14. Sales Pipeline—Using Right vs. Right to Differentiate Issues
Chapter Contents
Collaborate for Growth Initiative
Choosing the Right vs. Right Technique
Overview
This chapter shows you how to use Right vs. Right, along with the underlying concept of Business Practices, to distinguish between different types of issues, specifically execution issues and fundamental business disagreements.
Introduction
Ever had one of those pesky problem areas? You know, the one that you have “fixed” but still is an issue. Or perhaps it is the one that people have resigned themselves to live with because they get a headache just thinking about its complexity?
This case shows how a team used Right vs. Right to clarify the underlying issues in a complex situation. Using the technique, they were able to distinguish between execution issues (where barriers were in the way) and fundamental disconnects (where people did not agree on how the work should be performed and enabled). This understanding helped the team to create an effective path forward knowing the issues they faced.
Collaborate for Growth Initiative
Within IBM, leaders can use several initiatives to launch improvement efforts. One is called “Collaborate for Growth” (CfG) and it was developed to drive transformational change. CfG is an action-learning approach focused on helping IBMers address sticky, cross-organizational issues that impede sustained growth, innovation, and leverage of IBM’s collective capabilities.
CfG projects are focused on areas that require collaboration or integration between business units. The IBM Values and Leadership Competencies underpin the process, and are “brought alive” when applied to the challenges. In the end, the targeted business outcomes are achieved through improved business mechanisms (for example, processes, measures, policies), through enhanced cross-organizational understanding and behaviors, and through aligned perspectives and Business Practices.
When a CfG project is launched, people at multiple levels from the relevant organizations are engaged in dialogue and problem solving. CfG projects are structured with one or more sponsors (often senior vice presidents) who are responsible for selecting the project and participants, and for ensuring sustained focus to achieve the needed results. Also, a cross-organizational, cross-geography leadership team—the guiding coalition—is formed from mid-level leaders (often vice presidents and directors) of the business units. The guiding coalition has responsibility to make decisions and guide the work activities. Finally, a series of execution teams are formed to represent specific client sets, functions, and other expertise necessary to the project’s success.
A team of consultants is also assigned. Because these projects have “people” written all over them (remember that collaboration is the key focus), the consultants are experts in leadership, organizational development, and change management. Their task is to facilitate dialogue and problem solving, align and orchestrate leadership, and identify ways to sustain the improvements over time.
The Sales Pipeline Project
As you can imagine, sales are an important, ongoing function within IBM. And as we seek to leverage our combined capabilities—the full depth and breadth of IBM globally—the sales process becomes more complex (along with other things).
Frankly, IBMers are old pros at selling discrete products and services. Combining hardware, software, and services into the right capabilities to solve client problems—and doing it quickly—is trickier. For IBM, this means participation from multiple brands and channels—often including external business partners. In this complex sales environment, one worldwide brand executive began asking important questions.
The brand executive wanted to determine ways to improve the consistency and quality of the brand’s sales pipeline. This was not simply an issue of better tracking the opportunities, but was a fundamental question of whether people were targeting the right opportunities—and approaching them the right way. Because an effective sales pipeline for this brand requires multiple business units to participate, a CfG project was structured and a guiding coalition assembled.
To initiate the work, the lead consultants interviewed members of the guiding coalition—a group of 15 executives across several brands, customer sets, and functions within IBM. To broaden the perspectives and better understand the issues, 25 additional stakeholders were interviewed. During the interviews, the consultants began to sense some important underlying disconnects in the answers.
When the consultants compared interview notes, they saw seemingly different opinions on several important topics, from needed skill sets, to how people should be deployed to opportunities, to how sales coordination should be performed. If the consultants’ hunches were right and some of the underlying issues were disagreements among the leaders who need to be aligned for success, could Right vs. Right help them clarify the various perspectives? And could exploring these perspectives help them to quickly determine what actions to take to address different root causes?
Choosing the Right vs. Right Technique
After a review of other techniques, the lead consultants chose to use Right vs. Right. To explain the choice, Christopher Nickerson, a Senior Organization Leadership Consultant, explained, “We’re working with multiple perspectives across the business—and with seasoned executives with significant experience in their domains. We knew we’d face conflicting views, and that we’d have to help them reconcile the conflicts. Since a goal of this project is to improve IBM’s ability to collaborate, we wanted to use a constructive approach. The Right vs. Right approach would be a great way to surface and clarify the competing priorities we saw manifested in the organization.”
Applying Right vs. Right
The lead consultants individually poured over the interview notes to identify potential Right vs. Right conflicts in what the executives said—and implied. When they compared notes, many of the same differences showed up on their lists. Aha—they were right—there did appear to be some differences, and they were hearing the same things.
The consultants then consolidated their suspected conflicts into 11 pairs of Right vs. Rights. These 11 best embodied the differences reflected in the guiding coalition members’ views. Table 14-1 shows an excerpt.
Table 14-1. Suspected Right vs. Rights
Spreadsheets were then created and sent out to the guiding coalition asking them what they believed was best on the Right vs. Right uneven five-point scale. Table 14-2 shows an excerpt from that spreadsheet.
Table 14-2. Right vs. Right Data Collection Form
Analyzing the Data Collected
When the results came in, three general categories emerged—and interestingly, the relative numbers were approximately one third of each type of result:
1. One third of the answers showed good agreement between the participants on what was “right” (all of the answers were in two adjacent boxes).
2. The next third showed an emerging answer, yet less agreement and often one or more people who were on the other opposite side of the scale from the rest.
3. The last third showed a complete lack of agreement—in fact they had answers in every box, and approximately the same number in each box!
Now the team had something to work with—and here were their next questions:
For 1—Where there was general agreement
Were the organizations performing the work that way today? In other words, were there barriers that needed to be removed to enable people to do what was best for the clients and the business?
The consultants dubbed these “execution” issues. People agreed on what to do, but there was some kind of barrier to doing it that way and this is why the issue came up during the interviews.
For 2—The ones with an emerging answer but some disagreements
Was there a pattern to the differences? For instance, did the different perspectives come from people assigned to certain functions or client sets?
The consultants saw two reasons for these differences. The first was a valid alternate perspective that needed to be considered. For instance, two ways may be appropriate to deal with two different types of clients or projects. The second was that we simply had an execution issue with some minority views, but the majority would prevail. These would require more discussion before the path for resolution would be known.
For 3—The ones “all over the board”
These were ones where discussion and reconciliation were needed—and where the project could make a real impact. These issues wouldn’t be addressed in the regular course of business because they were fundamental disconnects. Even if some actions were taken, they would address only half of the perspectives—at best. Formulating actions without reconciling the disconnects would undoubtedly mean the problems wouldn’t be resolved, and the “fix” would have to be revisited in the future.
The consultants knew that the next step with these was to head down the Right vs. Right reconciliation path.
So, with a few short hours of work, the consultants were able to use existing information to cull out a series of potential conflicts. They were also able to gather executive viewpoints (using only 10 or 15 minutes of their time), and use that input to identify different types of issues and ways to handle them. Quickly, three paths of work were launched:
Path 1—The execution teams were convened to discuss the guiding coalition’s input, and identify the barriers and ways to address them.
Path 2—The areas with emerging answers yet disagreements were analyzed. During this analysis, a justifiable reason emerged—a difference in handling that was needed between large and smaller clients. The execution teams were chartered to consider the ramifications of having multiple approaches for these different contexts.
Path 3—The guiding coalition was taken through a Right vs. Right reconciliation exercise, and then their decisions were handed off to the execution teams for a Path 1 exercise.
These paths were launched in parallel, which helped to compress the overall timeline. The work is ongoing as of this writing.
Benefits
The team members found several benefits in using Right vs. Right on this project.
First, the technique allowed them to quickly identify appropriate actions and launch different types of work in parallel. Even though they were executing the project rapidly, they were addressing the fundamental issues. Often moving forward quickly means adopting one path for the work, which would have been unsuccessful here.
Second, the technique identified areas for guiding coalition discussion. Executives have limited time, so it is vital to focus their attention to keep them engaged. Frankly, these CfG projects will not work if the guiding coalition members’ participation wanes, and Right vs. Right surfaced areas that needed their attention—and they could see it.
Finally, the answers—which showed the three buckets of agreement and disagreement—gave the effort a mandate and call to action. This was especially important because there was a change of sponsor midstream. The new leader could have redirected the effort, but faced with the input collected, he chose to stay the course. The issues would simply not be resolved without collaborative decision making.
Christopher Nickerson explained, “Using this approach, we were able to demystify the topic of culture. We knew that there were underlying cultural issues, and the approach gave us tangible topics to discuss—using the participants’ own words. It was a great way to provoke the needed discussion and debate.”
Jenna Case-Lee, another Organization Leadership Consultant, added, “It was amazing how quickly the technique helped us pinpoint the real issues. Thinking about their Right vs. Rights helped us to condense the analysis and rapidly launch the real work needed to bring change.”
Conclusion
Right vs. Right can be used to understand issues and their source. Many companies jump quickly into creating solutions. If there are unresolved Right vs. Rights, however, it is likely that the issues will continue and someone will have to cover the same territory again. This case demonstrates how a few hours devoted to surfacing and gauging the Right vs. Rights early in the project can push the improvement effort forward quickly, yet ensure that the real issues are being addressed.
The authors of Tangible Culture offer sincere thanks to the members of the Sales Pipeline CfG project for allowing us to share their experiences.