How can you build a great culture in your company?
​
To find out how to build a great culture 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 and 4 to check your culture 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.

THE POWER OF WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ​

Let organisational psychologist and leading expert in motivation, Adam Grant, open your mind and challenge your notions of what builds resilience. 

Adam will present a 90-minute live, interactive virtual masterclass in a first for The Growth Faculty.

Learn to rethink, unlearn, interrogate ‘truths’ and embrace being wrong to develop the cognitive skills needed to adapt to change and build resilience in the workplace. 

​Adam has been described as a deeply engaging storyteller and a wildly entertaining speaker.   ​

In last week’s blog, I shared a podcast highlighting how CEOs can develop their leadership team members into A-Players by looking in the mirror at their own management style.

The book, 12: The Elements of Great Managing, by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter, can help. 

It highlights twelve key management practices that have the greatest impact on employee engagement as shown by increases in several tangible business performance metrics.

The book is based on two decades of Gallup surveys, interviews, focus groups and statistical analysis.

12 is a breath of fresh air for business owners, leaders and managers overwhelmed by the wide variety of management models and books they’ve come across. It helps by highlighting what makes the biggest difference.

The 12 elements, written from the perspective of the employee, are:

1. I know what is expected of me at work.
2. I have the materials and equipment necessary to do my job.
3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
8. The mission or purpose of my organization makes me feel my job is important.
9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
10. I have a best friend at work.
11. In the past six months, someone has talked to me about my progress.
12. In the last year, I’ve had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

Note that 12 does not hone in on what specific management behaviors or organizational systems to change at a deeper level to strengthen those twelve elements. The twelve elements are those seen and experienced by employees. Less visible dynamics such as leadership team functioning, culture, authenticity and trust underlie them. 

Yet, I have found 12 to be a helpful tool for leaders and managers I work with.

Many management frameworks can either be too high level to be actionable or lose leaders in the weeds with rheams of behaviours and tactics while forgetting the impact leaders need to have on their people in the first place.

12, on the other hand, provides leaders with a relatively small set of clear, tangible practices enabling their people to develop and be more engaged. From there, leaders can clearly identify what they are doing that is helping or getting in the way.

By strengthening these 12 practices in yourself, you can also inspire your leadership team members to strengthen how they manage their people, creating a positive impact on employee engagement, productivity and results throughout your company.

Book: 280 pages. Audio book: 4 hours 15 minutes. Soundview book summary: 8 pages, 20 minute audio.

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


​

There are many common challenges to growing a thriving mid-size company. There are solutions to every one of them (as I’ve shared in this 5 Minute Growth Tip article series). But sometimes it doesn’t seem that way.

It can feel like we’re stuck, like there are no options to address our deepest concerns and frustrations.

We may even hide those thoughts and feelings from others, or even deny to ourselves that we have them. Yet, they still remain in the background of our thinking, gnawing away at our focus and energy.

This is an opportunity to check our thinking.

Our thinking drives our actions. And our thinking can cause us to not take action. 

When we think there’s nothing we can do about a problem, we’ll naturally stand still on that issue. When we believe we can resolve it, we’ll find a solution and drive forward.

Organizational psychologists have researched these two ways of thinking extensively. They are part of what’s called our “locus of control”.

One way of thinking is that our situation is controlled by things that happen outside of us. We believe we are a victim of circumstances or of what others are doing.

This is an external locus of control.

The second way of thinking is that our situation can be influenced by what we do. We believe we can always do something that will make any situation we face better.

This is an internal locus of control.

Think of the word “locus” as “location”. Is our thinking putting the “location” of control of the situation outside ourselves (external) or within ourselves (internal)?

As human beings, we tend to grow up with a tendency toward either an internal locus of control or an external one.

We don’t exclusively think one way or the other, but rather predominantly.

However, we don’t necessarily think one way about everything. There can be areas of our lives and facets of our business that we treat with an internal locus of control mindset, and other areas that we tend to treat with an external locus of control.

As entrepreneurs and business leaders, we often predominantly have an internal locus of control: we believe we can make things happen. 

However, we can also have an external locus of control in certain areas.

For example, we might have an internal locus of control about getting more sales. We know that our actions directly influence our company’s sales volumes, and we look for and find ways to increase them.

Yet, we might have an external locus of control about being able to hire A players. We may believe that there just aren’t any really strong employees out there, or none of them are looking for work, or they all want too much money, or they all hide their faults in interviews, etc.

By switching our thinking to an internal locus of control in this area, we can find solutions.

We can ask ourselves, “what is it that I’m doing that is getting in the way of hiring A players?”  And from there, we can ask “what can I do differently to find A players?”

For example, do I have a clear description of what an A player will produce so I know exactly who I am looking for? What am I doing to network with A players I know in my industry who likely know other A players? Have I shopped around for an excellent recruiting company who can help me find the right people? Have I bolstered my interviewing skills to discover candidates’ true strengths, abilities and qualities? Have we captured on paper the advantages of working at our company, and do we sell great candidates on those virtues?

Believing we have influence over the situation causes us to look for solutions we can act on.

There’s also a way that an entrepreneur’s strong internal locus of control can actually create an external locus of control mindset in another area. I often see this struggle with CEOs and owners I meet.

They complain that they don’t have enough time.

This complaint is coming from an external locus of control mindset: the belief that their lack of time is happening to them. (Note that every complaint is really a form of external locus of control).

When I invite a CEO or owner to flip their mindset to an internal locus of control, and ask themself what they are doing that is causing them to not have enough time, they realize that they are causing the problem.

They often are attempting to jump on every problem and opportunity that comes up, and they are not delegating tasks and roles enough.

In this way, as entrepreneurs, our internal locus of control about solving problems can cause us to have an external locus of control about time.

Our tendency to think we can take control of any situation actually causes us to be so busy that we think we don’t have control of our time. Yet we do. We just need to change how we tackle problems: by equipping others to take care of them rather than solving them ourselves.

This mindset is a key linchpin in growing a thriving mid-sized company. The only way to grow and grow profitably, is to implement the structures, systems and processes to enable that growth. This then requires a leadership team that handles the day-to-day and can help with implementing many of those systems. These systems need to be guided by a solid strategy for competing in the market. That strategy needs to be executed efficiently. And efficient execution requires an A player leadership, as well as efficient buy-in to support accountability. And all of these business practices take time.

As a result, a CEO or owner will want to shift their mindset more fully to thinking about what they are doing, or not doing, that is causing them to be too busy to do these essential things. By doing so, they will get clear on what they need to do differently to free themselves up to shift increasingly from doing to leading. 

And, more generally, the practice of internal locus of control will help any leader, and their top team, look at how they’re contributing to a problem, and what they can do to influence it.

But what if we’re faced with a problem where we just don’t know how we’re contributing to it, and we don’t really know what we should do differently? We’ll tackle that topic in my next article.
​

What can you do to grow your mid-size company?

To find out what you and your leadership team could do 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.

Over this 5 Minute Growth Tip article series, I’ve described the critical leadership team best practices to implement the structures, systems and processes to enable profitable growth.

However, any CEO or owner might be thinking, “I can see how it works, but I’m really busy! I don’t have time for these things. I don’t even have time for family, friends or even myself.”

But rather than say “I don't have time”, what if we asked “how can I make time?”

How can I do less of what I’m doing right now so I have the time to put these best practices in place, to enable the profitable growth I want to see, and lead the life I want to live?

How can I get out of the weeds?


The chicken or the egg

One could maybe end this article right here with the simple guidance “delegate and elevate”.

But it takes more than just delegation. Chances are your team is busy too. So they’ll only be able to take on so much. 

Unless you’re in a financial position to hire one or more new leaders. If so, identify the functions you lead that you want to delegate, hire another leader and get on with making the changes and improvements to the business to get your return on that investment. 

But often, making the financial investment in another leader may not seem financially feasible. Instead, you’re in a chicken or egg position: you need to delegate to make more changes to improve profitability, but you need more leaders to be able to delegate more.

Or you may just be thinking, “we’ve got to be able to get more done with the people we have”.

Regardless of whether or not you invest in a new leader up front, delegating more yourself, and as a leadership team, will enable you to put more of the right structures, systems and processes in place to grow and profitably.

The solution is to increase your leadership team’s efficiency so your team members have the capacity to take on some of your roles and/or lead some internal change projects on your behalf.

How do you do that? By getting the right people in the right seats, improving execution and strengthening leadership team buy-in and accountability.


Right people in the right seats

An efficient leadership team means each team member is doing their job efficiently, collaborating effectively and minimizing drama. If all this is happening, they’ll need less attention from you and they’ll have the capacity to take on roles you’re currently doing. 

This starts with defining the right functions on the leadership team and making adjustments to have the right person leading each function.

Over time, if not early on, other leaders will be able take on functions you’re currently leading. For example, you may still be leading sales, marketing, operations or R&D. What would it be like to have someone else doing a great job fully leading one or more of those areas?

The goal is to make sure each leader is highly productive leading their function(s) and driving high productivity in their respective teams. 

We also want them to behave in constructive ways (aligned with your core values) that minimize drama across the leadership team and within each of their departments. 

Leaders can become even more efficient by ensuring they have the right people in the right seats within their departments and that their people are also behaving constructively.

All of this will also help your leaders create more capacity to lead the kinds of internal improvement projects that you’re leading right now.

See this article for more on getting the right people in the right seats.


Efficient execution

Having the right people in the right seats on your team provides a good foundation. How much of their potential productivity you tap into then depends on how each leader and the team executes.

Through improved execution practices, your leadership team members will deliver better results, need less attention from you, have capacity to take on one or more of your functions and lead improvement projects you might otherwise lead.

Great execution involves:
1) each leader owning clear metrics and targets for the company and their respective functions for the year and the next quarter, 
2) each leader driving 1 to 3 clear priorities for change and improvement for the next year and quarter, with a 13 week action plan to make it happen, and 
3) a rhythm of efficient weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings to hold each other accountable to hit the numbers, move the priorities forward and set new priorities for the next quarter. Daily huddles also help speed things up by identifying obstacles to solve as soon as they come up.

A note regarding choosing those few critical priorities: getting the right people in the right seats needs to be a top priority for the quarter if you want to delegate and elevate yourself, and have your leaders do the same. You will then be rewarded every quarter with a bit more capacity so you can work more on other priorities to move the company forward.

See this article for more on efficient execution.


Leadership team buy-in and accountability

For any of this to work, the leadership team needs to be bought in and committed. The best way is to do all this WITH your team, not TOO your team. 

Discuss and decide on leadership team functions and assignments, set metrics and targets, and decide on company priorities, all WITH your leadership team. This way, they’ll be fully bought into these changes and driven to make them happen.

All these practices will improve accountability and drive efficiency. But you can strengthen accountability further by 1) leading by example in all these activities, 2) raising your expectations of your leaders, and 3) communicating in ways that maintain their natural motivation to execute.

See this article for more on leadership team buy-in and accountability.


Making it happen

Getting the right people in the right seats, improving execution and getting leadership team buy-in and accountability will increase your team’s efficiency and enable you to delegate some of your functions and internal projects, so you can get out of the weeds.

As you gain momentum, you’ll carve out more time for yourself and your team to work on strategy, implement other structures, systems, processes, and build capacity to grow and grow profitably.

Ultimately, you’ll also start to be able to make more time for your family, rekindle old friendships and get back some of the personal things you enjoy.

You probably won’t delegate and elevate in one fell swoop. But bite off what you can and you’ll create capacity to bite off more as you go.

For example, you might find that more than one leader needs to be replaced. Start with one in the first quarter. Replacing even just one unfit leader with an excellent one will help reduce your workload. This will give you some breathing room to make other changes. The same will hold true for the employee changes your leaders make in their departments.

That said, at the foundation of all this is having a rhythm of efficient meetings to make decisions as a team, plan, execute and hold each other accountable. And that takes a commitment of time up front.

So now you may be wondering, “I said I was too busy to implement the best practices for profitable growth, and now Jean-Guy is suggesting solving that by implementing some of those same best practices. I said I’m too busy!”

Here’s the thing… it’s like exercising. We can say, “I can’t run because I don’t have the heart and lung capacity.” But the only way to build up that capacity is to start running. Not alot to start - maybe 500 meters. But start. After a few runs, you’ll have the capacity to run more - maybe a kilometer. In not too long, you’ll have the capacity to run 5 or 10 kilometers.

It’s an investment that pays off. The nice thing is that it pays off as you go. You don’t have to wait until some magical point in the future. But the only way to start getting the payoff is to start.

Of course, you have a choice as to how quickly that payoff grows.

You can try to figure it out on your own, learn some hard lessons along the way, and find that the benefits come slowly. Or, like with long distance running, you can get a coach who can help you and your leadership team learn the right way from the start, help you become more efficient and build up capacity very quickly. More on that choice in my next article.


How can you strengthen delegation in your entrepreneurial company?
​
​To find out how to improve delegation 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. Complete sections 1, 2 and 4 to check your delegation practices. 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 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?
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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.

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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.
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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 common types of processes and systems are needed for any company to grow beyond their 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 unique 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?

Over my 15 years facilitating strategy development, 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 offering 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 just unique. It also has to be valuable. Valuable to who? Customers.

Core Customer

Value 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, ie. “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 numbers, and
4. an awareness and understanding of the trends unfolding in our market and the world. 

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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).
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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.
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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.