Strategic Alignment and Accountability

We often receive calls from CEOs or senior lead­ers ask­ing us to help improve either the strate­gic align­ment or the account­abil­i­ty in their grow­ing com­pa­ny. And when we dig into the symp­toms and root caus­es we often find some very sim­ple things have slipped as the the com­pa­ny has grown.

In many cas­es, we find a lack of a clear vision of the com­pa­ny they’re try­ing to build. It’s not that those visions don’t exist in the minds of the CEO, senior lead­ers and team mem­bers, it’s that there are 4 or 42 or 4200 dif­fer­ent ver­sions. Some­times, long-term visions have been cre­at­ed, or the CEO may have made a pre­sen­ta­tion on them two or three years ago; but there’s no sin­gle, unde­ni­able vision (that most peo­ple know and can artic­u­late) for peo­ple to focus on and believe in.

Get­ting in Sync with the Vision

In real­i­ty, it’s very hard to get a group of 42 or 420 or 4200 peo­ple in sync – that’s why it is so rare to find in com­pa­nies. So, over the first year or two with clients, we use time-test­ed tools – dis­cov­ered and devel­oped over 25 years – to boil down their vision into some­thing com­pelling and tan­gi­ble enough for peo­ple to sink their teeth into: like a strong and sim­ple bill­board mes­sage that every­one walks by, as they enter their office every day, vir­tu­al­ly or phys­i­cal­ly, to be remind­ed of know who they are and the mis­sion they’re dri­ven to fulfill.

It takes hours of think­ing and debat­ing time to cre­ate these com­pelling (and rel­e­vant) visions – time that’s chal­leng­ing to find in fast-grow­ing com­pa­nies, as every­one tries to keep up with the growth and doing things like hir­ing des­per­ate­ly need­ed new team mem­bers, to take very good care of the new or exist­ing cus­tomers who pay the bills.

But a clear vision makes sure there is strate­gic align­ment with every­one in the com­pa­ny. Every per­son is aligned and point­ed in the same direc­tion – their own true North – plus or minus a few degrees. That clar­i­ty and com­mon pur­pose gives every­one more strength and peace of mind.

Choos­ing a Strat­e­gy To 2X

Once clear on the vision, the strat­e­gy of how you are going to get there becomes crit­i­cal for focus and account­abil­i­ty. We look at plans for 3 to 5 years in the future and call this 2X-ing the Busi­ness: the dri­ve to make the busi­ness dou­ble the size, and at least dou­ble the strength and profitability.

In this process, we boil down all the dif­fer­ent, poten­tial invest­ments of resources (cap­i­tal and human) to decide on the top 3 to 5 that will help to suc­cess­ful­ly get to the next big milestones.

This sounds sim­ple but requires hours of valu­able debate and strate­gic dis­cus­sions, test­ing and iter­at­ing ideas, to tease out what real­ly works and what doesn’t.

Because every­one believes their per­son­al or depart­ment projects are very impor­tant (which, from their per­spec­tive we can under­stand) this is where the orga­ni­za­tion decides on the best invest­ments of human cap­i­tal and finan­cial resources, to make the great­est improve­ment in the company.

Align­ment kicks in when you all com­plete the need­ed debates and agree on the growth strategy.

Account­abil­i­ty kicks in when one exec­u­tive on the team owns each of the major strate­gic invest­ments. Dur­ing annu­al and quar­ter­ly meet­ings, the own­ers of those projects give updates on the progress made, and how you’re get­ting clos­er — and/​or smarter about get­ting clos­er — to those objectives.

Break It Down Every 90 days

Focus & urgency come alive when those 3- to 5‑year goals con­vert into annu­al and quar­ter­ly deliverables.

This struc­ture helps peo­ple to suc­ceed because they are clear on what must be deliv­ered and, every 3 months, report back on what they achieved, what they learned and what they/​we can do bet­ter in the next quarter.

It’s no dif­fer­ent than cram­ming for an exam in high school or uni­ver­si­ty. When you only have an annu­al plan, peo­ple cram for the exam once a year – they’re more like­ly to be suc­cess­ful when they have to pass the test four times a year.

This quar­ter­ly reflec­tion cre­ates a real oppor­tu­ni­ty iter­ate — to tweak plans with bet­ter options or alter­na­tives, based on what we’ve learned in the last quarter.

So, when you have clear, 90-day deliv­er­ables, report­ed on every quar­ter, a lot more progress is made — and all the ques­tions about account­abil­i­ty and align­ment start to fade away because you’ve agreed on what is most impor­tant and have been trans­par­ent about how you deliv­er on your commitments.

Syn­chro­niz­ing the Real Impact

We also ask lead­ers of each invest­ment, project or goal to esti­mate the impact on the bot­tom line, to train peo­ple to think of their project in com­mer­cial and ROI terms. It can be hard to do — and we don’t care if they get the num­ber right — but want them to be able to debate dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties, based on the true eco­nom­ic impact.

We all have ideas that we are pas­sion­ate about and believe will real­ly impact the busi­ness — and some­times we are right! The goal is to get back to facts and to prove out the valid­i­ty and poten­tial impact of an idea before you invest heav­i­ly in a project that could improve prof­itabil­i­ty by $5000, when there’s an alter­na­tive that could impact the bot­tom line by $500,000 or $5,000,000.

Using our heads and look­ing at the num­bers in the game of busi­ness helps us to make smarter decisions.

The Chal­lenge

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the engage­ment, strate­gic align­ment, and account­abil­i­ty of your team?
• What do you think would improve that engage­ment, strate­gic align­ment and account­abil­i­ty by 10 or 20%?

If you need help to enhance your company’s per­for­mance, speak with one of our team of qual­i­fied coach­es to learn how we can help.