for the new leader's first 100 days. Once this is established, the team moves into creating and leveraging the next wave of tactical capacity building blocks—milestone management, early wins, role sort, and evolution of leadership, practices, and culture.

For the Burning Imperative xsto drive everything everyone actually does every day, it must be truly embraced by all. Thus, you need to get it in place and shared early on—within your first 30 days at the latest. A two- to three-day facilitated workshop is the preferred model for making that happen.

Additional Articles and Tools on www.onboardingtools.com

5A.1 Strategic Planning

5A.2 Business Plan Elements

5A.3 Profit Pools

5A.4 Financial Forecasts

5A.5 Mission, Vision, Values Discussion Guides

5A.6 Where Play Choices