Put simply, strategy is choosing the best environment for your team to produce the right outcomes

Sometimes it is magical how bits and pieces of concepts from over a long period of time come together all in one piece and paint a beautiful picture. I recently had such an experience where decades of random thoughts came together in a beautiful ensemble. The result has completely reshaped our approach to being a learning company.

At KiSSFLOW we are building a continuous learning culture not because it is fashionable, but because we truly believe that it will help us grow and create a rewarding experience for all our employees.

This journey started when we implemented learning organization principles from Peter Senge’s 5th Discipline book that was introduced to me by my former boss Ayee Goundan and also my mentor MSJ. Without that exposure I would not have understood that happy employees lead to happy customers, not the other way around.

The Org Model

While most companies are multi-tiered in their organization, we have a simple three-tiered organization model. The top tier is leaders who are heads of departments. The middle tier is managers who lead teams within a department (two pizza sized). The last tier is all the contributors who have mastery in at least one thing such as copywriting, coding, HTML, or SEO.

Managers might have mastery in more than one thing, but their best contribution is stitching together outcomes from different contributors to make a meaningful puzzle piece that is part of the larger picture. For example, for a squad manager to launch a campaign around a landing page, she must coordinate work around the outline briefing, copywriting, design, web tech, and promotion. This ability to stitch outcomes together is a key skill that helps a contributor to graduate to a manager.

Outcomes and Competencies

Outcomes are results of the goals we are pursuing. Goals differ from an organization, department, team, and individual level. But the key question to ask is what contributes to outcomes! The obvious first answer is the competency of the contributors, managers, and leaders. If they have the right competencies, then we should see our outcomes.

We classify competencies broadly into two buckets. Some are tagged as knowledge and others as skill. A knowledge competency is something that sticks to your mind as soon as you hear it. For example, once you know about gravity, you get it; there’s no need to practice it on a daily basis. On the other hand, writing clean code, creating a simple user-interface, or nurturing a customer account can only be mastered through practice, iteration, and a conscious effort to daily improve through self-benchmarking.

The Competency Scorecard

For every role at KiSSFLOW, we have a competency scorecard that helps build our continuous learning culture. The scorecard lists the required competencies to achieve the desired outcomes. The scorecard also shows the current level of mastery as well as the name of the training programs we conduct that help them acquire a new competency. Some competencies can be learned in a program, while others must be practiced daily to improve. With this knowledge, every team member knows exactly what skills they need to focus on, where they are currently, and how to improve and level up.

Here is a template of our scorecard:

Why are we still missing outcomes?

If we have highly competent contributors and awesome managers, why do we still miss outcomes? This dawned upon me when our enterprise partner team was not making headway despite being talented. They were smart and hardworking, but the needle was not moving. Suddenly I realized there is more to outcomes than just competencies. If outcomes were purely a function of competencies, life would be so simple and easy.

Also read: 5 ways to improve time management within your team

So, what was the missing piece? We chose an environment that was not yet ripe for us to enter and it required a herculean effort even with a talented team. In addition to competencies, the right environment is essential. The environment is the internal and external contexts where your team exists, including things like market conditions, competitors, internal culture, tools, and positioning.

Strategy might be the most-abused and least-understood word in all discussions about work. But put simply, strategy is choosing the best environment for your team to produce the right outcomes. Imagine strategy as that magical lever that makes life easy for your team.

For example, when we first launched KiSSFLOW, we started only in the Google ecosystem. That was a macro-strategy at the company level, and it helped our team taste initial success as there was little to no competition for workflow software within the Google ecosystem.

But strategy is not just for leaders; it happens at every tier. Managers must apply mini-strategies that are contextually relevant to their team to help them succeed. Even contributors can maneuver their outcomes by applying micro-strategies to their work. That is why decision-making and responsibility cannot happen at just at the top, but has to be practised at all levels for an organization to achieve velocity and reach its outcomes.

In Conclusion …

I’ve worked for multinational companies and also founded my own successful startup. I’ve been thinking about these concepts for my entire career. The challenge of building the framework for an organization to continuously learn and improve is one that many have tried to crack. But I completely believe that this model of pulling out specific skill- and knowledge-based competencies and encouraging everyone to practice strategy to choose the right environment is a model that can finally help us both reach our goals and offer clarity to our employees.

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