Category: 5 Minute Growth Tips

A CEO’s journey to an A-Player Team

2/11/2026

As a CEO, are you still the one stepping in to fix front-line issues? It’s a common frustration in growing small to mid-size companies.

In my previous 5 Minute Growth Tips, “Are your leaders high-performing?” and “The Strength of Talent by Mike Goldman”, we discussed the framework for moving leaders from "average" to "excellent." We identified five critical elements: Job Scorecards, Quarterly Coaching Reviews, Personal Assessments, Quarterly Development Plans, and Weekly One-On-Ones.

Here, I’ll share the story of a Winnipeg CEO who broke the cycle of micro-managing by focusing on this development process with his leaders.

The Challenge: The CEO as the Chief Firefighter

I worked for several years with Roger Miranda, the CEO of Evident IT, a managed service provider (MSP) in Winnipeg.

When we began our work together, Roger was feeling frustrated. Like many CEOs of scaling companies, he found himself constantly pulled down into front-line people issues. Despite his efforts, his direct involvement was having little effect.

Roger knew that to improve customer service, to turn clients into ambassadors who would help attract new business, he needed his entire team performing at an A-Player level. But he realized he couldn't do it alone. Developing front-line employees into A-Players required his leadership team to grow and develop into A-Players first. He needed to stop firefighting and start coaching his leaders to lead.

Step 1: Defining Excellence with Job Scorecards

The first step was removing the ambiguity. You can’t hold someone to a high bar if they don't know where the bar is.

I guided Roger to create a comprehensive Job Scorecard for each of his leaders. We didn't just list tasks; we documented core values and behaviours, specific results and targets, areas of accountability, and behavioral competencies.

Roger found determining the exact metrics and targets challenging at first. However, he leveraged MSP industry benchmarks to define what "average" vs. "outstanding" looked like. This gave him the confidence to hold his team to a rigorous, data-backed standard of excellence.

Step 2: Uncovering Reality through Quarterly Coaching Reviews

With the scorecards in hand, Roger implemented Quarterly Coaching Reviews. These weren't standard HR "performance reviews"; they were reality checks designed to surface blind spots.

In one instance, a review revealed a significant gap: a leader believed they were performing well, but Roger’s rating on one of their responsibilities was lower because the leader was "winging it" rather than following documented processes. This lack of structure was creating friction and inefficiencies whenever their work touched other departments.

Step 3: Identifying Potential with Personal Assessments

To understand why certain leaders were struggling despite having clear scorecards, Roger turned to Personal Assessments. Specifically, he used the Working Genius tool to map out the natural strengths and frustrations of his team.

One of his leaders, who managed a large team, discovered they had a "weakness" in Galvanizing, the ability to rally, inspire, and push a team toward a goal. In the fast-paced MSP world, Galvanizing is essential. This assessment was an "Aha!" moment for Roger; it explained why this leader struggled to get their team on board with changes. It moved the problem from a personality clash to a specific competency gap that could be managed or supported.

Step 4: Building Skills via Quarterly Development Plans

Once the gaps were identified (like "winging it" or a lack of "Galvanizing"), Roger used Quarterly Development Plans to bridge them. These weren't generic management courses; they were "live" and value-creating business projects.

For the leader who was struggling with process, their development plan for the quarter was to document and refine their department’s main work process. By making this their primary learning objective, Roger ensured they were growing their skills while simultaneously solving a major pain point for the company. The growth was practical, measurable, and directly tied to the company's success.

Step 5: Sustaining Growth through Weekly One-On-Ones

The final, and perhaps most difficult, piece was the Weekly One-On-One. In a technical environment, it’s easy to let these meetings become "tactical status updates" or cancel them when things get busy. Roger's challenge was consistency.

He realized that for the leader struggling with Galvanizing, the weekly cadence was the most important support he could provide. By showing up every week, he kept the bar high and provided the coaching necessary to help that leader learn to lead their team better. These meetings weren’t about "checking off tasks" but rather "building the leader," ensuring the leader’s development efforts continued and that the culture of accountability remained firm.

The Result: From Frustrated to Free

The beauty of a high-performance system is that it brings clarity. Over time, one of Roger’s leaders developed significantly and became a stronger leader.

However, the increased accountability led another leader to realize they were no longer the right fit for the direction of the company. They decided to move on. While "losing" a leader can be difficult, it allowed Roger to hire a new leader who possessed the "Galvanizing" genius the team desperately needed.

Today, Roger has stepped back from the front-line firefighting. With the right leaders performing at a higher level, and a system to keep them there, he is finally free to focus on the strategic growth of Evident IT.

Are your leaders performing at an A-Player level? Or are you still doing their job for them? If you want help implementing Job Scorecards and these developmental rhythms to help your team reach the A-Player level, let’s chat.

So, where can you begin to get your leaders to become high performing? Start with creating job scorecards with and for each your leaders. Then get acquainted with the Quarterly Coaching Review. We’ll cover that in detail in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

Are your leaders high-performing?

1/28/2026

As a CEO, how do you know the leaders on your executive team are high-performing? And how do you ensure they get there?

Over the last several 5 Minute Growth Tips, we’ve discussed the importance of getting your executive team aligned and getting them executing more efficiently, as well as the critical business practices to make this all happen.

So you and your team are now aligned around your One Page Strategic Plan, annual and quarterly plans, and individual roles and accountabilities. And you and the team are executing more efficiently with a Monthly Operating & Financial Forecast, quarterly targets and priorities, an executive meeting rhythm and a results tracking system. So how do you know if all your team members are performing at the level they need to be? And how do you ensure they develop to get there?

For a CEO to grow a thriving small to mid-size company, they need all their executive team members to be high-performing. From both an individual contribution perspective as well as in terms of how each leader collaborates with their team mates, there is no room for average or mediocre performers in this endeavor.

We call this A-Player performance. And while the term A-players can be misunderstood, we define it clearly as achieving excellence while ALSO living the company’s core values.

For executive team leaders, achieving excellence is critical because their excellence is defined by the excellence their teams achieve. And living the company’s core values is critical because this contributes to a cohesive, collaborative, high functioning executive team, and modelling the core values nurtures the company’s desired culture, not only in their own teams, but throughout the company.

If you’ve promoted certain team members, you may be keenly aware that they need to develop to be high-performing. If you’ve selected others from the outside or you were hired to lead the company with certain leaders already in place, you might think those leaders should be excellent because they earned their seat. But this is often not the case. New leaders are rarely fully prepared to meet the demands of such leadership roles, much less be high-performing. And leaders hired from elsewhere or who’ve been in such a role for some time have often never been adequately prepared either.

So how does one know what high performance should look like for each executive team leader?

The job scorecard for a role captures high performance. It goes beyond a traditional job description to outline all the expectations of a role, including results, metrics and targets, areas of accountability and responsibilities, authority and behavioural competencies. We also encourage our clients to include their core values in each job scorecard, as well as the specific behaviours that show those core values are being lived. See our earlier 5 Minute Growth Tip for how to create a job scorecard.

With the job scorecard for each leader as a definition for high performance, how does a CEO go about ensuring their leaders develop to that level? There are four key elements:

Quarterly Coaching Reviews
Personal Assessments
Quarterly Development Plans
Weekly One-On-Ones

Quarterly Coaching Reviews

The starting point for developing a leader is for them and the CEO to get in the habit of conducting a Quarterly Coaching Review. At the end of each quarter, usually after your executive team quarterly planning, have each leader assess themselves against their job scorecard in order to identify the areas where they are strong and the areas they need to develop in.

This involves simply rating themselves using a five point scale on each core value, metric, responsibility and competency in their job scorecard. The CEO does the same. They then get together and review their ratings. They note where there are similar ratings, but focus more on where there are differences and why they each view those items differently.

This often exposes a blindspot for the leader. They thought they were doing fine in a certain area, until the CEO shares their perspective. They quickly become aware that something is missing. This open conversation helps the leader buy into the need to develop in that area.

Personal Assessments

Sometimes, certain areas requiring development are stuck-points: areas the leader has been struggling with for some time. It can be helpful to have the leader complete one or more personal assessments to determine why they might be struggling.

Such assessments can help pinpoint an underlying root cause a leader needs to work on or how they might be able to go about the work in a different way to be more successful. Or it might reveal that the leader simply won’t be able to, or enjoy, excelling in that area. In the later situation, moving them to another role or out of the organization may be needed.

A qualified business growth executive team coach can help determine which personal assessment is best for the situation, provide access to the assessment, help interpret the results and help determine what actions could be taken.

Quarterly Development Plans

Once areas for development have been identified, it’s helpful for the leader, with the CEO’s support, to create a brief development plan for the quarter. This involves first narrowing down the areas for development to a manageable number, say the top one or two, as agreed to between the leader and the CEO.

Then, the leader identifies what methods will work best for them to learn in those areas and successfully turn that learning into sustained skills. One leader may find that their learning needs are best served by taking a course. Another leader may find that they are best to lead a project that will stretch their skills.

It’s important to document the development plan for the leader and CEO to be able to revisit throughout the quarter, as well as at the next Quarterly Coaching Review, when they’ll check in on completion. An individual development planning tool can be helpful for considering and evaluating the various types of learning and skill development options available for the leader, as well as documenting the plan.

Weekly One-On-Ones

The purpose of a CEO’s one-on-ones with their executive team members is to create a space where leaders can discuss their progress, receive relevant feedback (both appreciative and constructive feedback), discuss alternative approaches, ask for meaningful guidance, and access resources. They also create a space for the CEO to really get to know and appreciate the leader, both as a leader and as a person, which strengthens the relationship, contributing to the leader’s engagement, loyalty and retention.

One-on-ones are not a place to set targets, determine priorities, discuss reasons why goals haven’t been met or listen to the leader’s concerns or complaints about other team members. All of this should be handled in the executive team’s regular meeting rhythm: annual planning, quarterly planning, monthly checkins and weekly meetings. This is the place for planning, execution monitoring, healthy debate and holding each other accountable. Doing any of these in one-on-one discussions reduces the alignment, effectiveness and efficiency of the executive team and adds work and hassle to the CEO’s plate.

How often should one-on-ones be held and how long should they be? We recommend once a week for 20 to 30 minutes, scheduled at the time on the same day every week, and attended religiously. This is long enough and often enough for the conversation to build from week to week. Less than this and the momentum, meaning, impact and return are lost.

By implementing a regular rhythm of quarterly coaching reviews, quarterly development plans and weekly one-on-ones, complemented by personal assessments as needed, CEOs can develop their leaders to become high-performing with both excellence and core values alignments, while building strong, connected relationships that fuel their leaders’ engagement.

These aren't just my ideas. They're discussed in the best-selling book The Strength of Talent, by my colleague Mike Goldman in New Jersey. I'll cover that in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

Are your leaders high-performing?

1/28/2026

The following video builds on my earlier videos: “Is your executive team aligned”, "Is your executive team executing efficiently?" and “How to create your CEO job scorecard”

Want to listen to the tip? Use the play button below.

I'll discuss what the best selling business book The Strength of Talent says about these practices in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

How to build a forecast to improve execution

1/21/2026

How do you go about building a Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast to get your aligned and committed executive team executing more efficiently?

In my previous tips “Is your executive team executing efficiently?”, “A great book to fix execution drama: Metronomics,” and “How a president and her team improved execution“, we discussed the four proven practices that bridge the gap between team alignment, commitment to a plan, and disciplined follow-through. Working together to build a Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast is the first of those practices, which we will discuss here.

A Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast is a critical execution tool that allows an executive team to regularly check if the company is on or off course for their annual plan. By breaking down and tracking actual results against the expected monthly changes in volumes, revenues, costs, and cash, your team is enabled to make frequent, necessary decisions to keep things on track.

This forecast, based on your annual targets, also enables your team to validate that your initial one-year targets are financially feasible given the plan's assumptions. A feasible plan is an executable plan.

The forecast should also reflect any major planned investments, linking them to the annual priorities for change, improvement, and growth based on the company’s Number One Addressable Challenge for the year.

So, how do you go about building a Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast? There are four key elements of an effective forecast:

It’s widget-based
It’s structured effectively
It forecasts cash
It’s a collaborative effort

Let’s go through each one. And feel free to contact me to access the Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast template I use with clients. Or complete the form in this article.

Widget-based

We call this a Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast because it forecasts more than just the monthly financial results. The financial projections are based on the expected monthly volume of business, which we call widgets. This is whatever unit of measure your company uses to track business flow. It might be the number of orders, customers, items, subscriptions, users, hours, square feet, etc. Whatever unit consistently drives both revenues and costs.

A common, but problematic, approach to forecasting is to adjust last year's financial statements by a rough percentage reflecting expected growth. This is problematic because:

It fails to reflect how volume changes impact revenues, direct costs, and indirect (i.e., overhead) costs differently.
It assumes revenues and costs scale identically, potentially overlooking opportunities for efficiency as the business grows.
It assumes that all past costs were necessary and all current pricing is appropriate.

By basing revenue and cost forecasts on the number of widgets sold, produced, delivered, and supported, and using both a price per unit and cost per unit, the forecast enables the team to easily review whether pricing and costs per unit can be improved.

Effective structure

A Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast should present the key monthly numbers that empower the CEO and executive team to make timely decisions to improve financial results. This requires a specific structure for the financial statements, as suggested by financial management expert Greg Crabtree, author of Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits.

In the income statement, the structure includes:

Gross Profit: Calculated from Revenue minus Cost of Good Sold, which are based on units sold, price per unit, and direct (outside) cost per unit. Gross Profit is a key number for assessing buying effectiveness. Gross Profit is more important than Revenue because, aside from telling you how effective your buying is, it tells you how much money the company has to work with internally to get to its Net Profit. Note that the number of units, price per unit and cost per unit are the real levers to improve gross profit.

Contribution Margin: Calculated by subtracting Direct Labour (cost of employees who produce and/or deliver the good or service) from Gross Profit. This is a critical number that must cover all overhead and make a sufficient net profit. Direct Labour is a key lever for improving profitability through optimization and increased productivity.

Operating Expenses (Overhead Costs): For clarity and ease of consumption, roll these up into big buckets, such as: Facilities, Marketing, Management and Administrative Labour, Payroll Taxes & Benefits, and Other Operating Expenses. Sales Labour may be another important big bucket for your company. The main levers here are those large cost categories, particularly management and admin labour.

Net Operating Income (EBITDA): Subtracting total Overhead Costs from the Contribution Margin yields Net Operating Income, also called EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization). This is the ultimate barometer of day-to-day profitability, setting aside debt servicing, taxes, and asset depreciation, which can vary widely depending on how assets and liabilities are managed.

If your company has multiple products or product lines, then revenue and gross profit may need to be broken out for each, as well as direct labour and contribution margin if these vary by product or line.

This structure provides the executive team with clear visibility into the key numbers and levers for financial optimization, and allows for the calculation of standard ratios like Gross Margin, Labour Efficiency Ratios, and Expense Ratio for external comparison.

Forecasting cash

As Greg Crabtree famously said, “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, but cash is king!” Cash is the oxygen that fuels a business. Maintaining a healthy cash balance is essential for survival and confidently making planned investments. And a clear monthly cash balance forecast verifies the true feasibility of your operating financial plan.

Net Operating Profit is just a number on paper, but a company's actual cash situation is often very different, being heavily influenced by inventory, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and financing activities.

Forecasting cash requires a keen eye on timing: the flow of sales, inventory purchases, production, delivery, and invoicing. For example, a sale might occur in month one, production in month two, delivery and invoicing in month three, and payment in month four. Understanding the timing of these outflows and inflows is crucial for maintaining a healthy cash position and finding ways to optimize cash flow by speeding up the cycle.

A collaborative effort

Many executive teams assume creating the Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast is Finance & Accounting’s job. While they lead the process, building a realistic and useful forecast requires collaboration across the entire executive team, guided by the annual company plan.

Each leader must provide inputs on how expected volumes will drive revenues and costs, and the timing of those revenues and costs, on a month-by-month basis. Forecasted units impact various areas, from marketing spend to sales, production, delivery, and post-sale support, each with different timing.

Only the respective leaders and their teams can provide these numbers, along with expected pricing improvements or efficiency gains aligned with the company’s annual priorities. Furthermore, each area needs to plan and estimate costs for their investments in various initiatives.

When starting with a CEO and executive team and having them flesh out their One Page Strategic Plan and annual plan, we suggest beginning with a 12-month Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast prepared annually. After this is well-established (one or two years), we suggest progressing to a 36-month forecast prepared annually, and eventually to a 36-month rolling forecast (i.e., updated and extended monthly). This progression builds the team's ability to confidently predict results and optimize execution to hit their three-year targets.

Ultimately, a Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast, effectively structured and built collaboratively, is an essential tool that ensures a financially feasible plan, highlights key levers for performance improvement, and allows the executive team to track execution monthly to make quick adjustments to hit their targets.

Want a head-start in building a Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast to improve your executive team’s execution? If so, contact me to get my complimentary forecast template. Or complete the form in this article.

Watch / Listen to the Video

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

How to build a forecast to improve execution

1/21/2026

The following video builds on my previous videos: "Is your executive team executing efficiently?", “A great book to fix execution drama: Metronomics,”, and “How a president and her team improved execution“.

Want to listen to the tip? Use the play button below.

To get a head-start on your Monthly Operating & Financial Forecast, contact me to get the template we use with clients. Or complete the form on this page.

Read the Article

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

How a president and her team improved execution

1/14/2026

Does getting your executive team executing efficiently seem impossible? It’s not. We see this all the time with the companies we work with.

In my previous tips “Is your executive team executing efficiently?” and “A great book to fix execution drama: Metronomics,” we established the four proven practices that bridge the gap between commitment and disciplined follow-through. This article shares the story of one client who successfully mastered that journey.

I have had the privilege of working with Arcora, a human transformation partner. Arcora provides Employee Assistance Programs, Business Assistance Services, and Workplace Coaching to companies across Canada, also working through employee benefits companies and their benefits advisors. Their effective, results-focused services and caring, responsive experience help their benefits partners and advisors differentiate in the market, grow their client base, increase client retention, and fulfill their purpose of caring for people.

I began working with President Shandy McLean and her team to help them grow to penetrate the Canadian market by expanding their network of benefits partners and advisors. While their day-to-day services were excellent, they wanted to get aligned around a plan for growth and improve their ability to execute on the changes and improvements that would be needed to make it happen. After an initial kickoff and annual planning session, Shandy and her team got started implementing the four business practices we suggest to improve execution efficiency.

A Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast

They soon implemented their first monthly operating and financial forecast. This projection, based on anticipated client volumes from their benefits partners, was initially intended to set clear expectations for the ownership group and serve as a quarterly reporting tool.

The senior executive team soon began using it monthly to track results, immediately see where assumptions were or weren't being met, and understand the variance drivers. This helped them make frequent, necessary decisions to consistently meet or exceed targets.

The key operational shift was realizing we needed to adjust their annual planning to precede the financial forecast submission to the owners. This ensured the annual plan guided the financial forecast, not the reverse.

Quarterly Targets and Priorities

With a monthly operating and financial forecast established, the team could easily pull numbers to set clear monthly and quarterly volume and financial targets, essential for checking that results were on track.

We also initiated the practice of setting 90-day priorities for change, improvement, and growth each quarter, drawing from their annual priorities in their One Page Strategic Plan.

Initially, these priorities were 'rough'—ambiguous goals, a mix of company-wide and department-level focus, and a general feeling of overload. This is a common starting point.

To address this, the team got more rigorous: they got clearer on their ultimate aim for each priority, created detailed action plans to understand scope and contribution, and distinguished true senior executive Company Priorities from department priorities and day-to-day work. This newfound clarity supported the senior executive team and their own team members in executing company-wide changes and departmental improvements with greater confidence and accountability.

An Executive Team Meeting Rhythm

The Senior Executive Team fully embraced quarterly planning, making these sessions a standard part of their operating rhythm. In the second year, we adjusted the quarterly planning to get more rigorous with quarterly priorities.

The team also adopted a full communication rhythm to solve problems and keep their quarterly plans on track:

10-Minute Daily Huddles for quick synchronization, team cohesion, and issue identification throughout the week.
90-Minute Weekly Meetings were initially implemented to keep priorities on track and resolve larger issues or blockers. They then adjusted these weekly meetings to also proactively check whether key quarterly targets would be met.
Half-Day Monthly Meetings to discuss progress, resolve larger issues, explore opportunities, apply new business practices, and adjust the quarterly plan.

Initially, both the Senior Executive Team and the broader Leadership Team members attended the quarterly planning and monthly check-ins. This was because the initial annual planning session included a broad group of leaders from which the senior executive team was then selected. The joint group continued to meet for quarterly planning and monthly checkins to keep the newly formed leadership team bought into the change and to help inform the senior executive team, who were mostly newer to the company.

However, over time this structure proved sub-optimal: it clouded accountability, muddied the planning, and hindered true senior executive team cohesion by making the group too large for focused debate.

The CEO and Senior Executive Team shifted to conducting company quarterly planning and monthly check-ins on their own. They introduced shorter, separate monthly meetings with the Leadership Team to gather input, share decisions, and guide change. Limiting quarterly planning to the Senior Executive Team proved critical for tightening up their plans and improving their execution.

A Results Tracking System

Initially, the broader leadership group used a simple document to capture plans and support status updates. Once the focus narrowed to the Senior Executive Team, they adopted a proven Results Tracking System.

This system was vital for efficiently capturing and tracking results, monitoring progress on targets and priorities, and helping the team stay on top of execution between their daily huddles, weekly, monthly, and quarterly sessions. The system added a final layer of discipline, tightening their quarterly planning and execution by demanding clear articulation of targets, priorities and plans, as well as clear status updates.

Despite an initial learning curve, the team quickly appreciated how the new system made their plans and progress clearer, and helped their execution get more manageable, effective, and efficient.

With improved execution, Shandy and her team at Arcora have made great strides in making the key changes and improvements needed to make their exceptional human transformation services available through more employee benefits plan companies and advisors across Canada.

So, where can you begin to get your executive team executing more efficiently? Start with the foundation: get acquainted with the Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast. We’ll cover that in detail in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

Watch / Listen to the Video

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

How a president and her team improved execution

1/14/2026

The following video builds on my previous videos: "Is your executive team executing efficiently?" and “A great book to fix execution drama: Metronomics”.

Want to listen to the tip? Use the play button below.

I’ll go over the Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast format I use with clients in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

Read the Article

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

THE CEO’S GUIDE TO SELF-CARE - YOUR OXYGEN MASK FIRST

12/30/2025

I hope you made time to rest, recharge and reset over the holiday season.

I believe self-care can also extend well beyond the holiday season to our day-to-day in the new year, if we make it a priority.

In my work with CEOs and business owners, burn-out and lack of joy and fulfillment are common. One of the underlying causes is lack of self-care.

Taking care of ourselves will not only benefit us, but also our leadership teams, companies and communities.

One excellent resource is a book I use with CEOs that represents, what I believe, is a missing link for CEOs of mid-sized growth companies.

Written by my colleague, senior Gravitas Impact coach, Kevin Lawrence in Vancouver BC, Your Oxygen Mask First is a breakthrough in the combined art of leadership, self-management AND self-care.

We can find dozens of fantastic books and tools to learn the nuts and bolts of growing a thriving company. And there are a few methodologies, like the Scaling Up system and 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, that bring many of those essential tools together to make them more accessible for mid-size companies. However, the missing link is the CEO factor: the leader themselves and their skills for taking care of themselves first, so they can take better care of their people and their business.

Your Oxygen Mask First makes clear that it’s a myth that CEOs can build successful companies sustainably by putting everyone else first. In truth, this leads to burn-out and tragedy. It’s a dirty secret we need to talk about.

Kevin wrote Your Oxygen Mask First based on the experiences and tools he gained over 20 years as a coach and advisor.

The book covers the 17 habits Kevin has tried and tested for leaders to lead well AND take care of themselves, so they have a great company AND a great life. I highly recommend it to any CEO, president or leader.

How can you manage your leadership team members more effectively?

To find out how to manage your team members to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 2 to check your people management processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.

Check your management - try the checklist

A great book to fix execution drama: Metronomics

12/17/2025

The following video builds on my last video on execution: "Is your executive team executing efficiently?"

Want to listen to the tip? Use the play button below.

I’ll share the story of one of my clients getting their executive team executing efficiently in the next 5 Minute Growth tip.

Read the Article

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here

A great book to fix execution drama: Metronomics

12/14/2025

In my previous article, "Is your executive team executing efficiently?", I laid out the four proven business practices that bridge the gap between executive team commitment and disciplined follow-through. You've already seen how getting your team aligned around an annual plan is absolutely essential. But, as we talked about, the real drama starts when you try to move from a committed plan to disciplined execution.

That's why I wanted to dive into the book Metronomics: One United System to Grow Up Your Team, Company, and Life by my colleague, Shannon Byrne Susko. This book is a powerful resource because it offers a proven, prescriptive system that ties together people, cash, strategy, and execution, including the business practices you need to break down those execution bottlenecks.

Let's see how the Metronomics framework reinforces the four critical practices we discussed for moving from alignment to drama-free execution:

1. Monthly Operating & Financial Forecasts
In my previous article, I stressed that a Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast is a non-negotiable tool. It forces your team to break down expected changes in volumes, revenues, costs, and cash, and track actual results against the forecast monthly. This is how you make frequent, necessary decisions to stay on track.
Metronomics reinforces this beautifully through what it calls the Cash System. It emphasizes forecasting and monitoring financial results and cash flow to manage performance effectively. It's not just about tracking; it's about validating that your annual targets are financially feasible. A feasible plan is an executable plan.

2. Quarterly Targets & Priorities
You know that breaking your annual plan into Quarterly Targets and Priorities is the most effective way for small to mid-size companies to execute. Your financial targets come straight from your monthly forecast. The key, as we talked about, is selecting the priorities that must happen in the next 90 days, assigning accountability, and creating a plan to make it happen.

This is a core pillar of Metronomics, which features 90-day objectives as a pulse-setting mechanism to ensure the business stays on course. This approach is part of the Execution System in Metronomics, which is all about setting annual and quarterly goals, establishing clear accountabilities, and maintaining communication rhythms.

3. An Executive Team Meeting Rhythm
Execution is impossible without a consistent communication cadence. Our suggested rhythm includes:

Daily Huddles (5–10 min) for quick synchronization and identifying blockers.
Weekly Meetings (60–90 min) to proactively check progress and resolve larger issues.
Monthly Meetings (half-day to full-day) to check progress, resolve large issues, and adjust the quarterly plan if needed.
Quarterly Planning Meetings (one to two days).

This is essentially the Execution System at work within Metronomics. The book stresses this "metronome" of daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly rhythms, which ensures a consistent speed throughout the organization, preventing that draining cycle of going fast and slow. Metronomics provides the structure to turn chaotic operations into a predictable flow.

4. A Results Tracking System
Finally, a Results Tracking System is where your quarterly plan—targets, priorities, accountabilities, and action plans—is captured in an accessible format.
Metronomics champions the idea of a tracking system as an "open playing field." This means all the critical company and executive team results and progress - from quarterly priorities to key metrics - are visible and accessible to everyone on the executive team.

Think of it as a shared platform. It means no hiding, no confusion, and no wasted time finding numbers. This extreme transparency is what holds the whole system together and is the ultimate support for accountability. When everyone can see what’s on track and what’s stuck, it forces proactive problem-solving.

While our focus here is specifically on execution, Metronomics is a more complete operating system for growth. It goes deeper into elements that often precede or enhance the execution phase:

Cohesive and Human Systems: Metronomics adds depth and breadth around building trust, managing conflict, fostering commitment and accountability across an executive team (drawing on Patrick Lencioni's work), and getting the right A-Players in the right seats (drawing on Brad Smart's Topgrading).

Clarity and Strategy: The Metronomics system helps you go beyond the 'Annual Plan' column of the One Page Strategic Plan to solidify the first three columns: your Desired Culture, Strategy, and Longer-Term Goals. Articulating these "strategy fundamentals", including creating a unique market position (drawing on Michael Porter's work) is a non-negotiable foundation.

The Full Team Cascade: My article briefly mentioned that over time, teams need to cascade these practices down into their departments. Metronomics provides the structure for this organizational maturity, ensuring not just the executive team, but all teams, are operating with forecasts, quarterly plans, and a disciplined meeting rhythm. This is how you strengthen execution company-wide.

For CEOs, Metronomics provides a complete, connected framework. If you've got executive team alignment, you’ll find in this book the tools that offer the discipline and accountability to drive the results and growth you’re aiming for.

Does getting your executive team executing efficiently seem impossible? It totally is. We see it all the time with companies we work with. I’ll share the story of one of those clients in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

Is your executive team executing efficiently?

12/10/2025

How can you and your executive team move from alignment around a plan to executing without drama?

In my recent articles,”Is Your Executive Team Aligned?”, “The Alignment Playbook: Scaling Up”, ”How one CEO doubled business with aligned execs”, and “Your One Page Strategic Plan for Aligned Growth” I discussed how to get an executive team on the same page and going in the same direction, so they can help the CEO lead the company to grow profitably, predictably and sustainably.

While the first three columns of an executive team’s One Page Strategic Plan captures their desired culture, their strategy and longer term goals, the annual plan column is what they will tangibly execute to make it happen.

Being aligned around an annual plan is one thing. Executing on it with discipline and accountability is another.

Don’t get me wrong. An aligned executive team that is committed to their annual plan is a great starting point. And it’s a critical one for supporting accountability. Because accountability starts with commitment.

But the discipline to follow through on those accountabilities is where things often break down.

Thankfully, there’s a handful of proven business practices to resolve this challenge once and for all:

A Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast
Quarterly Targets and Priorities
An Executive Team Meeting Rhythm
A Results Tracking System

Let’s discuss them one by one.

1. A Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast

For an executive team to execute their annual plan, a monthly operating and financial forecast is a critical execution tool to regularly check if the company is on or off course.

Breaking down the expected monthly changes in volumes, revenues, costs and cash, and tracking your actual results against the forecast on a monthly basis enables you and your team to make decisions frequently to keep things on track.

Creating a Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast based on your annual targets also enables you and your team to validate that your initial one year targets are actually feasible financially, given the assumptions your plan is based on. A feasible plan is an executable plan.

A Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast should also reflect any major investments you and your team are planning to make. These should reflect the annual priorities for change, improvement and growth that you’ve planned based on the company’s Number One Addressable Challenge for the year.

2. Quarterly Targets & Priorities

The most effective and efficient way for small to mid size companies to execute on an annual plan is to break it down into quarterly plans.

Your quarterly company operating and financial targets are straightforward as they will come directly from your Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast.

As for your quarterly company priorities, an executive team can roughly sketch them out quarter by quarter during annual planning. However, this is always an approximation and not an exact plan to hold yourselves to.

Instead, at the end of your annual planning, work from that rough sequence of quarterly priorities and select which ones absolutely need to happen in the first quarter. Then after that first quarter, at the next quarterly planning meeting (usually a one to two day investment), determine what is most important to bite off for the next quarter based on what you learned and how things are evolving. And repeat every quarter.

What’s critical is to identify who is accountable for each of those quarterly priorities and what needs to be achieved that quarter for each. Then the leader for each quarterly priority identifies who else needs to be involved and how, and prepares an action plan to make it happen.

3. An Executive Team Meeting Rhythm

An effective execution process for an executive team includes quarterly planning meetings (as previously discussed), monthly check-ins, weekly meetings and daily huddles.

It's great to have a plan for the quarter. But then the day-to-day challenges of running a business happen. And things can go off track. A consistent meeting rhythm ensures the executive team connect regularly to communicate, problem-solve and keep the plan on track.

Five to ten minute daily huddles enable the executive team to stay synchronized, know who’s doing what and identify issues and blockers to quickly resolve them throughout the week before they snowball.

60 to 90 minute weekly meetings allow the executive team to proactively check whether quarterly results and priorities are on track and collaborate to resolve any larger issues or blockers.

Half day to full day monthly meetings provide the opportunity for the executive team to, again, check whether quarterly results and priorities are on track, and also to resolve larger issues or discuss opportunities, proactively learn and apply new business practices, and make adjustments to the quarterly plan if needed. This ensures the executive team stays aligned on what’s most critical for the quarter.

4. A Results Tracking System

For any of this to work, results and progress need to be captured, written down, and accessible by everyone on the executive team, and in a consistent format so that everyone quickly and easily knows what to enter and what it all means.

The best way to do this is with a proven results tracking system.

Such a system is where your quarterly plan will be captured. This includes your targets for each company metric, your quarterly company priorities, who’s accountable for each, who’s involved and the action plans.

A results tracking system also captures the actual results for each company metric as well as actual progress on each quarterly company priority.

Seasoned business growth executive team coaches use such systems with their clients. These provide a shared platform to efficiently capture and track results on quarterly plans, supporting the executive team to more easily stay on top of things during and between their daily huddles, weekly meetings, monthly check-ins and quarterly planning.

We find that executive teams who are new to these kinds of execution practices start with company-level forecasts, quarterly plans and meeting rhythms. Then over time, executive team members develop the capability to forecast, plan and meet with each of their teams. At that point, we encourage them to share and report on their department plans as an executive team so they are all aware of what they’re aiming to achieve in each area and can keep those plans aligned. This is when an executive team, if it functions in a healthy way, can really strengthen execution throughout the company, driving results and progress.

These aren't just my ideas. They're discussed in the top-selling book Metronomics, by my colleague Shannon Byrne Susko. I'll cover that in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

Is your executive team executing efficiently?

12/10/2025

The following video builds on my recent videos on exec team alignment: ”Is Your Executive Team Aligned?”, “The Alignment Playbook: Scaling Up”, ”How one CEO doubled business with aligned execs”, and “Your One Page Strategic Plan for Aligned Growth”.

Want to listen to the tip? Use the play button below.

I'll discuss what the best selling business book Metronomics says about these practices in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

Has your company's growth stalled?

12/3/2025

Want to listen to or read the tip? Use the buttons below.

We’ll discuss the CEOs role in our next 5 Minute Growth Video.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

Has your company's growth stalled?

12/3/2025

In the 13 years I’ve been an independent business coach and advisor, I’ve seen many companies that grow to a certain point and, despite all their best efforts, can’t seem to grow beyond that.

I’ve also seen companies that do continue to grow but become less and less profitable, and more and more stressful for the CEO.

Turns out this isn’t just my experience. It’s a common pattern.

Growth isn’t common

Out of the roughly 28 million firms in the US, only about 1.1 million have surpassed a million in revenue. Only 112,000 have gotten past $10 million. And only 17000 have grown beyond $50 million.

The reason is that companies need to operate differently as they grow. Companies that don’t adapt how they operate will tend to grow to the limits of that way of operating.

CEOs who have had success getting to a certain point often tend to repeat what they know, thinking “well, it got us here.” But, as the title of a book by Marshall Goldsmith goes, “what got us here won’t get us there”.

The systems to manage a growing company
The changes needed for a growing company are driven by the added complexity that comes with having more employees.

Think simply of going from having 2 employees to 3 employees. This makes the number of relationships between individuals increase from 3 to 6. Add one more employee, and there are now 10 relationships. This complexity continues exponentially as the company grows from 10 to 25 to 50, 100 and 200 employees.

To predictably achieve results within this growing complexity, a certain level of order is needed.

Processes, systems and structures create that order in companies. And the systems needed to create order in the complexity of a 200 person organization are different than that of a 100, 50, 25 or 10 person organization.

For example:

When a company has 1-10 people, the owner can manage everyone. When the company gets to 10 to 15 people, the owner needs to bring on supervisors and managers, as well as some basic people management systems.

When the company gets to about 25 people, it needs more than one leader and the beginnings of a middle management group. The CEO now has to get most of the company’s results through other managers. So effective leadership and management becomes more important. And keeping those leaders and managers all heading in the same direction becomes more challenging. Strategy, goals and priority setting become critical along with meeting rhythms to keep everything on track.

When companies hit 60 employees or so, they’ve already had to implement project management processes to get new systems fully implemented. And now, they often have to revamp their competitive strategy as they are now more visible in the market, and therefore a deliberate target of competitors.

At about 95 employees, another layer of middle management is usually needed, making new employees more disconnected from top level decisions. This then requires new systems to monitor and improve employee buy-in and engagement.

At around 160 employees, the size and complexity of the organization starts to make it more resistant to change and it often becomes less profitable as its costs go up and products start to lag the market. Other systems and processes are needed to speed up getting new and more profitable offerings to market.

Hitting the ceiling, valleys of death

Any company within one stage will usually hit a ceiling if they keep doing things the same ways they have been.

Companies that don’t make the right changes, or aren’t successful in making those changes, will fall into what we call a “valley of death”.

Valleys of death are where the leadership makes investments, but they don’t work out. So the company doesn’t move beyond that stage. The company can also fall backward in terms of revenue and often profitability because of the failed investments. Worst case, it can lead to company failure.

Growing unprofitably

Some companies grow despite not making the changes needed for the next stage. With sheer grit or dramatic demand growth, they’ll grow. However, these companies often become increasingly inefficient with the increasing complexity and resulting chaos. And so the company’s profitability will decrease, sometimes significantly.

Unless exceptionally well funded, with investors willing to accept short to mid term losses for a longer term windfall, the decreasing profitability and resulting cash flow challenges will eventually prevent the company from investing in the capacity to grow and the systems to grow profitability. And so growth will stall. One can also count on drama, stress and headaches being the overarching theme for the CEO.

So what stops a company from making the right changes and improvements to grow successfully and profitably?

Leadership is the linchpin

We can see early in a company’s life - by about 25 employees - that a CEO has to learn to get results from people THROUGH other managers or leaders, rather than managing everything themselves.

Very often, the leaders, like the CEO, are stuck in the weeds, too focused on the day-to-day. So the projects to move the company forward often don’t get done or aren’t done right.

Leaders in mid-size companies are often not on the same page about where the company is headed and how to get there. So they, and their people, are often working in silos and at cross purposes.

These leaders are also often not meeting the CEO’s expectations and aren’t being the kind of leaders they need to be to get and keep their people fully engaged, productive and effective.

And while the CEO may have a vision for the company, they often don’t have a clear strategy for how to attract and keep the best customers. Even if they do, that strategy is often not understood or supported by the leaders who need to make it happen.

The result is the company doesn’t identify or successfully implement the right processes, systems and structures to support growth, in ways that delight customers, retain great employees and do so profitably and sustainably. As a result, customers come and go, as does talent, and the company’s growth is rocky and/or unprofitable.

The shift needed is for the CEO to work WITH top level leaders as a team…a leadership team (or management team, executive team, or whatever you want to call it).

It’s the CEO’s job to assemble that leadership team, and build a plan together that gets them all going in the same direction, moving in lockstep, making the needed changes and improvements to enable the company to grow AND thrive.

An evolving leadership team and strategy

The challenge of having an effective leadership team and strategy continues through the life of the company. New leaders come and go. Markets evolve. Systems need to change. And so the capabilities of the leaders and the team, and the strategy and plan, need to evolve as well.

The crucial underlying challenge to growing a thriving company is to build, maintain and continuously improve a great leadership team that is highly capable, thinks strategically, is aligned around a clear strategy and plan, executing and leading effectively and efficiently, strengthening collaboration and engagement across the company. Essentially, working as one unit to move the company forward, because it’s too much for the CEO to do it alone, at least not effectively and sustainably.

In the articles ahead, I’ll cover in detail how to make all this happen.

And so what is the CEO's role in all this? And do you have what it takes?

We'll cover that in our next 5 Minute Growth Tip article.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

Your One Page Strategic Plan for Aligned Growth

11/19/2025

How do you go about building your One Page Strategic Plan to get aligned as an executive team?

In my recent articles, ”Is Your Executive Team Aligned?”, “The Alignment Playbook: Scaling Up”, and ”How one CEO doubled business with aligned execs”, I discussed the four ingredients to get an executive team on the same page and going in the same direction, so they can help the CEO lead the company to grow profitably, predictably and sustainably.

Working together to develop a written plan, using a one page strategic plan format, is a good starting point.

A one page strategic plan (OPSP) avoids lengthy, scattered documents that no one refers to again. It also keeps the plan brief, forcing clarity. And using a standard format with consistent language and definitions avoids confusion and unnecessary debate.

The OPSP was popularized by Verne Harnish in his best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, and is a key tool covered again in his more recent book Scaling Up.

Other coaching organizations such as my coaching community, Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches, as well as the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) and Metronomics, have all developed a version of the OPSP.

In reality, the one page strategic plan is two 8.5 by 11 inch pages side by side with the company’s philosophy, strategy, 3 year plan and 1 year plan on the left page and the current quarterly company plans and individual plans on the right.

I have found that some elements of the OPSP are more critical than others for small to mid-size companies here in the prairies. So I’ll share what I recommend to include in an OPSP.

Also feel free to contact me to access the one page strategic plan template I use with clients, or complete the form in this article.

The format I recommend to clients only includes a version of the left hand page of the one page strategic plan, which ends with the one year plan. The format for the quarterly plans on the right hand page of the standard one page strategic plan doesn’t allow for tracking progress, so it requires a separate progress tracking tool. This then requires double-entry and makes for more work and potential errors.

To capture quarterly company plans and individual plans, I recommend a different quarterly planning and tracking tool, which I’ll share in a future article on execution. Once an executive team understands the process of planning and execution, I recommend an online growth system platform that automatically populates the right hand quarterly plans side of the one page strategic plan while providing ways to track progress.

On the one page strategic plan that I recommend, there are four columns.

Column 1: Core Ideology
Column 2: Strategy Fundamentals
Column 3: Three Year Plan & Competitive Strategy
Column 4: The One Year Plan

Let’s discuss each column one by one.

Column 1: Core Ideology

Jim Collins and Jerry Poiras, in their book Built to Last, outlined the notion of a company’s core ideology, which includes its core values and core purpose. This core ideology, or you might say company philosophy, provides a foundation for every other decision in the company.

It’s the set of beliefs that, when articulated, enable a CEO and their executive team to make decisions that align with who they really are as a company, so that those decisions are authentic and sustainable.

A section on Actions to Live Our Purpose & Values is also included in this column. This is a spot for the executive team to capture, and remind themselves of, what they need to be doing to keep the purpose and values alive in the company.

Column 2: Strategy Fundaments

Here, you’ll find a number of decisions that provide the foundation for your competitive strategy. Your Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) is a bold, exciting 10 to 30 year goal that acts as a guiding star for where you want to get to as a company.

The Profit per X comes from Jim Collins’ best-selling book Good to Great and captures the key company-wide volume metric to grow and make more profitable over time: your “economic engine” as Jim calls it.

Core Competencies ground you and your team in what your company is really good at right now.

Your Core Purpose, from column 1, your Profit per X and your Core Competencies provide the basis for using Jim Collins’ Hedge Hog disciplined strategic thought process, also from Good to Great, to determine your Sandbox, being what you will offer, to who, through what channels, and where geographically, as well as your Core Customer, being the psychographic characteristics of your ideal customer.

Ultimately, your Core Customer and Sandbox help to refine your BHAG for where you want the company to win long term.

This 2nd column often takes a quarter or two to work through as a team with the support of a seasoned executive team coach. So these sections are often blank coming out of your first annual planning session.

Column 3: Three Year Plan & Competitive Strategy

In this column, you set your 3 Year Highly Achievable Goals (or 3HAG), that Shannon Byrne Susko coined in her book 3HAG Way. These include 3-year targets for your financial and operational metrics like revenue, unit volume(s) (that is, how many Xs from the chosen Profit per X in column 2), net profit, and, over time, cash in the bank, as your team gets more capable at forecasting.

Here, companies, over time, also identify other company metrics and targets that capture the health of the business, such as in the areas of people, culture, customer satisfaction and in some cases, vendors or partners.

This section is followed by the 3HAG statement, which briefly describes where the team expects the company will be in three years relative to its BHAG (in column 2) based on its 3 year financial and operational targets.

Following the 3 year targets and goal are the Problems We Solve and the key differentiators the company needs to implement, refine or maintain in order to make your product or service unique and valuable in the mind of your core customers to attract and retain more of them to achieve your 3 year targets and goal.

One can also then include the key competencies the company needs to develop to support implementing or strengthening those differentiators.

The problems you solve, key differentiators and key competencies often take a couple of quarters or more to determine, unless of course this work has been previously completed. However, we find this to be pretty rare.

We suggest setting 3 year goals in addition to 1 year goals so there is a sense of direction to provide guidance for the coming year, while being a major milestone towards the BHAG. And we suggest 3 year goals rather than 5 year goals because 3 years is more tangible and urgent, whereas 5 years is too far away to really grasp or create much urgency.

Column 4: The One Year Plan

The fourth column captures what you plan to achieve as a company this year. It includes, first, your Number One Addressable Challenge, a term and process developed by my colleague Mark Green in Virginia.

Your Number One Addressable Challenge is the single most critical company result that must be significantly improved by the end of the year. It’s a result that often has not improved in the past and has been getting in the way of meaningful progress and other important results. Sometimes it’s profit or revenue, other times it’s capacity, other times customer satisfaction, or employee engagement, etc. If achieved, this result will set up the company to be able to make meaningful progress in future years towards its 3-year targets and goal.

Then come your 1-year targets for the same metrics as in your 3-plan plan. These are the numbers you and your executive team will drive towards day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, quarterly-by-quarter.

One of your 1 year targets will be your Critical Number, which defines what quantifiable result needs to be achieved to say you’ve resolved your Number One Addressable Challenge.

Then the root causes of that Number One Addressable Challenge are identified in order to determine your annual priorities, being the three major changes the company needs to make to resolve that single most important challenge. These annual priorities are then broken down into potential quarterly chunks to execute in each quarter.

The one year plan should be developed in your first annual planning session, and it’s entirely feasible with a qualified executive team coach.

Below these four columns is a short section to capture your internal strengths and weaknesses, and the company’s external opportunities and threats (your SWOT). The SWOT is completed before your three year plan, and greatly informs your one year plan. It provides context for what’s possible over three years and provides clues to identify your Number One Addressable Challenge, root causes and annual priorities.

Think about column 1, your core ideology, as being the company philosophy that doesn’t change and guides every decision and behaviour in the organization. Column 2, your strategy fundamentals, reflects where you’re best to play and grow over the next 10 years based on where you can excel. Column 3, your three year plan and competitive strategy describes what you want to achieve and how the company needs to evolve to position successfully in the market, within your strategy fundamentals, on the way to your 10 year goal. And Column 4, your annual plan, defines specifically what the company needs to achieve and tackle this coming year to move towards your 3 year goals.

Do you see the value in creating your one page strategic plan to get aligned as an executive team?
If so, contact me to get my complimentary one page strategic plan template to help get you started, or complete the form in this article.

Watch / Listen to the Video

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

How one CEO doubled business with aligned execs

11/12/2025

The following video builds on my previous videos ”Is Your Executive Team Aligned?” and “The Alignment Playbook: Scaling Up”.

Want to listen to the tip? Use the play button below.

I’ll go over the one page strategic plan format I use with clients in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

Read the Article

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

How one CEO doubled business with aligned execs

11/12/2025

Does getting your executive team aligned seem daunting? We see it all the time with companies we work with. In this article, I’ll share the story of one of those clients.

In my previous articles “Is Your Executive Team Aligned?” and “The Alignment Playbook: Scaling Up”, we talked about the four critical elements for achieving and maintaining executive team alignment: the One Page Strategic Plan (OPSP), Annual and Quarterly Planning, Clear Individual Roles and Expectations, and Efficient Executive Team Buy-in.

I worked for several years with a national seed retailer here in the Canadian prairies.

When I first met the CEO, he had purchased the company from two partners who he still had working in the business and playing leadership roles. He knew he needed to bring some structure to the organization to grow sustainably. But he also knew he needed to involve these two leaders to get aligned on what needed to change.

The CEO wasn’t entirely sure who was or should be on his leadership team, given there was no formal organizational structure in place.

I counselled the CEO to simply start with the people he knew reported to him, being the other two leaders, and others they would clearly recognize as being on the leadership team. It ended up being only the three of them. This is a common starting point for companies we work with. We start with what we’ve got, and evolve the leadership team from there.

I facilitated their first two-day annual planning session and, together, they built their initial one page strategic plan. They got aligned on their basic philosophy, their 1 year plan and what they were going to change in the first 90 days.

Then I got them into a rhythm of one day quarterly planning sessions to continue biting off parts of their one year plan and adjusting course as needed. Once a year, we also got the team together for a two day annual planning session to assess the environment, adjust their one page strategic plan and plan for the coming year.

They were concerned at first because they didn't fill out the whole one-page plan in that first session. But I reassured them that most companies don't. They work through what they can and then add to it over time. Over the four years I worked with them, they did complete their one-page plan, which gave them more and more clarity about the company’s direction to guide aligned execution.

The CEO and his team had some difficulty in the first year keeping to the quarterly planning rhythm. Being a seed retailer, they had a very busy winter and spring production, sales and delivery season. The CEO wondered if they needed to do quarterly planning during that period given they didn’t have time to execute much change work.

I clarified that quarterlies are not just to plan for change, but, more importantly, to plan for results. If this was their busiest time of year - the season that made their year - was it not critical to have a solid plan for those two quarters?

Instead of skipping those quarterly planning sessions, I suggested making them shorter during the busy half of the year and longer during the slow half.

During the busy season, we focused the quarterly planning mostly on what results they needed to achieve through sales, production and delivery, as well as to identify and resolve issues that could get in the way of success.

For quarterly planning during the slow season, we invested more time planning the larger changes and improvements they could make during those quarters to move the business forward and be in a better position for the next busy season.

In the initial annual planning session, we also started clarifying their respective roles, using the Functional Accountability Chart exercise, so they were aligned about what each of them was accountable for. This also allowed them to easily agree on who would lead each company quarterly priority.

Over time, it also became clear that one of the original leaders was actually playing a role that reported to the other leader, and he didn’t need to be on the leadership team. This role clarification work also revealed that they needed someone to take over HR and Accounting from the CEO. This new leader was brought on quickly, made a part of the leadership team and attended their planning sessions going forward.

Later, they created their Key Function Flow Map to get really clear on how business flowed through the company and who on the leadership team was accountable to produce what and for which other department. This ensured they were aligned in terms of how each of their areas needed to support each other.

In facilitating their planning, I shared the “Disagree and Commit” approach to achieving efficient team buy-in. This helped to get the leaders sharing and respecting each others’ perspectives and being part of the conversation to be able to buy into decisions. But it also gave the CEO the freedom to still make the final decision when needed, while maintaining that team buy-in.

This was a particularly helpful ground rule for the CEO to challenge one of the leaders who was not engaging in the conversations, but rather than being indirect and then not committing to plans afterwards. While the leader improved at times, it became clear they weren’t a fit, and the CEO confidently replaced them with a leader who fit the culture and could contribute to an aligned leadership team.

Aided by the alignment they sustained through a one page strategic plan, annual and quarterly planning, clear roles and expectations, and efficient team buy-in, the company restructured the organization, smoothed out their operations and improved their customer service to double in size through and after the pandemic, all while maintaining their profit margin.

So where can you get started to get your executive team aligned? First, get familiar with the one page strategic plan. We’ll cover that in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

Watch / Listen to the Video

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

The Alignment Playbook: Scaling Up

11/5/2025

The following video builds on my previous video ”Is Your Executive Team Aligned?”

Want to listen to the tip? Use the play button below.

I’ll share the story of one of my clients getting their executive team aligned in our next 5 Minute Growth Video.

Read the Article

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here

The Alignment Playbook: Scaling Up

11/5/2025

How does the book Scaling Up support CEOs in aligning their executive teams?

In my previous article, we talked about the four critical elements for achieving and maintaining executive team alignment: the One Page Strategic Plan (OPSP), Annual and Quarterly Planning, Clear Individual Roles and Expectations, and Efficient Executive Team Buy-in.

The truth is, these concepts aren't just my ideas; they're the battle-tested principles used by some of the best small to mid-size companies, formalized nicely by Verne Harnish, and contributing coaches, in his book, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It... and Why the Rest Don't.

Scaling Up provides a comprehensive framework for predictable, sustainable growth, built around four critical decisions: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. As you read it, you'll immediately see how the keys to alignment we discussed fit perfectly into the Scaling Up system.

Let's start with the plan.

We know that getting an executive team aligned requires a "page to get on", and that's where Harnish's work truly shines. The One Page Strategic Plan (OPSP), which I mentioned he first introduced in Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, is a cornerstone of the Scaling Up system, fitting squarely in his Strategy pillar.

The book dedicates significant detail to showing how to boil down your entire company's philosophy, 3-year plan, annual goals, and quarterly priorities onto that single, focused page.

The OPSP is the tool that forces the executive team to get really clear and aligned about each of their decisions. This powerful tool comes directly from Scaling Up.

Hand-in-hand with that plan is the need for a disciplined rhythm of planning. Our discussion on Annual and Quarterly Planning is a direct nod to the Execution pillar in Scaling Up.

Harnish emphasizes that a consistent meeting rhythm—including annual and quarterly planning—is essential for maintaining alignment, adjusting competitive strategy, and breaking down the annual plan into manageable 90-day chunks. This Execution rhythm ensures the team has the flexibility to learn, adjust, and course-correct as the market and organization evolve. This disciplined planning is a key principle that Scaling Up advocates for.

Beyond annual and quarterly planning to support executive team alignment, the Executiion pillar also covers the importance of data as well as monthly, weekly and daily huddles to support efficient execution.

When you move into the People pillar, the book strongly reinforces the need for Clear Individual Roles and Expectations. We previously talked about clarifying roles, results, and expectations to eliminate duplication, mixed messages, and internal friction. The Scaling Up framework stresses having the right people in the right seats, and one of the best tools for that is the Functional Accountability Chart exercise, introduced in the book.

The Key Function Flow Map that I use with my clients, and that I picked up from Shannon Byrne Susko of Metronomics, is an excellent complementary exercise to make the Functional Accountability Chart even more actionable.

Scaling Up also introduces the job scorecard—which includes the function's purpose, results, metrics, and targets, and competencies. It is a prime example of a tool strongly featured in the Scaling Up system to ensure every leader is aligned on what they're expected to produce.

However, in Scaling Up, the job scorecard is emphasized as a tool for hiring great talent, while only suggesting metrics and priorities for setting expectations of individuals. Whereas myself, and many executive team coaches in my network, also recommend the job scorecard to clients to get clear on not only the “what” of the results expected of each team member, but also the “how” in terms of the competencies needed to achieve those results. Myself and some of my colleagues also suggest including values and behaviours, responsibilities and authority in the job scorecard, to get really clear on what’s expected of each person.

The People pillar also goes well beyond setting expectations to create executive team alignment, to also cover how to hire great talent, as I mentioned, and how to get and keep them engaged.

Finally, we hit the last key: Efficient Executive Team Buy-in.

We advocated for shifting from dictating a plan to making decisions in collaboration with the executive team. Our approach of "disagree and commit," which Patrick Lencioni popularized in his best-selling book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which Scaling Up often references, is the final guardrail for driving executive team alignment. It's the process where everyone's voice is heard and considered, and then the team commits fully to the CEO's final decision.

While Scaling Up encourages using the Five Dysfunctions model, he frames it as an Execution discipline. Whereas, the model and the specific "disagree and commit" method is essential for all of an executive team’s discussions and decisions.

Beyond these three pillars that reinforce our alignment keys—People, Strategy, and Execution—a lot of what Scaling Up covers focuses on the crucial fourth pillar: Cash. This is vital for any growing company. The book provides actionable advice on cash flow management and maximizing your financial health as you grow.

If you're a CEO who's already committed to the four keys of executive team alignment we discussed, picking up Scaling Up is a great way to learn more about a popular integrated system for running your company. It provides a consistent language and framework to help align your team around the right people, strategy, execution and cash practices to grow a thriving company, team and life.

Does getting your executive team aligned seem daunting? We see it all the time with companies we work with. I’ll share the story of one of those clients in our next 5 Minute Growth Tip article.

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Is Your Executive Team Aligned?

10/29/2025

As a CEO, are you facing the challenge of getting your executive team truly aligned?

In my recent articles,”The #1 Reason Growth Stalls”, "What’s the role of an effective CEO?", and “A Great Book On Your True CEO Role”, I discussed the critical CEO role of developing a team of leaders to help lead the company to grow profitably, predictably and sustainably.

One of the great challenges in doing that is getting that executive team on the same page and going in the same direction. The answer lies not in laying out a plan for the team, but rather involving the team in creating a plan.

As the saying goes, “people support what they help to create”. The leaders on your team need to not only support, but also help drive the desired results and the changes needed to help get there.

There are several critical elements to getting and keeping your executive team aligned:

A one page strategic plan
Annual and quarterly planning
Individual roles and expectations
Efficient executive team buy-in

Let’s discuss each one.

1. A One Page Strategic Plan

One problem with getting an executive team on the same page is that there needs to be a page to get on. There needs to be a plan and that plan needs to be written down. Having planning discussions and keeping things in our heads only leads to misalignment. When we put plans on paper, misunderstandings and disconnects become obvious and can be addressed.

Another problem is that when teams do put plans down on paper, they are often too long, or they’re spread across multiple documents. This leads to the all-too-common problem of SPOTS: “Strategic Plan on Top Shelf”. No one refers back to it and it disappears never to be seen again.

A third problem is a lack of a framework and consistent language and definitions. When one person uses the term targets and another person talks about goals, are they talking about the same thing? This often leads to confusion and vagueness, resulting in misalignment.

A solution to these three problems is a One Page Strategic Plan (OPSP).

Verne Harnish, speaker, trainer and CEO of Scaling Up, formally Gazelles, which I was trained by, first introduced the One Page Strategic Plan format in his popular book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.

The One Page Strategic Plan is just that, one page. It includes brief statements capturing the company’s philosophy (eg. values, purpose, vision), strategy, 3 year plan, as well as 1 year and quarterly plans, including specific numerical targets and priorities for change and improvement.

Each component of the OPSP has consistent language and clear definitions. It’s reviewed and updated at least quarterly to make adjustments and add the next quarter’s 90-day plan.

Having the plan all on one page means it’s quick and easy to review, reference and update. Its brevity forces executive teams to get really clear and aligned about each of their decisions.

While the full one page strategic plan is used for the company plan, which the CEO should ultimately own, certain parts of the one page strategic plan can be used by each leader to create a plan for their own area that supports the company plan. For example, what targets is Marketing shooting for next year, and what improvements will they make, to support the company’s goal of increasing revenue by 20%?

2. Annual and Quarterly Planning

So how can an executive team work together to come up with a one page plan that they are all aligned on?

A disciplined rhythm of executive team annual and quarterly planning has become the standard for the best small to mid-size companies. This rhythm ensures that an executive team adjusts its competitive strategy annually and agrees on its goals and top priorities for the coming year, while also breaking down the execution of the annual plan into more specific and manageable quarterly plans.

The quarterly planning approach also gives the team the flexibility to adjust their plans as they learn through action what works and what doesn’t. It also allows them to adjust course as the market and organization evolves.

An annual and quarterly planning rhythm is made a lot easier to organize and run when you have a seasoned executive team coach.

3. Individual Roles and Expectations

It’s one thing to come up with a plan that the executive team is all aligned on. It’s another to be aligned on how they are going to make that plan happen.

Who will do what depends on what each leader’s role is. All too often role disconnects or confusion create misalignment around who should tackle what part of the company plan.

The greater misalignment comes in how each leader runs their own area. When leaders on an executive team aren’t all on the same page about their respective roles and accountabilities, there can be duplication of effort, mixed-messages to the organization, leaders being stretched thin, and/or critical work not getting done.

As well, if leaders aren’t clear on what’s expected of them and their peers, standards and targets may not be met by certain areas, which can then affect other areas’ ability to deliver.

Furthermore, when expectations about leadership and management practices aren’t clear and aligned across the executive team, it creates misalignment across the organization as a whole. Their team members will have widely varying experiences as employees. The level of understanding of goals and priorities for the company and different areas will result in teams working at cross-purposes with each other, if not out-right competing.

The solution has three parts: clarifying roles, results and expectations.

a) Clarify what executive team level functions are needed in the company and which executive team leader will be accountable for each. We use what’s called a Functional Accountability Chart exercise - or FACe - to clear this up.

b) Define visually what each function is accountable to produce and what other function or functions they produce it for. This creates what we call a Key Function Flow Map (KFFM), which shows how business comes into the company and flows from one function to the next until money shows up in the bank account. This gets the executive team aligned around how they need to work with each other to achieve results for the company overall.

c) Each leader on the executive team creates their own job scorecard, based on the function(s) they are accountable for and the results they produce in the flow of work (KFFM). It includes the purpose of their function, the results, metrics and targets they are to achieve, their responsibilities and authority, and the competencies they need to be successful. We covered the job scorecard in a previous article.

Once complete, it’s important that the executive team review their Functional Accountability Chart and Key Function Flow Map at least once a year, if not more often, to identify any shifts in roles that are needed as the company evolves and grows. As well, any material changes to any job scorecards should be shared with the whole team for awareness. More significant changes may warrant discussing them as a team before finalizing them.

4. Efficient Executive Team Buy-in

Rather than a CEO coming up with the plan and each leader’s role(s), and simply delegating activities to team members, they need to shift to making decisions for the company in collaboration with the members of their executive team. This will enable them and their team members to make decisions they’re all committed to.

This doesn’t mean the CEO doesn’t get the final say. It’s how they get to a final decision that needs to be adjusted.

Patrick Lencioni, in his best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, called this approach “disagree and commit”.

For each part of the plan, and for the roles expectations of each leader, the executive team discusses the problem or opportunity and gets all the relevant information out on the table for consideration. Options are discussed and weighed. All members of the top team have the opportunity to share their perspectives and concerns.

If an agreement is easily made as a team, then great. If not, the CEO makes the final decision with everyone knowing their perspective has been heard and considered, and agreeing that now is the time to commit to the final decision.

This approach allows for effective executive team participation and buy-in, while keeping it efficient.

This can be a game-changer for CEOs who have already shifted to involving their top team in decision-making, but have gone too far, seeking team agreement for every company decision.

As a result, decision-making may have slowed to a crawl, or decisions simply don’t get made, because they and their leadership team members don’t always agree on what’s best. And the CEO isn’t willing to make a final decision for fear that their leaders won’t buy in at all.

“Disagree and commit” solves this problem.

As you can see, getting an executive team aligned is not a once-and-done activity. It’s an on-going system, a set of interconnected processes that ensure the executive team stays aligned about their plans and roles.

These aren't just my ideas. They're discussed in the top-selling business book Scaling Up. I'll cover that in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here

A Great Book On Your True CEO Role

10/22/2025

In my recent article, "What’s the role of an effective CEO?," I talked about the critical shift needed to stop battling daily fires and start driving strong, sustainable, and predictable results.

I defined the CEO's job not by solving problems for your managers, but by focusing on high-level results and proactive activities.

If that concept resonated with you, I want to share a powerful resource that provides a global framework for what we discussed: Brad Giles’s book, Made to Thrive.

Giles is a colleague of mine, and a seasoned entrepreneur and coach, who created this playbook to help small to mid-size companies like yours move from achieving "good" to achieving "great, enduring" results.

The book’s core concepts reinforce, and have enhanced, the structure we recommended for becoming an effective CEO.

Lagging AND Leading Results

We emphasized that the ultimate goal is not just a strong P&L, but sustainable success. Giles's research confirms this, showing also that truly great results are directly supported by competent leadership practices.

Lagging Results like revenue and profitability are your score, but they only tell you where you have been. Giles’s entire framework is designed to lead to these results.

The real work is in the Leading Results. We identified crucial predictive indicators like customer loyalty, employee engagement, and the percentage of A-player talent on your team. Giles backs this up, listing key results of great leadership as a higher density of top performers, better retention rates, and consistent growth.

The big takeaway here is clarity: If you’re not actively tracking and improving talent quality and engagement, your growth will be unpredictable.

The Six Areas of CEO Activity

The most powerful part of Giles's work is how his Five Key Roles—the blueprint for CEO effectiveness—align with the CEO’s Six Areas of Accountability we suggest to clients.

1. Strategy and Planning

Giles calls this the Strategy role, and it’s about more than just having a plan. It means you own the long-term vision and differentiation. Giles’s work reinforces that you must work with your executive team to translate this vision into quarterly and annual execution plans.

2. Team Development

Giles calls this the Accountability role. Accountability means more than just metrics; it’s about setting clear expectations, ensuring effective onboarding, and ultimately building a high-performing executive team. This is how you ensure the quality of the talent engine that drives your business. That said, our recommendation is to also focus on developing those leaders and building a unified team.

3. Organizational Communication

While Giles covers this broadly under Accountability and Culture, our focus here is on the rhythm of execution. Your commitment to leading daily huddles, weekly meetings, middle-management meetings and company-wide town halls is crucial for keeping everyone aligned on the plan and progress.

4. Manage the Culture

Giles confirms this as a distinct role: Culture. You are the chief champion of purpose and core values. Giles emphasizes that culture is the magnet for great people. Your job is to bring that purpose and those values alive by welcoming new hires, celebrating successes, and immediately addressing any breaches.

5. Strategic Relationships

Giles calls you the Ambassador. This means managing the external ecosystem. You must cultivate your public profile, maintain key advisor connections, and, importantly, terminate underperforming partnerships to clear the path for growth. Giles’ work informed our decision to add some key activities to this area.

6. Continuity Planning

Giles’s Succession Planning role contributed to us expanding this area. While he also stresses knowing leaders to succeed his team members, he also recommends appointing and developing an internal CEO successor. His work also contributed to us recommending his other business resilience activities, such as actively assessing at-risk products/services and evaluating new opportunities to replace revenue, ensuring the longevity of the business.

The Path Forward

If you read our earlier article on the role of an effective CEO [link to What is the role of an effective CEO?] and found that you are "only doing a fraction of these things," leading to stress and unpredictable results, know this: you are not alone.

Yet Made to Thrive confirms that playing the full CEO role is not a fantasy; it is a discipline. It provides the step-by-step guidance you need to focus on these critical areas.

The question isn't whether you can do these six things, but whether you are ready to stop being the bottleneck and truly lead a thriving company, team, and life.

If you're ready to create your CEO Job Scorecard, as we discussed in our last article, to put these proven frameworks into practice, let's talk.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here

A Great Book On Your True CEO Role

10/22/2025

The following video builds on a recent video about the role of an effective CEO.

Want to listen to the tip? Use the play button below.

In our previous video, we discussed How to Create a CEO job scorecard,

To get our complimentary job scorecard template and draft CEO job scorecard to help get you started, contact me here.

Read the Article

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

How to Create Your CEO Job Scorecard

10/15/2025

A job scorecard is a vital tool for any CEO, offering a clear framework for defining and achieving success in their role, as I’ve discussed in a previous article on how to become an effective CEO.

A job scorecard moves beyond a traditional job description to outline the values, specific behaviors, measurable results, responsibilities, authority (if applicable), and essential competencies to focus on in a role.

Benefits for the CEO:

Clear Expectations: A clear CEO job scorecard defines what success looks like, providing objective benchmarks for performance.

Strategic Focus: It helps you align your efforts with the highest value activities needed to lead your team and company to achieve your desired results. Ultimately, it helps you stay out of the weeds.

CEO Development: It provides a clear basis for assessing what parts of a CEO job you’re doing well and what parts can be improved to become more effective.

Values Reinforcement: It helps you focus on your company‘s core values and specific behaviours in order to set an example for the organization.

Succession Planning: It helps define the ideal profile for a future CEO successor, so you can proactively develop internal candidates, or if needed, find and select an ideal external candidate.

Key Components of A Job Scorecard:

Following is an overview of all the essential elements of a clear job scorecard. Also feel free to contact me [link to contact me form page] to access, at no charge, the job scorecard template I use with clients, or use the form in this article.

Purpose of the Job:

This is a concise, one-line statement that captures the primary outcome or key result your role is intended to produce. It should clearly articulate the fundamental reason the job exists and its most significant contribution to the company. Feel free to contact me [link to contact me form page] to access our draft CEO job scorecard that includes the purpose of the CEO job that we recommend to clients, or use the form in this article.

Company Core Values and Behaviors:

This section outlines the core values of your company and the specific behaviors that exemplify them. List each core value and the observable behaviors associated with each. This serves as a personal guide and sets a powerful example for the entire organization, demonstrating the importance of living these values from the top down. Identifying your company’s core values and behaviours is best done with your executive team, to ensure full buy-in. However, make sure you believe in them too, because you’ll need to promote and enforce them on an ongoing basis.

Results, Metrics and Standard Targets:

This section focuses on the "whats" of the job – the measurable outcomes that demonstrate your success. As discussed in a previous article on the role of an effective CEO [link to article], this should include both lagging company results, like key financial numbers, as well as leading company results related to the market, customers and employees. Our draft CEO job scorecard also gives you a running start at these metrics. Then identify the standard mid-level, top-end and bottom-end targets for each metric.

Areas of Accountability and Responsibilities:

Responsibilities are the job-specific duties and activities expected in your role, grouped into "areas of accountability" that represent common outcomes. Think of these as the "must-hows" – the non-negotiable ways of operating that are specific to your role and the company. This section should not list every single task but rather the critical activities that ensure you achieve your desired results and targets. As we covered in a previous article on the role of an effective CEO [link to article], the responsibilities of a CEO fall under the areas of: Strategy and Planning, Team Development, Organizational Communication, Managing the Culture, Strategic Partnerships, and Continuity Planning. The responsibilities we recommend are included in our draft CEO job scorecard.

Authority:

If you’re a hired CEO, this section clearly defines the decisions you, as CEO, have the authority to make, as well as any limitations on that authority. This type of clarity can make it easier for you to negotiate more authority than you may currently have, because the other areas of the job scorecard will provide assurance that you have things well under control. It can also help you ensure your owner or owners retain authority for the types of decisions you need them to make so that you have their full support. Some common types of authority we recommend are also included in our draft CEO job scorecard.

Key Competencies:

Competencies describe the essential skills and abilities required to perform your responsibilities and achieve your desired results. Select the behavioral competencies that are absolutely critical for anyone to be successful in the CEO role. This ensures the scorecard focuses on what is truly essential for your role. For a CEO, this can be a long list, including high level leadership competencies as well as more basic pre-requisite competencies also needed to be successful. We recommend a method to select these competencies and make them more manageable. A full list of potential competencies is included in our job scorecard template, and the essential ones we recommend for CEOs are included in our draft CEO job scorecard.

Note that a job scorecard is dynamic, adjustable as needed, but always serving as the definitive document capturing what it means to excel in the CEO role.

So, do you see the value in creating your CEO job scorecard? If so, contact me to get our complimentary job scorecard template and draft CEO job scorecard to help get you started, or use the form in this article.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here

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How to Create Your CEO Job Scorecard

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