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How To Break The Profitable Growth Ceiling
How to Increase Momentum to Grow How to Strengthen Your Competitive Strategy How to Build an A-Player Leadership Team The 3 Disciplines of Drama-Free Execution The 3 Ingredients to Get Out of The Weeds The Key Mindset to Grow and Thrive Why a DIY Approach Slows Growth The 8 Options for Outside Support Why Leadership Training Doesn’t Work Do You Have What It Takes? The 5 Criteria to Pick an Executive Team Coach  As more business owners, CEOs and presidents become aware of leadership operating systems like Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, it’s important to remember that these frameworks stand on the shoulders of one of the first frameworks developed for mid-sized companies: Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, by Verne Harnish.
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, like the methodologies that followed in its footsteps, describes a compilation of several tools developed and proven by other great thought leaders, and packaged for owners, CEOs and presidents of mid-sized companies. Released in 2001, the book, for the first time, brought together concepts like getting the right people doing the right things, creating a one page strategic plan, setting quarterly metrics and priorities, and having an effective meeting rhythm. Verne was inspired by the biography and executive team routines of the renowned John D. Rockefeller, who led Standard Oil for 19 years, as well as the practices of many other business leaders, like Jack Welch of GE, Tom Meredith of Dell, Tom Siebel of Siebel Systems and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. The best practices covered in Mastering the Rockefeller Habits are now corner-stones of the more recent Scaling Up system (also spear-headed by Verne Harnish) and the more holistic 7 Attributes of Agile Growth system, summarized in books by the same names. Yet Mastering the Rockefeller Habits is still worth the read. Beyond seeing some of these best practices from another perspective, there are a couple of tools that haven’t been carried forward into later systems: how to de-hassle your company (Chapter 7) and how to make banks compete to loan you money (Chapter 10). Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth focus instead on finding cash from within the company (EOS doesn’t directly address cashflow and profitability). Yet, financing is still often needed. And Mastering the Rockefeller Habits provides some great advice on this. Book: 150 pages, 4 hour audio. GetAbstract Summary: 5 pages, 10 minute audio. How can you strengthen your team’s habits? To find out how to create more discipline on your executive team 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.  STRATEGIES TO ATTRACT AND KEEP TOP TALENT In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 25% discount to Hire, Coach and Keep “A” Players, with Chris Mursau. You might have heard about The Great Resignation phenomenon. In 2021, 1 in 5 Americans left their jobs, and almost a quarter are still considering it. It is a tough market to get talented people into your team, however it has never been more important to get this right. Chris Mursau is the president of Topgrading, an agency helping companies identify and recruit top talent. He has worked with Red Bull, Bank of America, and other Fortune 500 companies to help them assemble the best teams. These companies have tripled or even quadrupled their hiring successes thanks to Chris’ methods. He joins Growth Faculty in May for a 90-minute masterclass on the art of hiring well. He will take a deep dive into the Topgrading philosophy, how to attract A-players, as well as the red flags that often go unrecognised until it is too late. This is not to be missed by anyone who realises the power of the right person in the right seat. “It is extremely important to focus time on getting your hiring process right…. as much time as you spend getting any other process in the business right.” Chris Mursau - President of Topgrading Monday, May 17, 2022 - 8pm in MB, 7pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $130* | OUR NETWORK: $115*  Click on “See more session times / currencies” to see the US/Canada time and currency. *Prices quoted in USD. How can you attract the best people?
To find out how to strengthen your recruitment and selection 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 company’s talent 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 the previous 5 Minute Growth Tip 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 clarifying and strengthening your strategy. From there, other tools and practices can be used to refine the strategy and make it more robust over time. The strategy misconception 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 17 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. Thinking of strategy as what needs to be done, rather than a vision for the business you are building, results in directionless busyness. Imagine building a house with no clear blueprints. How confusing would that be? It’s the same in a company. More Than Unique 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 “Differentiation”. 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 us, and they can’t get it from our competitors, they’ll keep coming back. Hence the more traditional terms used for Differentiation, including Unique Value Proposition, Unique Selling Proposition, Unique Offer and Competitive Advantage. 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 clear differentiation, which is captured in their brand promise: “Low Fares, Lots of Flights, Lots of Fun”. This is unique in the american airline business. Yet Porter’s definition means our differentiation needs to be more than unique. It also has to be valuable. Valuable to who? Customers. Getting Focused This can be tricky. Because what’s valuable to one type of customer is not necessarily valuable to another. To make our differentiation 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 differentiation, 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 deliver on our differentiation 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 focussing 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 differentiation that will be valuable to them. Without understanding our core customer’s needs, we’re just guessing. With clarity about who our core customer is, what they need and what differentiation would be valuable to them, we also want to make sure we can deliver on that differentiation. Maybe we aren’t fully set up right now to deliver on it. But we need to examine if we can get there. Regardless of our differentiation, those unique activities needed to deliver it need to be doable. If not, when we market our offering based on that differentiation, 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. What Sandbox to Play In 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 differentiation, 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 competitive strategy include:
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 - a 10 to 30 year company goal that is bold but stimulates innovation and progress), 3) our 3 year strategic targets - including financial, non-financial, - and 3 year highly achievable goal (or 3HAG as Shannon Byrne Susko calls it) that defines what we want the company to look like, 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 5 Minute Growth Tip article. How can you improve your strategy? To find out what you can improve in your competitive strategy 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 sections 3 and 6 to check your competitive strategy. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  There are many keys to successful execution…priorities, alignment, measurement, lean principles, and more. However, the most critical element is having the right high-performing leadership team around the CEO/President of the company. Bar none. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches webinar, Sean Knutsen, CEO & Co-Founder of Boveda in Minnesota, talks about his experience successfully building High Performance Leadership Teams. Boveda Inc. is the leading producer of 2-way humidity control solutions for a variety of moisture-sensitive products, including cigars and cannabis. Becoming the global leader in any category doesn’t happen overnight. Becoming the global leader in a category that didn’t even exist is even harder. But that’s what Boveda did and continues to do since 1997. How can you build a high performance leadership team?
To find out how to develop a great top team 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 leadership team 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.  As you work with your leadership team on building your business and organization to grow more easily, profitably and sustainably, it helps to have a methodology or set of tools to use, rather than figuring out on your own what best practices to implement.
Over the 17 years I’ve been working with CEOs and their leadership teams, I’ve learned to implement a half dozen methodologies, including the Scaling Up method and the 7 Attributes of Growth tools. Traction, a book written by Gino Wickman, summarizes another such methodology: EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System). Like Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Growth, it goes beyond setting mere mission, vision, values and priorities to also address people and execution. This isn’t coincidental. Gino was a coach in our network several years ago and used our tools. He then founded his own network of coaches and wrote Traction to capture his approach. Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Growth were written since that time and included many best practices that Gino did not, like the daily huddle and cash flow optimization tools. That said, Gino includes a couple of unique tools I have found useful, for example, the People Analyser and the Visionary-Integrator model, which I sometimes implement with the CEOs and leadership teams I work with. The People Analyser is a simple form to quickly evaluate each employee against the company’s core values. The companies I work with use this as input to our talent assessment where leadership team members assess each of their direct reports and then hold each other accountable to coach them up or out. The Visionary-Integrator model is a way for dynamic, creative owners and CEOs to pick and effectively work with a co-CEO who is stronger in the disciplined, structured and organizational aspects of running the company that are needed to enable predictable, profitable and sustainable growth. It enables the owners to do what they do best while also having someone with the other critical skills needed to truly move the business forward. Gino packages the best practices he selected into the six areas of EOS: Vision (including high level strategy and execution planning), People, Data (metrics), Issues, Process and Traction (meeting rhythms). EOS and Traction is a solid, simple approach with easy-to-use tools. In my experience, it works best for smaller companies up to about 25 employees. Beyond that, there tend to be certain challenges that come up that EOS doesn’t address, for example: leadership team cohesiveness, team member productivity, effective hiring, leadership mindset, cascading metrics, planning priorities, clear competitive strategy and financial optimization, planning and forecasting. By contrast, Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth include most of the best practices found in EOS, and also address these additional challenges as they come up. The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth then go beyond to tackle some of the more nuanced challenges of growth like customer experience, systems and change and leaders’ health. See last month’s Book of the Month for more information. If you’re looking for a simplified methodology with user-friendly terminology and a detailed how-to playbook to get started implementing a set of best practices, Traction may do the trick. Book: 251 pgs, 6h56m audio. How can you get more traction? To find out how to make more progress 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.  HARNESSING THE POWER OF TRUST In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 10% discount to Live Book Club Event - Trust & Inspire, with Stephen M. R. Covey. Research tells us trust in leaders is at an all-time low. Yet trust has never been more essential for effective leadership. How do we make sense of this paradox? Join us on 26 April 2022 for a live virtual book club with Stephen M. R. Covey to discuss his ground-breaking book Trust & Inspire. Stephen is an acclaimed thought leader, advisor and organisational expert. He increased the shareholder value of Covey Leadership Centre seventy-fold while CEO, and today he is an expert on the relationship between trust, inspiration and businesses which stand the test of time. Do not miss this event. Sign up today while tickets are still available so you can learn to:
Monday, April 25, 2022 - 8pm in MB, 7pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $75* | OUR NETWORK: $69* *Prices quoted in USD. How can you build trust and inspire your people?
To find out how to lead more effectively 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 to check your company’s 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. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In the previous 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I shared how companies need to implement structures, processes and systems in order 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 an owner or CEO tries to grow their company to 50, 100 or 200 employees, they may feel like the company is no longer making real progress with those kinds of improvements. Any changes they want to make in their company don’t seem to get done, or don’t get done right. So, how can CEOs increase their momentum? We know that, as a company grows, the CEO increasingly has to get things done through their top team. I covered this also in this previous article. The members of their top team are the ones who need to lead improvement projects within each of their departments and between and across departments. The two keys to making this happen are 1) efficient leadership team buyin, and 2) accountability for execution. Why progress slows with growth When a company is small, less than 10 or 15 employees, it’s more straightforward to get improvement projects done. Often, as CEOs, we just do these projects ourselves. As we begin to delegate these improvement projects, we simply ask a supervisor or front-line employee to get them done. If they are a strong employee, they will usually make it happen. When we have 25, 50 or 100 employees, it gets harder. The reason is what’s called “the power differential”: the difference between the influence of the CEO and the influence of others. In a smaller company, the owner 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 employee has a strong motivation to follow through on the owner’s direction. In a smaller company, there is a large power differential. As the company gets larger, the power differential decreases. As some departments get larger (eg. a production department), the leaders of those departments gain influence. They have now become critical people for the productivity and profitability of the company. The owner no longer has that same strong singular voice. One or more other leaders have strong voices as well. They tend to have more influence about decisions made for the company, and certainly their own department. As well, the owner becomes more detached from the front-line and may feel less confident about what is the right thing to do. The other influential leaders now often have a better perspective on what needs to be done in the operations. This also increases their influence. The owner may therefore feel less influence to be able to simply ask others to take on and carry out improvement projects they dream up. They know they need these high-influence leaders to make things happen. And they may recognize that they lose their leaders' commitment and initiative when they just tell them what to do. The result is that getting leaders to make changes and improvements in and across a mid-size company becomes more challenging than getting front-line employees and 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 Buyin 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 in collaboration with the members of their top team. This will enable them and their top team members to make company decisions that they’re all committed to. In short, as the saying goes, “people support what they help to create”. 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”. 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 have gone too far. Their 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. Accountability for Execution Once there is top team buyin to a decision, how do we ensure accountability for its execution? Buyin 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 changing power differentials. Simply following up one-on-one with individual leaders no longer works as well. Leaders of larger departments have more influence, 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 Virginia, and a peer member of 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:
Self-accountability is where the CEO, as the leader of the team, leads by example by acting accountably themselves, ensuring they have the right people in the right seats on their leadership team, and raising 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 others. Process accountability includes communicating about decisions they’ve made in a way that maintains leaders’ natural motivation to execute. This includes believing in their ability to succeed, reminding them why it matters and paying attention to their progress. Process accountability also involves: - ensuring planning happens before action, and on a consistent basis, - having a rhythm of effective and efficient meetings that ensures regular follow-up on progress and results, - and regular one-on-one coaching between the CEO and each leadership team member to develop and support performance. From leading 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 to grow their 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? More on that in my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article. How can you increase your momentum? To find out how to make more progress 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 sections 1 and 4 to check your company’s leadership team and 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.  TEAMWORK AND HIGH-PERFORMANCE CULTURES IN THE POST-PANDEMIC ENVIRONMENT In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a $50 discount to Building High Performing Teams, a 2.5 hour interactive virtual event with Patrick Lencioni. This April, join us as 12x New York Times bestselling author, Patrick Lencioni, presents an unmissable live virtual event; Patrick Lencioni: Building High Performing Teams. Pat's work has transformed thousands of workplaces globally through practical frameworks to elevate teamwork, attract star performers, multiply intellect, maximise talent and ensure high performance flourishes. Back by popular demand, over 2000 Growth Faculty professionals have rated Pat as 9.6/10. Pat will bring game changing research to transform your team and your business. Don't miss Patrick Lencioni. "one of the most in demand speakers in America." Wall Street Journal - "one of the most coveted speakers in the world." Forbes Tuesday, April 26, 2022 - 6pm in MB, 5pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $295* | OUR NETWORK: $245* *Prices quoted in USD. How can you build a high performing team?
To find out how you can build a healthy, high organization 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’ve found that a growing number of CEOs and executive teams are becoming familiar with leadership operating systems for midsize companies; systems like The Rockefeller Habits, Scaling Up or the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), that are summarized in books by the same names.
These systems have been built on each others’ shoulders: the Rockefeller Habits compiling best practices from a variety of thought leaders, EOS expanding on the habits and making them more accessible to small businesses, and Scaling Up adding more best practices to strengthen strategy, profitability and cash flow. When CEOs and their teams successfully implement these methods, then growth, and even profitable growth becomes easier, especially if they're working with a leadership team coach. However, as companies grow, the journey becomes more complex and some gaps can become apparent in these systems. I’ve also found that some companies struggle to implement these methods because certain elements aren’t covered in much depth; things like accountability, how to set metrics, targets and rocks, and how to get executive team alignment. While I use the Scaling Up method and the Rockefeller Habits with the companies I work with, as well as some of the tools that are unique to EOS, I also rely on a system that builds on their shoulders to fill the gaps and address some of the more subtle challenges of growth: The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth. The book, again by the same name, was written by Keith Cupp, CEO of Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches, the global community of executive team coaches I am a part of. The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth is a monograph, a relatively new format of book, being made popular by certain thought leaders, like Jim Collins with his Flywheel monograph. Monographs are relatively short, at 40 to 80 pages, designed to cover a narrow topic or provide a high level overview, and be read in one sitting, like on a short-haul flight. The book outlines the attributes of companies that are successful at not only growing, but also overcoming the new challenges that come with growth and adapting to a constantly changing environment in order to keep growing sustainably and profitably over time. These 7 Attributes include Leadership, Talent, Strategy, Execution, Profit, Customer and Systems. The leadership attribute is where the executive leadership team has done the work to become authentic, healthy, and aligned. Talent is about leaders and managers pursuing a culture of trust, results, and accountability with their people. The strategy attribute is where the executive team has defined and evolved a unique and valuable position in the market, and it can be easily recalled and stated by all employees in one phrase. Execution includes having annual, quarterly, and personal targets and priorities that are visible, measured, and activated successfully with a 13-week sprint. The profit attribute is where cash flow has been optimized, and the executive team understands the forces and levers in their control to increase profit and cash. The customer attribute is where the core customer has been defined, a compelling promise has been crafted, and the customer lifecycle has been systematized. Systems is where the organization has defined methods to optimize core processes, change management, decision-making, and technology use. The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth is an introductory monograph to the overall operating system. Separate monographs are being developed for each attribute. So far, four monographs have been released, going into some depth on: accountability, profit and cash flow optimization, A player talent, and competitive strategy. Monograph: 56 pages. How can you grow an agile company? To find out how to implement a leadership operating system 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.  Whenever I start working with a CEO and their executive team, they realize very quickly that most of their efforts to strengthen their company ultimately hinge on people. Their efforts to manage things, to move things forward, to change things, to improve things… these all need more than things. They need great people. They’ve known this. They believe this. But somehow, they’ve never put it at the top list. And yet, it gets in the way of progress every time. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches podcast, Jay Niblick, founder and CEO of Innermetrix and co-founder of WizeHire, walks through the key elements of the People Problem, and how to address it successfully within your business. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android How can you solve your people problem?
To find out how to strengthen your people 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 company’s people 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.  BUILDING BETTER HABITS: HOW TO MAKE CHANGE AT A MOLECULAR LEVEL In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 10% discount to How To Get 1% Better Every Day with James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. Nine out of ten habits don’t last. Why? Often, it is because we try to change too much too quickly. It becomes unsustainable, and we fall back into old ways we know don’t work. Introducing James Clear; #1 New York Times bestseller of Atomic Habits and expert in habit formation. In this 90 minute masterclass he will explain the psychology of how our brains form habits. By making incremental changes at an atomic level, we can ensure that these habits will stick. Fine margins can have profound results. This is a must-not-miss for anyone who has been held back by their own bad habits. Over 5 million people have bought his book Atomic Habits. By aiming to be 1% better each day, they are rewiring their brains to be more productive than they were yesterday. Tuesday, April 5, 2022 - 6pm in MB, 5pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $130 | OUR NETWORK: $115 *Prices quoted in USD. How can your team strengthen their execution habits?
To find out how to improve your executive team’s habits 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 company’s execution habits. 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 the 11 years I’ve been an independent 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 owner or 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. Owners, presidents and 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 team The changes needed for a growing company are driven by the added complexity that comes with having more employees. Think simply of going from 2 to 4 employees. This makes the number of relationships between individuals increase from 1 to 10. This complexity continues exponentially as the company grows from 10 to 25 to 50, 100, 200 employees or more. 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:
Hitting the ceiling, valleys of death Any company within one stage will usually hit a ceiling if they keep doing things the same way they always have. 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 big 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 leaders. So what stops a company from making the right changes and improvements to grow successfully and profitably? The CEO and leadership team are the linchpin From these stages and key changes, we can see early in a company’s life - by about 25 employees - that an owner or CEO has to learn to get results from people through other managers. That means the changes and improvements the company makes will depend on the CEO working WITH top level managers as a team…a leadership team (or management team, executive team, or whatever you want to call it) . And, very often, leadership teams in mid-size companies are working in silos and at cross purposes. They often are too focused on the day-to-day, so the big projects to move the company forward often don’t get done or aren’t done right. The result is the company doesn’t identify or successfully implement the right processes, systems and structures to handle the increasing complexity of a growing company. It’s the CEO’s job to pull their leadership team together, get them all going in the same direction, moving in lockstep, making the needed changes and improvements to enable their broader team to keep growing. An always-evolving leadership team The challenge of having an effective leadership team 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 need to evolve as well. The crucial underlying challenge to achieving profitable growth is to build, maintain and continuously improve a great top team that is highly capable, aligned, leading and executing effectively and efficiently, and therefore minimizing silos and strengthening execution between and across departments. Essentially, working as one unit to move the company forward because the owner CEO can’t do it alone…because it’s too much for the owner or CEO to do it alone, at least effectively and sanely. More about that in my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article. What systems can you improve to grow a thriving company? To find out what systems you and can improve 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. *These examples of structures, systems and processes are drawn my own experience over my last 16 years coaching, facilitating and advising, and from the 7 Stages of Growth research: a 6-year study of entrepreneurial companies in the Front Range and Silicon Valley including interviews with over 700 CEOs to understand and decipher the patterns, the behaviors and the characteristics of growth in entrepreneurial enterprises. This research was led by James Fischer, Founder of Origin Institute, a research and consulting company out of Boulder, CO.
 In my experience, CEOs are often leery of hiring a leader to take over sales, even though it will free up the CEO to work more on building the business. The issue they state is often that they’re concerned the lifeblood of the company will slow down or go sideways. The root issue is that they don’t really know how they’ll keep tabs on the sales leader, ie. what metrics to track. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches podcast, Mike Carroll, founder and managing partner of Intelligent Conversations, shares his insights into how best to measure your sales team’s success. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android How can you grow your company’s sales?
To find out how to increase your sales 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.  Scaling Up, written by Gazelles’ founder, Verne Harnish, and contributing coaches in 2014, is a summary of the leadership and management system I use as a foundation for my work with CEOs and executive teams. It builds on Verne’s 2001 book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.
It’s a compilation of countless best practices, tools and stories that help CEOs and their leadership teams focus, align and grow their companies. It organizes these best practices into a fairly holistic system set up to meet the needs of midsize companies. The book, and management system, address four critical decision areas: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. The People section is about ensuring that all our employees are happy and engaged, that we would enthusiastically rehire them all, and that we’re creating a harmonious culture of accountability. Strategy tackles building strong, sustainable topline revenue growth by creating a unique offering in the market that is valuable to our most profitable type of customers. Execution is about reducing drama and converting revenue efficiently into industry-leading profitability. The Cash section helps ensure companies have consistent sources of cash to have options, make wise decisions, and fuel growth. The Scaling Up system is flexible and scalable. It includes a number of simple, practical & actionable tools, like the popular One Page Strategic Plan. One reaction I often hear from CEOs is “there are so many tools and best practices crammed into this book…it’s like drinking from a firehouse”. And it’s true, as a summary of hundreds of best practices, most pages refers to several other well known - and lesser known - thought leader books. And there’s no real roadmap in the book for how to implement them all, or where to start. Without an executive team coach to guide the process, the book can feel a bit overwhelming. Maybe surprisingly, from an Executive Team Coach’s perspective, there are some important areas that aren’t addressed in the book… areas that have come to light since the book’s launch in 2014. I’ll address these other areas in my next book introduction, on The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, another methodology I use with CEOs and executive teams to build on Scaling Up. Book: 245 pgs, 8h50m audio. Get-Abstract summary: 5 pgs, 10m audio How can you scale up your company? To find out how to implement an integrated system 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.  A BUSINESS THAT FAILS TO INNOVATE IS A BUSINESS THAT FAILS EVENTUALLY In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 10% discount to How to Build Invincible Companies with Alex Osterwalder, author of Business Model Generation. Nothing lasts forever. But when you innovate, you start again a thousand times. You become functionally invincible. Dr. Alex Osterwalder is a world-renowned expert on innovation and has developed a framework by which a company might reinvent themselves and stay ahead of the curve; as he puts it, they become ‘invincible’. In this 90-minute virtual masterclass, he will delve into his definitive work The Invincible Company, providing a revolutionary model for how leaders might leverage innovation to stay ahead of the curve regardless of what may come tomorrow. With his very specific approach to innovation, you can ensure that you don’t just survive in the future, you thrive. Tuesday, March 1, 2022 - 4pm in MB and SK  NON-MEMBER: $130 | OUR NETWORK: $115 *Prices quoted in USD How can you grow a thriving company?
To find out how to build a thriving company 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.  If you think you’re a fit for business, growth and executive team coaching, you may be ready to look for a coach that’s a fit for you.
In my experience working with executive teams over the last 17 years, I’ve found there are five key criteria to consider in an executive team coach:
Knowledge Whether you’re looking to more easily grow your company, get more profitable, or have more time or quality of life, you’ll want an executive team coach who knows the right best practices to help you and your top team get there. The easiest and best way to figure this out is by looking at what methodologies they use and whether those align with what you want to achieve. There are several reputable, holistic methodologies developed for senior leadership teams of midsize companies. These include: Scaling Up, the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System), the 7 Stages of Growth, among others. A coach that uses a reputable methodology will help ensure your team learns and implements best practices that are tried, tested and true, not simply based on the latest business fad or one person’s opinion. The creators of these methodologies haven’t developed their own best practices. They’ve only curated and compiled best practices that have already been researched and developed by the world’s best thought leaders and applied in the most successful companies. A holistic methodology will help ensure that all the critical aspects of a management team and company are addressed and supported. For example, not only is it important to develop a great competitive strategy, but also to develop an efficient plan to execute it. Great strategy and execution can only be enabled through great people. And great people will only contribute their best with great leadership and a highly cohesive team. And all of this leads to bottom line results only by aligning them with a focus on optimizing profit and cashflow. A holistic methodology addresses all the legs of the stool so the business is built sturdy and strong. Note that some of the methodologies above are more holistic than others. Generally, the larger the company or the more you want to grow, the more holistic a methodology you will want your coach to know. While a simpler methodology like EOS is a great starting point for smaller companies (say 5 to 20 employees), a more holistic methodology like Scaling Up, and then the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, will enable you and your executive team to learn and implement the same basic best practices and then learn the others needed to get to the next level. Also, all of these methodologies have simplified the best practices to fit mid-sized companies. This is critical. A CEO and their senior team need to address a number of things, as discussed above. But your mid-size company likely only has so much capacity. You don’t have large departments to handle extra complexity. So, you and your team need to do just enough in each aspect to move the needle, while not doing so much in one of them that there’s no time to work on another. This means the best practices need to be simple and easy to implement. One sign that a coach has the knowledge to help you and your leadership team achieve your goals is when they know and use more than one of these methodologies. This means they can pull in whatever best practice is needed for the situation. No methodology includes all the best practices needed for every type of decision a CEO and their top team will need to make. So, being able to pull in the right tool for the right situation is key. While it’s important to pick an executive team coach who does use A reputable, holistic methodology of simplified best practices, which specific methodology (or methodologies) they use is less important. The coach themselves is more important: their experience, abilities, results and your chemistry with them. You can pick a coach who uses a methodology that resonates with you. But this doesn’t guarantee they’ll be great at teaching and facilitating those tools, or at guiding the process to help your team get results. You could also pick a coach who uses a methodology that’s not your first choice. But they may be an exceptional coach, teaching and facilitating best practices in very effective ways that truly move your business forward. Experience The most important experience you’ll want to look for in a business, growth & executive team coach is how much they’ve worked with and supported both CEOs and executive teams. This will affect how much they understand the challenges CEOs and their teams face, the dynamics often at play on such teams, and how to address them successfully. Unfortunately, there are low barriers to entry in the coaching field, so you’re best to look for a coach who has lots of experience. Broad business experience working with many different kinds of companies is also important. Having experience leading or working in different functions of a business, such as marketing, sales, operations, HR, IT and finance can also be a great asset. All this will allow your coach to share experiences from different sectors and relate them to all the members of your senior team. Now, you may be wondering if you should get someone who specializes in your industry. My guess is that industry experience is something that’s important to you when you’re hiring leaders and employees. So, you likely have a whole company full of industry experts. And yet, are you growing as fast, as profitably or as easily as you know you could? In my experience, having the right executive team coach is not so much about industry expertise. It’s about knowing how to consistently scale over time as a leadership team, and that’s where they bring their expertise. They’re never going to know as much as you will in your domain, and you’re never going to know as much as they do about getting management teams to scale companies. So, if you’re looking for a like-minded industry expert who’ll reinforce what you already know, and echo everything you say, then look for someone with lots of experience in your industry. But if you’re looking for someone to push, challenge and hold you and your executive team accountable, help clarify your goals and priorities, help clarify your thinking, an executive team coach with a broad base of experience will be a good fit. You may also be wondering if you should get a coach who has been a CEO. This is a valid question as it’s common to believe that someone who has done our job will be best able to coach us. But that’s not necessarily true. Consider Usain Boldt, widely considered to be the greatest sprinter of all time. He’s an eight-time Olympic gold medallist and eleven-time world champion. He’s the world-record holder of the 100 meter, 200 meter and four by 100 meter relay. His coach, Glen Mills, never ran in the Olympics. In fact, he dropped out of sprinting at the age of 14 because he wasn’t very fast. He then became an amazing coach to many olympians. Although Glen never ran the kind of races that Usain did, Usain would be the first to admit he wouldn’t run as fast if it weren’t for Glen’s great coaching. On the other hand, we’ve all heard stories of hockey or football greats who made poor coaches. While it’s possible for a great CEO to become a great coach. It’s not necessarily the case, nor is it a requirement. Ability Coaching and team facilitation are skills that take years to develop and hone. They are each combinations of technical, behavioural and relationship skills that are best developed alongside keen self-awareness and attention to self-improvement. This doesn’t happen overnight. One way to get a sense of someone’s coaching and facilitation skills is to look for how many years they’ve been practicing each of them, and how much. Another way is to notice their coaching skills in your initial conversations with them, and to ask them to do a brief facilitated trial session with your team. Someone with good coaching skills will cause you to think more deeply about your team, your business and your life. They will inspire you to a new level of openness. They will challenge you by asking tough questions. They may share some principles, but they will avoid trying to tell you what you should do. They will facilitate your thinking so that you have the realizations, you come to the conclusions, and you make the decisions that are right for you in that moment… because you came to them yourself (albeit with some support and guidance) and therefore you believe in those decisions. Yet, they will also teach, share experiences, observations and opinions when needed. A coach’s team facilitation skills are related to, but different from, their coaching skills. Great coaching skills enhance a coach’s facilitation skills. But group facilitation is also a skill in itself. To get a sense of these, ask the coach if they’d be willing to do a brief session with you and your top team for you to see them in action. A coach with strong facilitation skills will help your team stay focused, explore the issues from all angles, and come to clear decisions with the strong support and commitment from the whole team. Results At the end of the day, what you want from engaging a business, growth & executive team coach are results. That said, the coach won’t create those results. You and your team will. But the coach will help you and your team 1) set goals that are important to you, 2) determine how to get there, 3) solve problems along the way, and 4) achieve those results over time. Their support and guidance needs to be focused and purposeful. One good sign that a coach is results-focused is to notice what they ask you in your initial conversation. Do they try to understand what you want for your company, your work life and your personal life in the future? Do they get you thinking deeply about the biggest challenges to getting there? And do they demonstrate a clear understanding of the path to tackle those challenges and get to where you want to be. Another way to gain confidence that you’ll get results is by asking about the work they’ve done with other CEOs and executive teams. They should be able to share clear examples of challenges they’ve helped them overcome and results they’ve helped them produce. In the end, the results a coach has helped produce with other companies won’t guarantee you’ll get great results with them yourself. But you’ll have some level of confidence that they can help you get there. The rest will depend on how well you work together. Chemistry Chemistry is important in an ongoing relationship like you will have with an executive team coach. You’ll work closely together and for some time, so you might as well also enjoy it. This largely comes down to being aligned on what drives each of you. What’s their Why, as Simon Sinek says, and does that connect with yours? Do they want to make a difference in the world that’s compatible with the difference you want to make? If so, you’re more likely to work well together. You’ll also want to look for clues that you have compatible values… that similar things are important to you in life. Your coach will be more emotionally invested in your efforts when they believe in what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And lastly, you just get along. There will be ease in interacting with the coach. You’ll feel comfortable and accepted, but also kindly challenged to do better. Picking a business, growth & executive team coach that fits you, your team and company takes a bit of thought… about their knowledge, experience, ability, results and chemistry. But the results will be well worth the effort, especially if you’re also a good fit for coaching. How can a great business, growth & executive team coach help you grow a thriving company? To find out what areas a qualified executive team coach can help you improve in 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’ve met many CEOs and business owners who’ve said they need to get their business processes down on paper to make the business less person-dependent. Yet, too often, the effort gets put off. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches recorded webinar, David Jenyns, serial entrepreneur and author of Systemology, discusses the simple methods he discovered to get employees to turn their knowledge into processes in order to create consistency, efficiency and scalability across a company. David shares the Systemology approach and dispels the following common myths that cause leaders to put off documenting processes:
How can you develop systems in your company?
To find out how to develop systems 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 7 to check your systems. 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 our work with CEOs and their leadership teams, we often find business owners’ expectations of their returns from their business are too low… too low for the health and sustainability of their business, too low to support their growth aspirations and too low relative to what they’ve invested in the business. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches podcast, Greg Crabtree, speaker, entrepreneur, financial expert and author of Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!, outlines what returns entrepreneurs should expect from their investment capital, and how they can increase their return on that investment. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android
How can you improve your company’s profitability? To find out how to increase your bottom line 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 5 to check your profit 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.  HOW TO SAY LESS AND ASK MORE TO BE MORE EFFECTIVE In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 10% discount to How to Tame Your Advice Monster with Michael Bungay Stanier. Organisational learning and development expert, Michael Bungay Stanier, knows which of the three advice monsters has you by the throat. Importantly, he knows how you can shake off your advice monster to become a more coach-like leader and get more out of your team without needing to work harder yourself. In this 90 minute live virtual masterclass, Michael draws on the experience of training more than 10,000 managers in everyday coaching skills, and his new book, The Advice Trap: Be humble, stay curious and change the way you lead forever. Michael reveals how to use curiosity to say less, ask more and lead better and spend more time doing work that matters. “… learning to do less can be painfully hard. Fortunately, Michael Bungay Stanier applies his signature wit and clarity to the challenge, which means making Hard Change just got a whole lot easier.” – Liz Wiseman Tuesday, February 22, 2022 - 6pm in MB and SK NON-MEMBER: $130 | OUR NETWORK: $115 *Prices quoted in USD. How can you develop people in your company?
To find out how to develop your leaders and talent 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 talent 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.  I’ve long been interested in strengths-based development. So I was glad when I finally dug into Strengthsfinder 2.0 from Gallup, and written by Tom Rath.
Tom worked with the late Donald O. Clifton, father of strengths-based psychology, and author of Now, Discover Your Strengths with Marcus Buckingham. This book, Tom’s sequel to Donald and Marcus’, coincided with the release of version 2.0 of the Strengthsfinder assessment. Tom reiterates the message from the first book: we are better off focussing on roles and activities where we can further develop our strengths, rather than trying to become strong in areas we simply are not. The storyline of the underdog is a common one in our culture. The unlikely candidate for greatness in a certain sphere overcomes their weaknesses and beats the odds. However, it’s also the path of most resistance and rarely works. The reality is that someone who has always struggled in a certain area is unlikely to become great at it. Rather, our best opportunity for growth, and greater productivity and impact, lies in our areas of strength. Here, we improve easily and quickly, achieve and refine excellence, and can take our impact to new heights. The rest of the book describes the 34 strengths using the same language as the original book. For each strength, it adds “ideas for action” to capitalize on it. If you’ve read the first book, you may find this one light on added insights. New readers will get big value from it and the assessment. Used by a leadership team, they can help team members be more productive, enjoy their work more, and collaborate with each other more effectively. Book: 192 pages; Audio Book: 4 hours 9 minutes. How can you develop talent in your company? To find out how to develop your leaders and talent 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 talent 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.  Happy holidays from my wife Janelle and I! We wish you, your employees, and your families, a restful, joyous and safe holiday season.
And for 2022, we wish you all the success in growing a thriving top team, company and life!  Why is it that some leaders can be counted on in critical situations and others can’t? What are the key characteristics of these A-players and what makes them different from their peers? In working with CEOs and business owners, this is one of the early conversations we have: “Who are your A-players and how can you tell they’re performing at that level? And what are the behaviors to look for and cultivate in your other leaders to get them to that same level (or decide to part ways)?” In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches recorded webinar, Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers, discusses her key findings on these questions in her new best-selling book Impact Players. Based on a study of 170 top contributors, Wiseman identifies the mindsets that prevent otherwise smart, capable people from contributing to their full potential and the five practices that differentiate Impact Players: • While others do their job, Impact Players figure out the real job to be done. • While others wait for direction, Impact Players step up and lead. • While others escalate problems, Impact Players move things across the finish line. • While others attempt to minimize change, Impact Players are learning and adapting to change. • While others add to the load, Impact Players make heavy demands feel lighter. Wiseman makes clear that these practices—and the right mindset—can help any employee contribute at their fullest and shows leaders how they can raise the level of play for everyone on the team. How can you develop Impact Players in your company? To find out how to develop A-player talent 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 talent 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.  Underpinning the Scaling Up system and 7 Attributes of Agile Growth framework I use with my clients are methods developed by many great business thought leaders.
One of these methods is the Where to Play choices in A.G.Lafley and Roger L. Martin’s 2013 book Playing To Win: How Strategy Really Works. The book draws on their experience working together on the strategy transformation of Proctor & Gamble from 2000 to 2009, and distills strategy down to its essence so it’s useful and effective for any size company. They underline first that strategy is about choices. Making trade-offs to focus a company on the higher opportunities for success, rather than spreading a company thin. Their strategy framework includes choosing: 1) how you define winning, 2) where you will play in the market, 3) how you’ll win/compete, 4) what capabilities must be in place and 5) what management systems are needed. Playing to Win helps make better sense of strategic terms like vision, target market, value proposition, core competencies, etc., and helps tie it all together in a logical way. However, it offers few practical tools or specific processes. And some of the long P&G stories seem to miss the point. That said, it’s a great book for those who’ve been exposed to strategic thinking tools and want to deepen their understanding. Book: 272 pgs, 7h9m audio. How can you develop a winning strategy? To find out how you can strengthen your strategy and 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 sections 3 and 6 to check your competitive strategy. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  As Jim Collins outlined in the book Good To Great, we know that great companies start with having great people. And yet, finding and selecting great people remains elusive to many growing companies, their CEOs and leaders. In our work with these folks, we recommend the Top Grading process to drastically increase the odds of hiring A-players, which we define as being both highly productive and a great fit with our values. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches podcast, Michelle LaVallee, Gravitas Impact Alumni and Topgrading Champion, who has conducted over a thousand Topgrading Interviews across multiple industries worldwide, shares the top 6 ways in which to increase your chances of hiring an A-Player and decrease the risk of hiring other candidates. During this Topgrading overview, Michelle reviews best practices that include:
Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android How can you improve the people element in your company? To find out how to get your people right 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 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. |
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