I read questions like “Is it worth doing an MBA?”, “Should I get a degree?” and “Do you need an MBA to succeed in business?” and I see responses that range from “worth every cent” (usually graduates) to “what a waste of money!”.

Other than the vagueness of such questions in relation to individual situations, I feel that a lot of people get confused about the difference between “education” and “learning”.

Does everybody need an MBA? No
Could everybody gain knowledge and/or skills from an MBA? Absolutely!

You see, good leaders, great CEOs and world-class innovators display some common personality traits, one that always stands out to me is a desire or even a personal need to continually learn.

The below is a summary of some of the types of learning that you should be considering for your personal and professional development.

Academic Education / Higher Learning

Education is (rightly or wrongly) associated with universities and professional qualifications (PMI, CPA, CA etc), and provide a means of learning a solid baseline, sometimes very theoretical or academic, set of knowledge and skills. For me, my MBA not only taught me many new things in relation to leadership, business strategies, marketing, financial management and much much more. Further, it validated much of my existing approaches and ideas about business, strategy and team building, even if I didn’t know the name of the principle or theory I was applying.

In the end though, academic education is just one type of tool to learn. Without an ability to apply this knowledge it is not going to help your organisation or you develop as a professional.

Reading

Reading is one of the most common ways for people to learn; reading about other peoples successes and failures, reading about new approaches to business and personal problems, and reading about the everyday lives of those that may be your current or future customers and reflect on how this new insight or knowledge could be applied to improve your own organisation or job.

The insights you gain through reading can truly help you to challenge yourself about your approaches and mindset and leads to better decisions in your own business and personal life.

Tutorials, YouTube and Online Training

The web has a vast source of information available of course, many of these can be found via a simple google search, and even better, you should be able to get the basics of a new set of knowledge for free on sites like YouTube. Even advanced courses are usually available but there are resources available through paid online training services like TED & Udemy. There are also free online training packages via Alison where you get a certificate and all.

Personal & Organisational Reflection

Personal and organisational reflection is another tool that great leaders use to learn from a situation and make corrective actions or improvements each time they cycle through a process.

Is there a single type of “learning” that will make you a great business person or leader? Of course not!

The real question that people should be asking is “what combination of learning tools should I use to grow?”

Coming back to the question about the value of an MBA, it does not automatically make you an exceptional leader or great team member. It does not automatically increase your value to an organisation. It does however provide you with knowledge, tools and methods, that if executed effectively, will help you to become a better leader, a better team member and lead to more organisational success. I do however firmly believe that what will get you over the line professionally, is going to be applying a combitation of the methods discussed here.

I’ve met people with 3-4 degrees, who couldn’t run a project or execute on a strategy to save their lives. Conversely, I’ve met people who (like me prior to my MBA) had no degree or formal qualifications, but got things done, and got things done well.

For me, my MBA studies was an amazing experience and I have learned so much from not only the course material but those amazing people that I work with throughout my 18 months of study.

So do not get yourself confused between the need for formal education and the need for continuous learning. Since my MBA I have read countless articles, methodologies, books and engaged with many leaders at various organisations and communities that I engage with, and importantly I’ve learned from each and every one.

Strategy Planning vs Backlog Development

There are a number of different approaches to strategic planning, such as commonly used tools like SWOT analysis sessions, but for the most part, the outcome is a set of goals or actions that your organisation that the group have identified to; remain competitive, achieve competitive advantage. leverage from an identified strength, or mitigate the risks associated with an identified weakness.

Unfortunately, many times these strategically significant actions remain in notes, butchers paper, whiteboards and never get effectively executed.

So within the scope of an agile scrum, this is consistent with the backlog development. They are your “user stories” that will need to be broken down into manageable pieces of work that you, or another team member, will be responsible for delivering.

Praying for Results vs Strategy Sprints

Often during strategic planning sessions, ownership is delegated to the appropriate team members. This is often done without consideration of the effort involved, other priorities and I’ve even seen these actions quickly put into the “if I get time” basket.

But hang on, you just spent a half day or full day with your most valuable (and probably expensive) resources in a room and you all agreed that these actions were critical for the business! Why would this not be considered a priority to execute and realise the benefits of the defined actions?

By implementing “strategy sprints”, that would usually run in two-week “sprint periods”, you are encouraging your team to take the developed backlog, prioritise, plan and most importantly complete the work.

By breaking down the work into smaller, manageable pieces, you are going to increase your chances of success significantly.

This is achieved through common agile scrum processes;

• Backlog Grooming – breaking strategic targets down into actionable and manageable pieces of work and prioritising them
• Sprint Planning – taking into consideration other commitments and priorities that staff have, planning the work that will be completed over the agreed sprint period
• Scrums – regular reports on the progress of the tasks that have been planned. This is achieved through the answering of three questions; what did you do? what are you going to do? are there any impediments or blockers? 
• Sprint Retrospectives – this is possibly the most important aspect of adopting agile scrum for your strategic objectives, this gives your team the opportunity to reflect on the outcomes and provide inputs and suggestions that will lead to improvements

It should be noted that in agile scrum projects, scrums are usually daily as these projects usually have a much more aggressive burndown requirement. While you could do this for your strategy sprints as well, it tends to be too much for a normal leadership team on top of their usual responsibilities and begins to eat into the value of the process. I would usually suggest weekly or twice weekly scrums for these types of sprints.  

Significant Roles

Product Owner

Ultimately the product owner should be a senior leader, if not THE senior leader of the organisation. It is important though that they also have the ability and willingness to provide “user stories” and “needs” without solving problems.   That’s the responsibility of the scrum master and team members!   Additionally, the product owner needs to be realistic in terms of expectations and prioritisation, as I’ve often said to my teams, “if everything is a priority, then nothing is”.

Scrum Master

Especially when dealing with, what is very likely to be non-technical work, there is a need to separate the scrum master responsibilities from day-to-day operations. You need to identify a stakeholder who is going to be both empowered and willing to call other stakeholders out when they fail to meet expectations, regardless of their seniority, while offering support and guidance when required.

It is this role that I fulfil with my coaching engagements; it’s hands-on, much more than your average advisor or coach, with support and accountability for the entire team, both within the context of a scrum and throughout the sprint.

Team Members

As touched on above, one of the challenges with strategic planning and execution is balancing day-to-day tasks and operations with strategically important actions. Team members, who are likely to be within your leadership group, need to have a solid understanding of their work and what is realistic in terms of prioritising between the day-to-day and the strategic tasks.

Using the right tools

There are many approaches to managing your brand new strategy sprints, but you should be considering the following;

1. We need to maintain a high level of visibility without burdening our leadership group with additional administrative tasks
2. We need to be able to monitor progress and communicate challenges along the way
3. We need to be able to easily report and view the outcomes throughout the sprint period

Let me know what you think of this approach and if you would like to explore running strategy sprints with me!

This is not all that surprising given I now (hopefully) know more than I did 16+ years ago, but it got me thinking about the things I wish I understood back then, so I thought I would share some with my community in hopes that it will assist somebody looking to take on additional responsibilities in within their organisation.

Business outcomes vs personal expectations – read: salary

When we first come into the workforce we often lack the professional maturity to understand that if a business or you aren’t performing well, that it is difficult to have a meaningful discussion about a bonus or significant increment. At times we have an extremely unrealistic view of our own value (could be lower or higher!) and there is a sense of entitlement associated with performance reviews that they will always result in an increment.

Unfortunately, just because you’ve worked another year in a role does not mean that you are worth 5-10-15% more than last year, in fact, sometimes your skills and knowledge are one more year out of date!

My recommendation to anybody who feels that they are worth more and would like to seek a higher increment is to prepare answers to the following questions prior to your salary review and be willing to both ask the question and provide the answer if your reviewer is not;

1. What have you done in the past period that adds value to the organisation?
   Have you completed training or certifications? Have you taken on additional responsibilities? If so, you are in a great position to have a meaningful, and hopefully, successful discussion about your salary when you can articulate what you have done that is of value to the business.
2. Do you add revenue to the organisation or are you a “cost”?
   To be clear here, when I refer to a cost, we all are, but some staff generate revenue directly as opposed to administrative or back-office functions that are considered a pure cost on the P&L. There is nothing wrong with being on either side of this coin, but the message to your direct report could change as a result.
3. If you’re generating revenue, how much did you generate in the past period?
   Were you above your targetted numbers? Are you trending upwards? What strategies have you initiated and adopted to improve your efficiency and effectiveness? If you can answer these it is a much better tone for the discussion.
4. If you’re a “cost”, what initiatives or changes have you introduced to be more efficient and effective?
   Did this introduce ideas that helped to reduce the costs for other business units? Did you get more cost-effective as a result? If so then, again the discussion is much more positive in nature.

Another great way to drive these discussions is to be actively seeking, presenting and implementing new ideas throughout the year that will; increase revenue, decrease costs or improve organisational culture and effectiveness.

I recall my first leadership position where I had the responsibility for my team’s performance and salary management. A team member came in and said: “I want a 10% increment”. I asked one simple question “why are you worth 10% more?”.. to which he said, “I’ve been here another year”. Not good enough! To make things worse for him he’d been enrolled in training he never completed and actively resisted learning new aspects of the products we were delivering, but that’s another story altogether.

Perhaps my approach was unfair in hindsight, but I needed him to understand that increments for increment’s sake are not scalable approaches for any business.

Time vs Effectiveness

Another observation I made in my CV, was that there were accomplishments that were directly related to working above and beyond. For example: “Achieved 80% utilisation despite increased management responsibilities”. My perspective at the time was that this shows that I work hard, achieve big services numbers and still do everything needed to manage my new team.

With experience, my perception has shifted and now this suggests that I was not managing my team so well. I was definitely not giving them my time for coaching and mentoring OR I was working long hours consistently OR possibly worst of all, I was unable to justify or articulate the importance of my time and its effect on the effectiveness of my team to the organisational leaders at the time.

Working long hours is not a strength, it is a potential weakness in your work habits. If you are doing this consistently and regularly then you are not working effectively or you are not able to have that constructive dialogue with your leaders about introducing effective working habits in the business.

Targets, Goals and Objectives

When I was a green worker, I always dreaded targets and goals because, in truth, many of them were poorly designed and implemented (a direct sales target on every resource in a business is just silly!). That led to a negative association that took a long time for me to shake. Quality of targets aside (which will form the basis of a future post), I hated to be measured, despite being a high performer within any business I’ve worked for.

Now, I understand the value of SMART goals and objectives as a tool to drive effective and organisationally important behaviours and outcomes. Try to look at your goals as your roadmap to success rather than criteria that will be used against you during your performance management process.

If you feel that your goals are not SMART in nature, raise this with your leadership group and present examples of business valuable goals that you would be happy to work towards. Remember goals should not be too easy to achieve (otherwise what’s the point?), nor too hard (otherwise why try?). One suggestion is to work on this in a small group and present your recommendations in a united way that expresses the importance of getting this right to the leadership group.

Opportunities – New responsibilities

One thing that I experienced many times was being given “the opportunity” to take on new responsibilities, which usually did not coincide with an increment or a development plan that would lead to an official plan. This is one of those “tricks” used by poor or ignorant managers to get more out of somebody without taking a hit on salary, and in my lack of wisdom, I accepted… way too many times.

On one occasion, my CEO talked to me about becoming the new product manager (I was a project lead at the time). We talked at length about the responsibilities and opportunity for my career but there was no talk of a change in package, nor the introduction of a development plan to guide me on this path. We parted ways on poor terms not long after as I pushed the point of increment at the next salary discussion and he was upset about my approach (should have thought through my above questions!). His response was to give me the increment but retract the product manager role.

These discussions need to be open and direct and must be beneficial to both parties. The above mentioned “Achieved 80% utilisation despite increased management responsibilities” was a direct result of another such “opportunity”. I, however, lacked the confidence and the leadership competence to open up this discussion to say that if I am now managing a team, my utilisation targets (related to project billing) should also decrease.

Now, not every “opportunity” means an increment, but you must be clear on what value you will be adding to the organisation and what the package will look like once you have developed the required competencies. Do not be afraid to ask questions such as;

1. Which of my current responsibilities will be delegated or decreased to give me enough time to do justice to this opportunity?
2. When I have met your expectations, what will my package be?
3. What criteria are to be set to define my success, and therefore trigger an official role and package change?
4. Can we work together on a development plan that will state all of the above?

If your manager is uncomfortable about answering any of the above, I would be questioning the reality of this “opportunity”.

This has been quite a fun reflection session for me, and I hope that some of these insights and thoughts will help those who are seeking to take on new responsibilities within their organisation.

Do you disagree with any of my points or suggestions? Let me know below!