Series 1 Episode 03: Judy Oliver
On episode 3 of Strategy Sheroes I speak to Judy Oliver.
Judy is Managing Director of Oliver & Co helping organisations think more strategically, manage change and develop effective leadership.
Judy began her career at BP, where she qualified as a Barrister before becoming the company’s International Management Development Adviser. She spent 12 years as a Non-Executive Director in the NHS before starting her own consultancy specialising in effectiveness, leadership and strategic thinking.
Judy is an accredited assessor for the Myers Brigg Type Indicator and has qualified as a Thinking Environment Consultant and Coach with Nancy Kline.
She has co-authored a book about the development and future of commissioning in health and social care and is a Visiting Fellow at the Bournemouth University Institute for Health and Social Care.
In 2001 Judy co-founded A New Kind of Leadership, a women's leadership network dedicated to researching and developing an effective leadership model appropriate to a 21st century world.
I speak to Judy about -
Common challenges to effective leadership
Getting buy-in for strategy
Myths around strategic thinking
How to think well
Getting the best from people’s time in meetings
Personal strategy
Read some of my favourite take-aways below, or subscribe on itunes.
Getting buy-in for strategy
I think often it’s because people haven’t been involved in the process early enough, and I think it’s really important that people are given the opportunity to think it through for themselves. When I was chair of a social enterprise I invited representatives across the organisation at different levels, to come and work through the issues for the organisation. It started off quite cynical but when they worked it out they could see why the board had made the decision it had. The important thing is giving people time to think it through, and give context. Encourage people to work it through for themselves, they own it more, rather than having it forced upon them.
On thinking well, including the reliance on powerpoint
The quality of the attention people give one another actually helps the quality of their thinking. But we tend to overuse powerpoint, in our work we don’t use any powerpoint at all, I banned it from my boardroom. It tends to make people very passive. Often the powerpoint is for the speaker rather than the audience. Your job as the presenter is to make sure people think. And the best way you can do that is by giving them your attention, by giving their attention to you, it helps you know what you need to say. But it’s quite a controversial approach. People hide behind powerpoint. People lose energy when they’re looking at a screen. They have much more energy when looking at a human being. If you use that principle, people will be more energised by your ideas, people’s stories are much more powerful.
Overcoming negativity around strategic thinking
When I run workshops on strategic thinking, people have often been sent because their managers have told them they don’t think strategically enough. So they come feeling quite bruised and lacking confidence. So the first thing I do is to help them understand what people tend to assume about strategic thinking that limits its impact e.g. just for the board, you need to be really intellectual, and that you should end up with a document of at least 120 pages long that no one will ever read and it’s full of acronyms. So strategic thinking doesn’t have a good name.
I value Professor Bob Garratt’s work, and his book “The Fish Rots from the Head (very graphic title but it means if you don’t get it right at the top it doesn’t smell too good further down). He describes strategic planning as an oxymoron, because as soon as you have a plan you often have to change it, you’re always having to adapt. So what he emphasises is that strategic thinking is much more important, that you do that regularly so you can adjust, especially now with the rate of change being so vast. So we get people to think what might people assume and then what does it really mean. It’s about a plan, it should be in plain english, it should be in a language that people can relate to, and like a vision it should be something that people can see in their mind’s eye.
