How can you strengthen your entrepreneurial company?
​
To find out how to improve the entrepreneurial systems in your business 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. 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.

I was looking for a reference guide of common KPIs to make it easier for the leadership team of one of the companies I work with to identify appropriate metrics to drive execution. 

I reached out to my network of colleagues in Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches. They suggested Key Performance Indicators: The 75+ Measures Every Manager Needs to Know, by Bernard Marr.

The problem was there was no audio version and no text-to-speech feature. Listening to books while driving or walking my dog is my only option.

So I found this “for Dummies” version by the same author. It did the trick.

The gist of it

In Key Performance Indicators for Dummies, Marr provides, not only a list of common KPIs across the essential areas of financial, customer, internal efficiency and people, but also a comprehensive guidebook to developing and implementing KPIs.

While the book, in places, goes into more complexity than is needed for many mid-size companies, he does a nice job of explaining how KPIs connect with and support business strategy and execution disciplines.

Marr, an expert in KPIs and big data, emphasizes how KPIs, effectively developed, can support a learning culture of fact-based decision-making where leaders test business assumptions and strategies through metrics.

He also shares common pitfalls to avoid, such as tying compensation directly to KPIs, which unwittingly creates an incentive for employees at all levels to distort results. 

The alternative, in my experience, when incentives are implemented to support an already developed performance culture, is to tie them to numbers that are regimented, centrally controlled and therefore not easily manipulated, such as financial results.

The irony of this book is that, while it’s designed as a go-to reference for picking KPIs, it recommends - and rightly so - to not just pick them from a list, but to do the harder thinking as a leadership team of what you’re aiming to achieve and what number you can track to tell you you’re making progress.

Length of book: 320 pages.

Bernard Marr is founder and CEO of the Advanced Performance Institute and author of 16 books on key performance indicators, metrics, big data, analytics and artificial intelligence.


How can you execute on KPIs more effectively in your company?
​
​To find out how to have more efficient execution 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 4 to check your execution 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.

​​Subscribe to Gravitas Impact Podcast: Android

How can you create a culture of accountability in your company?
​
​To find out how to strengthen accountability 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 1, 2, 4 and 7 to check your processes that support accountability. 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.

In an earlier article, I discussed how strategy is not a lengthy action plan but the evolution of a central idea about how a company can be unique and valuable to its customers.

So if a strategy is about how the company needs to compete, then how does a CEO and their A player leadership team make it happen? With a best practice execution plan and process.

​The Execution Challenge

In my experience over the last 16 years working with leadership teams, when CEOs and owners of mid-size companies decide to do formal planning with their leadership team, they often go through a traditional strategic planning process.

However, this often only goes so far.

Many strategic plans include a mission (or purpose), vision and values - all important - yet little, if anything, about how the company will compete in the market.

And often, these documents have vague plans for implementing whatever rough direction they’ve set out: some high level multi-year priorities, or maybe some one year initiatives. In the best case, an annual budget is built with the strategic plan in mind.

From there, leadership team members will report on their numbers quarterly, or maybe monthly.

In the meantime, the CEO assumes the leaders are working on making improvements and changes in their departments that align with the high level priorities. 

After a couple of quarters, a few things can happen:

• The CEO or team might notice that, at the current pace, the numbers aren’t looking good enough to achieve budget. The owner or CEO might then ask the leaders to pick up the pace.

 

• The CEO will also ask where things are with the priorities. They’ll often discover that not much has been done, other things have come up, and focus appears to be drifting. At this point, the CEO might insist on seeing more progress on all the original priorities, or ask that the new items be tackled as well. In some cases, they might work with the leadership team to decide what’s most important for the rest of the year. The reality is there’s only 6 months left to execute something meaningful.

 

• Then, for companies with a December year-end, summer arrives. People go to the lake for a couple of weeks here in the prairies. Holiday schedules make it hard to meet up with others to move things forward. So often, there’s another push in September to get things going again. Then leaders and their teams might work like mad through the fall to accomplish what they committed to in September.

Does this pattern seem familiar? 

Does it cause drama, tension and low morale? Usually so. Is it efficient? Not really. Does this hamper progress, growth and profitability? For sure it does. And is it any fun? No.

So, what’s the solution? Not a traditional strategic plan. But a strategy (which I outlined here) and an execution plan and process.

Our 3 key disciplines of low drama execution describe how it works: 1) Metrics and Targets, 2) Priorities and 3) an effective Meeting Rhythm.


Metrics and Targets

Watching the numbers may seem like the most obvious of the three disciplines. We all know that tracking financial results is an important part of monitoring whether we’re on track.

However, there are other key numbers to monitor as well. 

While some metrics tell us how we’ve done, others give us an indication of how we’re going to do. This is the difference between lagging metrics and leading metrics.

For a company as a whole, lagging metrics will be things like financial results, units delivered and market share. Some leading metrics may be customer loyalty, on-time delivery, employee engagement or the percentage of employees that are A players.

We want to set long term targets for our key metrics - say for 3 to 5 years out. These targets should align with our 10 to 30 year vision, or big hairy audacious goal, as well as our best-guess estimates of what’s possible with the core customer and sandbox we chose in our strategy.

From there, we can set goals for those same metrics for the next year. For most of those metrics, we’ll also set goals for the first quarter. And finally, for some metrics, often leading metrics, we might be able to set monthly or even weekly milestones.

Setting short-term goals that align with mid-term targets that align with a longer term vision allows the leadership team to commit to biting off a certain amount of progress each quarter.

This way, we can check that we’re making enough progress over the weeks, months and quarters to achieve what we need to for the year, which will contribute to reaching our 3 to 5 year targets and our vision.


Priorities

Metrics measure the results and state of our day to day operations, and how they’re progressing towards our vision.

Priorities, on the other hand, are the changes and improvements to those operations. These are what we want and need to implement to make it possible to achieve those mid to long term goals and targets.

Going back to my first article in this series on how companies need to do things differently to continue to grow and profitably, these priorities represent, in part, those very structures, systems and processes.

Priorities may also be about building or buying new facilities, equipment, or other significant capital assets to expand or replace capacity.

Priorities should also build the capabilities needed to bring to life or strengthen the unique brand promises we chose in our strategy.

Like with metrics, we chunk these down from long term to mid term to short term. This again  helps us make progress every quarter that supports the progress we want to make over time.

We can start with the 3 to 5 year priorities (we sometimes call these Key Thrusts or Key Capabilities). These are the broad, multi-year categories of change and improvement that need to happen to support achieving our 3 to 5 year targets. For example, “developing leadership capability at all levels” or “automating our production processes”. Both likely take multiple years.

From our 3 to 5 year priorities, we’ll identify our 1 year priorities (we sometimes call these Initiatives). They capture the handful of large multi-quarter change projects that bite off a chunk of one or more of our 3 to 5 year priorities.

And from our annual priorities, we’ll choose quarterly priorities (we sometimes call these Rocks). These are the multi-month change projects that will help us complete one or more of our annual priorities.


An Effective Meeting Rhythm

It’s great to know what targets need to be achieved and what priorities have to be accomplished over the next quarter to make enough progress towards our long term goals.

But we know that unforeseen things will happen during the quarter. Problems will come up. Things can get forgotten. People can lose focus. 

So, how do we make sure our leadership team executes on our quarterly plan in the midst of all that?

Through regular communication. An effective and efficient meeting rhythm is the key.

This meeting rhythm includes:

• weekly leadership team meetings - 60 to 90 minutes
• daily leadership team huddles - 5 to 10 minutes
• monthly leadership team meetings - 4 to 8 hours
• quarterly planning meetings - 1 to 2 days
• annual planning meeting - 2 to 3 days

The purpose of weekly leadership team meetings are to check that our metrics and priorities are on track, to take corrective action, and to problem solve where needed.

Daily leadership team huddles are to keep all team members in sync throughout the week and identify problems quickly so they can be resolved as they come up.

Monthly leadership team meetings are for checking that our metrics, priorities AND monthly financial results are on track, taking corrective action, adjusting the plan as needed and tackling larger tactical or strategic issues.

Quarterly planning meetings are to check what we accomplished over the last quarter, adjust course for the year and set our quarterly goals and priorities for the next 90 days.

The annual planning meeting is for assessing overall progress, noting market trends, adjusting our strategy, long term vision and 3-5 year targets and priorities, and deciding what we’ll bite off with our goals and priorities for the coming year and for the first quarter.

With a clear purpose and a proven agenda for each type of meeting, and with the right people in the roles of facilitator, time-keeper and note-taker, these meetings can efficiently keep the leadership team and its members focused and executing throughout the year.


Pulling it all together

A clear, aligned execution plan and an effective execution process will minimize drama and maximize efficiency and goal achievement.

However, this will work best if we create the execution plan with the leadership team, so there is efficient leadership team buy-in. And this goes for the strategy as well. 

Combine all this with strong accountability practices and having A players on our leadership team, and we have a powerful mixture to reliably implement the structures, systems and processes to implement our strategy, build capacity, and grow consistently and profitably...AND enjoy the ride.

That said, this all may seem daunting if you and your leadership team are too busy working in the weeds. 

If that’s you - and most CEOs I meet have this challenge - keep an eye open for my next article on how to shift from working mostly “in the business” to working more “on the business”, and having more time for you and your family as well.

How can you execute with less drama in your company?
​
​To find out how to have more efficient execution 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 4 to check your execution 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.

‘‘Working on health works. It’s good for your people and for your bottom line.”

McKinsey (2017)  ​

​In partnership with The Growth Faculty, Wellspring Growth Systems is delighted to offer you a $50 discount to see Patrick Lencioni in a live virtual event this April: Patrick Lencioni - 4 Pillars of High-Performance Cultures.
​​
Teamwork and High-Performance Culture in the Post-Pandemic Environment: Our reliance on teams has hit a peak. But when teams fail, businesses stumble. Bring your team to a live virtual event with organizational health pioneer, best-selling author and in-demand speaker, Patrick Lencioni, and get access to over 20 years of research on organizational health and building a high-performance culture.

New York Times best-selling author of The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team (plus 11 other books), Patrick Lencioni is the global pioneer of the organisational health movement.

McKinsey research shows a healthy organisation delivers roughly 3x the returns to stakeholders than less healthy companies. And, companies that institute initiatives to improve health see tangible performance increases in as little as six months.

Named "one of the most in demand speakers in America" by the Wall Street Journal, Patrick Lencioni will deliver a fast-paced, highly practical event teaching business leaders and their teams how to create a healthy organisation and high-performing culture that takes advantage of the talent within their teams.

YOU WILL LEARN:

Practical and highly entertaining, over 2.5 hours you’ll learn: 

• The 4 Disciplines Model of organisational health  
• The 5 Essential Behaviours required to build a cohesive and high performing team  
• The Ideal Team Player framework for identifying, hiring and developing ideal team players   
• The 6 Types of Geniuses - Identify your areas of working genius that allow you to thrive at and enjoy work  
• PLUS, interactive Q&A with Patrick

You will leave with immediately actionable frameworks and tools that have transformed thousands of businesses globally.
 

YOU'LL BE BLOWN AWAY BY THE INTERACTIVE VIRTUAL VENUE  

Patrick Lencioni will present live in real-time via The Growth Faculty's bespoke virtual venue, now rated 9.5/10 by 1000s of business leaders.  ​

Patrick Lencioni is well-known for his business best-sellers: The Five Dysfuctions of a Team (which I introduced here last month), The Ideal Team Player, and Death by Meeting. 

His last best-seller, The Advantage - Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, is the culmination and integration of his previous works. It’s one of the most comprehensive and accessible books I’ve read on the key elements of an effective organization. 

In fact, many of the tools and concepts in the Scaling Up system and 7 Attributes of Agile Growth framework we use with companies are found in The Advantage.

The Advantage is also one of the frameworks Patrick will be covering in his upcoming live virtual event.

In the book, Lencioni describes a healthy organization as one with minimal dysfunction, politics, and confusion. Instead, clarity and alignment reign, resulting in strong performance.

He argues that organizational health is the greatest advantage any business can have. And yet, it is largely ignored by business leaders.

Lencioni clearly and logically lays out the four disciplines to creating a healthy organization: 

1) build a cohesive leadership team - essentially the five focus-areas described in the Five Dysfunctions of a team: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results;

2) create clarity - of purpose, behaviours (ie. core values), offerings, competitive strategy, priorities, performance metrics and leadership team member roles;

3) overcommunicate clarity - repeated, aligned cascading communication from leadership team members to their direct reports and down the line;

4) reinforce clarity - through human systems - every process that involves people, from hiring and people management to training, compensation and termination.

Lencioni then slips in a 5th unofficial, yet critical, discipline titled “The Centrality of Meetings”, drawing from his Death by Meetings framework. In it, he underlines that no action, activity or process is more central to a healthy organization than effective meetings, from the daily check-in (huddle) through to the quarterly off-site.

A key point in The Advantage, which may be missed or forgotten, is that the single biggest factor determining whether an organization is going to get healthier, is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the top leader - the owner-operator, CEO or president.

Book length: 240 pages, 5 hour 25 minute audio. Soundview summary: 8 pages, 21 minute audio. GetAbstract summary: 5 pages, 10 minute audio.

How can you strengthen your organization?
​
To find out how you can make your organization healthier to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, 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. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.

Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android

How can you strengthen your leadership team?
​
​To find out what you can improve in your leadership team to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, 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. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Complete section 1, 2 and 4 to check your leadership team’s collaboration, talent and accountability 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.

Last month, I shared some tips for developing a successful strategy to compete and thrive in your market. Yet, developing a great strategy takes more than a framework. It takes a high performing leadership team. That, in turn, takes high performing leaders.

As a CEO, president, owner or entrepreneur, you’ve likely had department heads on your team that didn’t meet your expectations or were poor leaders. It can be frustrating to be repeatedly disappointed or to have to continuously push, cajole or just grin and bear it. 

Yet, it’s entirely feasible to resolve these headaches and prevent them from happening in the first place.

This is about ensuring that, on the leadership team, we have the right people in the right seats doing the right things in the right way.

Right Seats

First, we want to ensure we have the right seats - the right roles needed on our leadership team - eg. sales, marketing, operations, finance, accounting, human resources, information technology, etc. We want to consider that each team member is likely playing more than one role. By thinking of it this way,  we can identify what functional roles are being played, and whether the right roles exist on the team.

We also want to get each leader, and the whole team, on the same page about what each role means. This includes being clear about the expectations for each role in terms of results (eg. role: marketing => results: qualified leads). It’s best if these results expectations are quantified with targets (eg. X number of qualified leaders per month). The results, metrics and targets are the productivity side of each role.

We also want to be clear about the behavioural side. This includes defining the behavioural expectations needed across the leadership team and across the company. 

These behaviours are captured to a large degree in our core values. These core values distill the essential behaviours for working in the company, and also across the leadership team. This is what enables great teamwork, productive conversations and problem-solving, developing a strong strategy and execution plan, and coordinating to execute.

Clarity on core values is also critical because leaders living them is one of the main ways the company’s culture is brought to life among employees.

Right People

With productivity and behaviour expectations clear, we want to ensure we have the right person in each seat. We want to ask ourselves: is each person on the leadership team meeting our expectations...in terms of both the results expected in their role AND the behaviours captured in our core values?

Furthermore, if we want to build a thriving company, we’ll need A-players. We define A-players as being among the top 10% performers for the specific role and for the pay we can afford, AND they live and breath all of our core values.

Right Things

Being a top 10% leader doesn’t just mean doing a great job at one’s function: marketing, accounting or human resources, etc. It means getting great productivity from their people - both quantity and quality of work. This takes strong planning, delegation, mentoring, coaching and monitoring skills.

Often leaders tend towards one of two extremes: micro-managing or laisser-faire management. Strong leaders will stay involved enough to monitor and be supportive while at the same time letting capable employees use their skills, be self-sufficient and take initiative.

A-player leaders create an environment in their department that inspires employees to perform at their best.

Right Way

When it comes to leaders who don’t live our core values, it’s usually a dead end. Because a person’s values can’t really be changed.

People behave according to what they believe. If they grew up believing that learning and adapting is valuable in its own right, they’ll learn and adapt on the job. If they believe that tradition, duty and compliance are noble, they won’t behave in adaptable ways.

And if they don’t believe in one of our core values, there’s not much we can do about it. We can coach them on that core value, and they may start behaving more in alignment with it for a while. But often, they’ll slip back into their habits.

This means that very often, a leader that isn’t living one or more of our core values never truly will. And so they’ll never be an A player leader, at least in our company.

Addressing the Gaps

As CEOs, presidents and owners, we can often be hesitant to let a leader go who doesn’t fit. Our underlying concern is often that maybe we weren’t clear on our expectations or maybe we didn’t coach the leader enough or very effectively.

So, it can be reassuring to start by establishing clear expectations and providing better coaching where needed. At the end of the day, the leader may still not meet our expectations. But at least we’ll know that we did what we could to support them.

A good practice is to, every quarter, ask ourselves how each of the members of our leadership team are performing both in terms of results AND core values. Then, for any team members that aren’t performing, ask, what will I do about it this quarter? Will I coach them or cut the chord? If we keep coaching the leader on the same issue quarter after quarter, we should not only question their leadership, we should question ours too.

A caution: sometimes a leader’s poor performance IS in fact our fault. It’s entirely possible for a CEO to create an environment where people can’t perform well. Maybe we’re the micro-manager, or the laisser-faire manager. Or we set a poor example by not being accountable or not living some of our core values. If we have just one or two leaders whose performance is in question and the majority of the leaders reporting to us are performing great, we do have a people issue. Yet, if most or all of our leaders are struggling, chances are our own leadership is what needs work.

Working Through Our Own Stuff

Usually, the decision to let a leader go isn’t hard. Once we think it through, it’s often pretty clear. It’s just that we avoid thinking it through. We avoid it because of how it feels. It’s sad. It’s disappointing. It’s nerve-racking. We can feel guilty or like a failure. 

If we acknowledge, accept and process those feelings, we can then face the facts of the situation and come to a logical, firm conclusion. This can usually be tackled with some pros and cons thinking, considering all the impacts of the leader, on both the culture and performance of their department, the leadership team and the company as a whole. 

Replacing a Leader

It’s one thing to come to realize and accept that a leader has to go. It’s another to feel confident we can successfully replace them with an A-player. If you’re concerned about this, you probably have a recruiting and selection problem. And you’re not alone. The average hiring process picks an A-player 25% of the time.

Implement the Top Grading or A-Method hiring process and you’ll knoch that up to an 80 or 90% success rate. Replacing a top level leader is a great reason to make that change. You’ll get two trees with one stone: an A player leader and a drastic improvement in hiring throughout the company.

As Jim Collins found in his research for Good to Great, the foundation of a thriving company is “disciplined people”. This includes being a Level 5 leader (determined AND humble) and getting the right people on the bus in the right seats on our leadership team. Only then can we create a great strategy collaboratively with our leadership team, to achieve efficient team buyin. And with buyin and a great leadership team, we can implement the right decisions and system to grow more rapidly, profitably and sustainably. 

Right? Not quite.

This is where great execution comes in. In this next article, I’ll share the common challenges with executing a strategy and the three key execution disciplines to minimize drama and maximize profitability.​

How can you have more A-players in your company?
​
To find out how to have stronger talent and leaders 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 A-player 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.

In partnership with The Growth Faculty, Wellspring Growth Systems is delighted to offer you a $50 discount to see Patrick Lencioni in a live virtual event this April: Patrick Lencioni - 4 Pillars of High-Performance Cultures.
​​
New York Times best-selling author of The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team (plus 11 other books), Patrick Lencioni is the global pioneer of the organisational health movement.

McKinsey research shows a healthy organisation delivers roughly 3x the returns to stakeholders than less healthy companies. And, companies that institute initiatives to improve health see tangible performance increases in as little as six months.

Named "one of the most in demand speakers in America" by the Wall Street Journal, Patrick Lencioni will deliver a fast-paced, highly practical event teaching business leaders and their teams how to create a healthy organisation and high-performing culture that takes advantage of the talent within their teams.

YOU WILL LEARN:

Practical and highly entertaining, over 2.5 hours you’ll learn: 

• The 4 Disciplines Model of organisational health  
• The 5 Essential Behaviours required to build a cohesive and high performing team  
• The Ideal Team Player framework for identifying, hiring and developing ideal team players   
• The 6 Types of Geniuses - Identify your areas of working genius that allow you to thrive at and enjoy work  
• PLUS, interactive Q&A with Patrick

You will leave with immediately actionable frameworks and tools that have transformed thousands of businesses globally.
 

YOU'LL BE BLOWN AWAY BY THE INTERACTIVE VIRTUAL VENUE  

Patrick Lencioni will present live in real-time via The Growth Faculty's bespoke virtual venue, now rated 9.5/10 by 1000s of business leaders.  
 ​

How can you create a high performance culture?
​
​To find out how you can strengthen your culture to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, 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. This report is complementary and involves no obligation. Complete sections 1 to 4 to check your high performance culture*. 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.

​For those who weren’t able to make it to the Gravitas Impact Global Interactive Leadership Summit on February 25th, I thought I’d share a brief summary of some of the key things we learned from the presenters and discussed in our CEO peer break-out groups.

The summit started with futurist Anne Ward providing guidance for leadership teams on spotting and analysing trends, followed by Keith Cupp, CEO of Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches, on the new 7 Attributes of Agile Growth monograph and the key characteristics of great CEOs, and then Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap, on how to tackle “hard change” (as opposed to “easy change”).


Futurist Anne Ward encouraged the CEOs and leadership team members in attendance to identify emerging trends by using solid data, in order to accurately inform decision-making.

One example she shared was Dominoes Pizza. With their data driven approach, they’ve driven the value of the company from $3 per share, ten years ago, to over $300 per share.

Speed of delivery had been Dominoes’ primary competitive advantage for many years...until competition caught up and customer preferences changed. Through the use of data, their executive team discovered that their customers really yearned for great tasting pizza.

Their leadership team and product development team leaned into their data to identify what their customers liked, what tastes were emerging, and then to test and experiment with different offerings.

One challenge for executive teams is bias. It’s easy, as individual leaders or as a team, to fall prey to omission bias (the tendency to avoid data or action), confirmation bias (the tendency to make data interpretations that confirm our beliefs) or loss aversion bias (the tendency to avoid loss rather than create gain, thereby avoiding change and taking risks).

One key insight is that the resulting health and strength of the organization will be limited by the clarity of mind of the weakest leader on the leadership team.


Our very own Keith Cupp, CEO of Gravitas Impact,  provided an overview of the latest Gravitas Impact monograph, titled "The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth." This is the flagship monograph that provides an overview of our growth framework by the same name.

When we build a company, we can wing it, or we can implement a proven framework. The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, which I think of as an evolution of, and improvement on, the Scaling Up system, is a framework that’s comprehensive, works regardless of industry, and is flexible and scalable – from startup to billion dollar companies.

The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth monograph provides an overview of the 7 areas every executive team needs to work on and be aligned on together: Leadership, Talent, Strategy, Execution, Customer, Systems and Profit.

My colleagues and I, certified in the 7 Attributes, facilitate, coach and advise leadership teams through building a plan collaboratively, using our version of a one page strategic plan. We then work with the team on a monthly and quarterly basis to assess progress and apply any one of the 42 tools in the framework to solve problems and make key decisions for the future.

Keith also shared his insights on the three recurring leadership characteristics that he’s found in his research over the years by studying great business thought leaders like Adam Grant, Patrick Lencioni and Jim Collins.

Those three leadership characteristics are: ambition, humility and confidence. With the humility to be curious and put others first, and the discipline of thought and action to move things forward, these CEOs learn, discover and execute with excellence. And with the support of a strong CEO and executive team coach, they can also develop great confidence to lead and grow others and their organization.

The key take-away: the CEO is either the primary enabler or the bottleneck to greatness.


Michael Bungay Stanier is the author of The Coaching Habit, a best selling book I use to complement LIz Wiseman’s Multipliers (recall she spoke at the June 2020 leadership summit). He shared some insightful tactics for tackling Hard Change as opposed to Easy Change.

Easy change is a change where we identify where we are now and where we want to be, we learn something and/or do something, we practice and we make the change happen. It’s pretty straight forward and usually successful.

Hard Change is a change that doesn’t come so easily to a person. It’s not about doing something differently, it’s about becoming someone different. It’s a fundamental rewiring of how we approach life.

What’s also interesting is that a change that is hard for one person may be easy for another, and vice versa. It’s not about the change per say, but about how substantial of a change it will be for a particular person.

One key insight is that we all struggle with Hard Change because not changing serves us in some way… even though we may not realize it.

A way around this is to identify out loud or in writing the reasons to not to take on the change (in addition to the reasons to do it). This exercise will uncover our resistance to the change - the comfort, status, power, etc. that keeps us stuck. Then we can consciously evaluate whether those benefits of not changing really outweigh the benefits of changing. And if not, we can choose to be ok with not keeping the benefits of the status quo so that we can move forward with the hard change.

Michael also shared some interesting tools for defining what he calls a “worthy goal”. A worthy goal maximizes our level of motivation and complements the reduction in resistance we’ve accomplished with the previous exercise. 

Bungay Stanier will have a new book coming out early next year going into detail on tackling Hard Change. I’ll be watching out for it!


Our next Gravitas Impact Global Interactive Leadership Summit will be June 17th. Pencil it in your calendar! It’s sure to be another excellent learning experience for CEOs and their leadership team members.


How can you improve your leadership?
​
​To find out how you can improve your leadership to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, 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. This report is complementary and involves no obligation. Complete section 1 and 2 to check your leadership 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. 

How can you improve your strategy?
​
​To find out what you can improve in your strategy to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, 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 3 and 6 to check your strategy and customer processes. Complete section 4 to check your execution. 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.

In my last article, I wrote about how midsize companies can make more progress at implementing the processes and systems that will enable them to grow and grow profitably. But is it really progress if you’re not going in the right direction? And how do you know if you are going in the right direction?

While various types of processes and systems are needed to grow beyond a company’s current level (see the first article in this series), some types of systems will need to be chosen (or tailored) specifically for that unique business AND to support and execute its strategy in the market.

Developing a clear strategy is not only important to making the right progress. It’s also important for ensuring a company is pursuing truly valuable growth opportunities.

This brief article will cover the basics of developing a successful strategy. From there, other tools and practices can be used to refine the strategy and make it more robust over time.

What is strategy?

First, let’s recognize what strategy is NOT. As Jack Welch once put it, “Strategy is NOT a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a CENTRAL IDEA through continually changing circumstances.” A list of projects, priorities or action items is not strategy. That’s an execution plan.

And what is this “central idea” Jack speaks of?

I’ve been facilitating strategy development for over 15 years. In all that time, the simplest, most accurate description of strategy I have come across is from Michael Porter, the renowned Harvard Business School professor, researcher and consultant.

In his best selling book “Competitive Advantage”, Porter describes strategy succinctly as “a unique and valuable position in the market that involves a different set of activities from competitors”. 

Your “unique and valuable position in the market” is this “central idea”. And it needs to continually evolve to respond to changing circumstances. It describes the essence of the business you and your leadership team want to build. Your execution plan is how you’ll build it.

Brand Promise

Let’s look at what Porter calls a “position in the market.”

Put simply, this is about how your offering compares to competitors who offer the same or similar products or services. In the Scaling Up system and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, we use the term “Brand Promise”.

For most business leaders, like myself, it’s been drilled into our heads that our business needs to be unique. Porter confirms that this is important for our positioning.

But why? To create customer loyalty. If our customers can only get our unique twist on a product or service from our company, and not from our competitors, they’ll keep coming back.

Hence the more traditional terms used for Brand Promise, including Unique Value Proposition, Unique Selling Proposition, Unique Offer, Competitive Advantage and Differentiation. They all essentially mean the same thing - a brief statement that describes how our product or service is or will be unique from our competitors.

One example is SouthWest Airlines. While they provide air travel services like so many other airlines, they have a unique brand promise: “Low Fares, Lots of Flights, Lots of Fun”. This combination of promises is unique in the American airline business.

Yet Porter’s definition means our brand promise needs to be more than unique. It also has to be valuable. Valuable to who? Customers.

Core Customer

This can be tricky. Because what’s valuable to one type of customer is not necessarily valuable to another. To make our brand promise valuable to a customer, we need to know WHO that customer is. 

Once we’re clear on who that customer is, we can define our brand promise, and then design our “different set of activities”, as Porter puts it, to consistently deliver that unique positioning.

Note that, if we are to do things differently than competitors to fulfill a unique brand promise for a specific type of customer, the number of different types of customers we serve has to be pretty small. Doing things in a number of unique ways that are each valuable to different types of customers becomes unprofitable, if not impossible, without sufficient scale. So for many companies, especially, midsize companies, that often means focusing in on one type of customer. We call them our Core Customer.

How do we identify our core customer? We examine our best customers! The ones who are the most profitable, the most loyal, the most likely to refer, the ones who pay on time.

In addition to knowing WHO are Core Customer IS, we have to know WHAT our Core Customer NEEDS. This enables us to then define a brand promise that will be valuable to them. Without understanding our Core Customer’s needs, we’re just guessing at our brand promise.

With clarity about who our core customer is, what they need and what brand promise would be valuable to them, we also want to make sure we can fulfill that brand promise. 

Maybe we aren’t fully set up right now to deliver on it. But we need to examine if we can get there. If not, we’ll be making a promise to customers that we just can’t keep. Customers will be disappointed and become less loyal, rather than more loyal, over time.

So, how do we know if we’re fulfilling our brand promise? With a brand promise metric. For example, with SouthWest’s promise of “low fares”, the company tracks all fares in the industry to make sure their fares are always the lowest.

Sandbox

The Sandbox defines what specific products or services we’re going to offer, where we’re going to sell them, and through who. Through direct sales? Online? Through distributors, affiliates or retail?

The Sandbox encourages us to proactively think through where our focus for growth needs to be over the next 3 to 5 years. It encourages focus also by proactively deciding to avoid products, geographies and distribution channels that will distract us. We may even choose to discontinue some we have right now.

Choosing our Sandbox involves making sure these “what?”, “where?” and “through who?” decisions align with 1) our core customer, 2) our brand promise, and 3) our understanding or estimates of what products, geographies and distribution channels will provide the greatest opportunities for growth and profitability.

SouthWest Airlines, for example, has determined that offering a first class service would not fit. It would take away from their “Lots of Fun” promise by treating some customers more lavishly than others. It would also increase complexity which would lengthen ground time, reduce the number of flights per day - “lots of flights”, and therefore increase costs and affect their “Low Fares” promise.

Making it Work

The three basic elements of a successful strategy include:

• Identifying our Core Customer’s characteristics and true needs
• Defining a Brand Promise that is valuable to our core customer, checking that it’s feasible and setting a metric to track if we’re meeting it
• Setting our Sandbox to focus on the right products or services, geographies and distribution channels.

This basic strategy work will be most successful when aligned with four foundational pieces:

1. our core purpose (or our Why, as Simon Sinek calls it - the difference we want to make in the world beyond creating jobs and profit),
2. our vision (or Big Hairy Audacious Goal - BHAG - as Jim Collins puts it),
3. our 3 to 5 year strategic targets - including financial and non-financial, and
4. an awareness and understanding of the trends unfolding in our market and the world. 

​
And let's remember, as CEOs, we’re best off developing our strategy collaboratively with our leadership team, in order to achieve “efficient leadership team buy-in” that supports “accountability for execution” (as discussed in my previous article).
​
From there, we can develop our one year and quarterly execution plan to bring our strategy to life. With the right leadership team members and the right culture, we can execute with efficiency and predictability.  AND, with the right leadership team members and culture, we are much more likely to develop a great strategy with that team. More about that in my next article.

As we’re now mid-way through the first quarter, I want to underline the importance of annual planning. 

Whether you don’t yet do annual planning, haven’t yet gotten to it for 2021, or want to improve, this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches podcast by senior emeritus coach, and a mentor of mine, Ron Huntington in Seattle, Washington, goes over how to complete effective, rigorous and productive annual planning.
​
In this 30 minute podcast, Ron paints a vivid picture of effective planning by applying his experience as a pilot to the discipline of getting a CEO and leadership team from where they are to their desired destination, as quickly and safely as possible.

The process and perspectives he shares mirror the planning I facilitate and coach leadership teams through annually. It’s a disciplined, rigorous, productive, yet tailored process that gets the whole senior leadership team clear on where they’re going and cohesively aligned and committed to how they’re going to get there.

And as the COVID-19 adventure continues, having a flight plan to not only survive - if your business has been negatively affected - but to also thrive, and make the best of the opportunities, is critical for organizations.

Are you ready to grow a great top team, company and life?

​Try our Growth Readiness Self-Assessment to find out where you, your leadership team and company shine and where you could improve in order to grow, improve profitability, consistency and your quality of life.

With our live virtual event with Jim Collins coming up next week (Feb 17, 2021), I thought it fitting that February's Book of the Month be Jim's most renowned book: Good to Great.

​For those new to this classic, here's an overview of one of THE best books on building a great company. And, for those who’ve read it, consider this a brief reminder of the insights from this in depth research.

Released in 2001, Good to Great studied what made 10 “great” companies great, compared to comparable companies Jim called "good". Greatness was defined by a minimum 20 years of growth and sustained financial success that far outpaced the market or industry average.

The book debunked a number of myths and identified 8 key factors to greatness:

1. Good is the enemy of great - the comfort of good enough gets in the way of putting in the effort to build a great company.

2. Level 5 leadership - in addition to ambition and determination, a level 5 leader is humble enough to exert their drive for the benefit of what they are creating, not for their own ego.

3. First who, then what - get the right people on the bus - on your team - before setting your strategy.

4. Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith) - believe you can prevail AND be realistic about what's happening and what's needed to get there.

5. Your hedgehog concept - compete successfully by playing only in the intersection of your three circles: what your passionate about, what you can be the best at and what drives your profit engine.

6. Culture of discipline - look hard at what to NOT be doing, including anything that strays from your hedgehog concept.

7. Technology accelerators - use technology not as a strategy in itself, but to enable and strengthen your competitive advantage.

8. The Flywheel - apply these concepts rigorously through small, consistent, aligned actions that reinforce each other and build momentum over time.
​
We are forever grateful to Jim Collins for these fantastic research-based insights, which still hold to this day, and which the leadership teams we work with benefit from greatly.

Book: 320 pages. Audio book: 6 hours. GetAbstract summary: 5 pages or 10m audio.

Are you ready to grow a great top team, company and life?
​
Try our Growth Readiness Self-Assessment to find out where you, your leadership team and company shine and where you could improve in order to grow, improve profitability, consistency and your quality of life.

In a previous article, I shared how companies need to implement the structures, systems and processes needed to grow. Without this, they either won’t grow beyond the limits of their current structures, or they will grow inefficiently and increasingly unprofitable.

But as a company grows to 50, 100 or 200 employees, the CEO may feel like the company is no longer making real progress with those kinds of improvements. Any changes and improvements they want to make for their company don’t seem to get done, or don’t get done right.

So, how can CEOs increase the momentum?

An Evolution

We know that, as a company grows, the CEO has to get results increasingly through the members of their top team. This is one of the ways companies need to operate differently in order to grow and profitably (other examples are listed in this previous article).

This tends to happen in stages.

In the first stage, the CEO will have their supervisors produce the day-to-day results, while the CEO implements most of the changes and improvements in the business.

As the company grows, the CEO will find that this also becomes too onerous for them or just doesn't work anymore. At that point, they'll look to have the members of their management team also complete improvement projects within each of their departments, and possibly even between and across departments where needed.

And the two keys to making all this happen are: 1) efficient leadership team buyin, and 2) accountability for execution.

A Power Shift

When a company is small, less than 10 or 15 employees, it’s more straightforward to get improvement projects done for the company.

Often, as the owner or CEO, we just do these projects ourselves. 

If we begin to delegate these projects, we simply ask a supervisor to get it done. If they are a strong supervisor, they will usually make it happen.

When we have 25, 50 or 100 employees, it gets harder.

The reason is what’s called “power differential”: the difference between the influence of the owner or CEO and the influence of others, in this case the supervisors or managers reporting to them.

In a smaller company, there is a large power differential.

Here, the owner or CEO is a strong voice that is heard more easily among the small group of employees. There are often no other voices that are similarly strong (unless of course there is one or more partners involved).

It’s also easy to see when someone in a small group is not following through on a project. So each supervisor has a strong motivation to follow through on the owner’s direction.

As the company gets larger, this power differential decreases.

As some departments get larger (eg. a production department), the managers of those departments gain influence. They have now become critical links in the productivity and profitability of the company.

The CEO no longer has that same strong singular voice. One or more other managers have strong voices as well. Employees in their department will often listen as much to their direction as to the direction coming from the CEO.

As well, the CEO becomes more detached from the front-line and may feel less confident about what is the right thing to do. Meanwhile, the influential managers now often have a better perspective on what needs to be done in the operations. This also increases their own sense of power.

This smaller power differential between the CEO and a manager reduces the owner's influence to get the manager to simply take directives to carry out an improvement project they dream up.

While the manager may move the project forward to some degree, the owner will often find that the manager doesn't take full ownership of it.

Combine this with the fact that the manager may not see the value in the project, may not agree with the decision, and will have many demands and competing priorities within their department, and the project will often miss the mark, be late, or fizzle out entirely. 

Owners will often complain that their managers don't take initiative, aren't driven, or don't accept direction well.
 
In reality, it's this lower power differential and the increasing demands on the manager that reduce their motivation to just "do as the boss says".

The result is that getting managers to make changes and improvements in and across a mid-size company becomes more challenging than getting supervisors to do so in a smaller company.

The trick is in the two keys: 1) efficient leadership team buy-in, and 2) team-based accountability.

Efficient Leadership Team Buy-in

Rather than a CEO figuring out on their own what needs improving and changing for the company, and simply delegating those projects to others, they need to shift to making decisions for the company together with the members of their top team. This will enable them and their top team members to make decisions for the company that they’re all committed to.

In short, "people support what they help to create". When leaders are involved in making decisions and feel that their perspective and opinion is heard, they are much more likely to be committed to those decisions and to own and drive the projects to make them happen.

This doesn’t mean the CEO doesn’t get the final say. It’s just 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”.

The top team discusses the problem or opportunity and gets all the 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, 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 leadership team participation, 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 may have gone too far.

Their team's decision-making has 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.

Accountability for Execution

Once there is top team buy-in to a decision, how do we ensure accountability for its execution?

Buy-in is certainly important for accountability. But it’s not enough.

Accountability ensures that leaders assigned with taking on certain improvement projects follow through as best as humanly possible. Accountability also means being open and transparent when a project or special effort doesn’t go as planned, so all possible action can be taken to get it back on track.

Accountability, also, is more difficult as a company grows. And it’s also due to the decreasing power differentials.

Simply following up one-on-one with individual leaders no longer works as well. Again, leaders of larger departments have more power, and their performance is more hidden in a larger company. So there is less pressure to follow through.

The solution is again a team approach.

Mark Green, a colleague of mine in New York, and a colleague of mine in Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches, captured the key ingredients for accountability in his recent monograph titled “Creating a Culture of Accountability”.

There are three ingredients for accountability:

• the CEO’s self-accountability
• role accountability, and
• process accountability.

As the leader of the team, the CEO needs to lead by example, be honest with themselves to ensure they have the right people in the right seats on their leadership team, and raise their expectations of their leaders.

Role accountability is about ensuring each leader is clear about their own and each others’ accountabilities. This includes defining the specific results expected for each role and the metrics that make those expectations clear.

Note that it’s just as important for leaders to be clear on each others’ roles as their own. This ensures only one person is accountable for each function and everyone is clear on what to expect from each other.

Process accountability involves three leadership team elements and a one-one element:
- communicating with leaders about improvement projects in a way that maintains their natural motivation to execute by 1) communicating your belief in their ability to succeed, 2) reminding them why it matters and 3) paying attention to their progress;
- ensuring planning happens before action, on a consistent basis and in an open way, with all leadership team members aware of each others' plans and how they contribute to the whole; 
- having a rhythm of effective and efficient leadership team meetings that ensures regular follow-up on progress and results, while creating a subtle peer pressure that motivates leaders to deliver;
- and regular one-on-one coaching between the CEO and each leadership team member to develop and support performance.

From Directing Individuals to Leading the Top Team

Efficient leadership team buy-in and team-based accountability for execution are the two keys for CEOs to enable continual improvement in their growing mid-size companies.

And we can see a common thread for the CEO: shifting from directing individuals to leading and building the top team.

This shift can be challenging for CEOs who have become comfortable with a directive style. Yet shifting to leading the top team is critical to getting their leaders bought in, executing, and making more progress.


​But is it really progress if you’re not going in the right direction? And how do you know if you are going in the right direction? More on that in my next article.

As we headed into the holiday season, I encouraged the CEOs, presidents and owners I work and interact with to make time to rest and recharge.

2020 was a strange and especially stressful year for many of us. And I think we can all benefit from making self-care a higher priority as we start off the new year.

​This will benefit us certainly, and also our leadership teams, companies and communities.

One excellent resource is a book I use with CEOs that represents, what I believe, is the 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 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 successful company. And there are a few methodologies, like our Scaling Up method 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 executive leader.

​Book: 231 pgs, 3h46m audio. Find the book, ebook and audible book here.
​
Are you ready to grow a great top team, company and life?

Try our complimentary Growth Fitness Self-Assessment to find out where you, your leadership team and company shine and where you could improve in order to grow, improve profitability, consistency and your quality of life.​

As a CEO, have your culture building activities slowed to a crawl since March? Did you feel uncertain about their value and effectiveness even before the pandemic? Or does culture seem like something you should finally start working on? 

I'm honored that Innovation Place has invited me to deliver this engaging webinar with other CEOs to address these questions.

You will learn and apply:
- The real value of a strong culture
- Why culture building is the CEO's job
- How to quickly define your culture so people will buy in
- How to strengthen your culture, in person or at a distance

Register here: https://bit.ly/innovationplace1

I will work LIVE in the webinar with CEO Greg Sutton on TinyEye Therapy Services' culture. You will leave with key culture building tools and guidance on how to use them with YOUR leadership team and company!

All CEOs are encouraged to bring their curiosity, concerns and questions. I will also stay on immediately after the webinar to address any additional questions.

Time: Wed, Nov 18 at 10am CST
Via Zoom: a meeting link will be provided to registrants
Register here: https://bit.ly/innovationplace1

I hope you join us!