Strategy Acceleration

Alignment is a catalyst for speed and a cornerstone for accelerated strategy execution and growth

Research accentuates the important connection between an aligned organization and an organization’s sustained performance. Aligned organizations grow faster, are more profitable, and perform better on indicators including customer retention, customer satisfaction, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement than unaligned organizations.

The connection between an aligned organization and performance and profitability is unsurprising. When an organization is aligned, there is a shared understanding of purpose, and of the strategies, goals, and tactics that will make the organization successful. Organizational alignment energizes the organization and enables people to work together to achieve success.

What distinguishes high-performing organizations is staying aligned. Organizational alignment isn’t a destination – there is no finish line. Rather, organizational alignment is a continuous process and an unending journey. This is because internal and external conditions inevitably change – market realities shift, internal capabilities fluctuate, key personnel move up or move on—and leaders must respond to maintain alignment.

Organizational alignment starts at the top

An organization is the lengthening shadow of its Senior Team. When the Senior Team is not aligned and highly effective, the organization cannot achieve its true potential for success.

Our Strategy and Leadership Team Alignment Process compels the Senior Team to surface and resolve issues—to operate with a very high degree of explicitness and candor, which enhances teamwork and collaboration. Our process includes a series of one-on-one meetings and virtual workshops designed to identify barriers to alignment, foster communication, increase engagement, increase trust, drive better decision-making, improve operating discipline, promote individual leadership development, build the capabilities of the team, and align the organization around key strategic priorities.

Because organizations cannot hit “pause” to focus on organizational alignment, we use real-time business issues and strategic thinking to align on critical issues, operational plans, and key behaviors. The process is agile, fast, flexible, and time competitive.

Clarity, alignment, and engagement throughout the organization accelerates execution

The Strategic Business Framework™ is one cornerstone of our Strategy and Leadership Team Alignment process. Crafting this framework during a series of working sessions helps Senior Team members align around their vision and become explicit about their priorities and the metrics they will use to track performance. The process also involves sharing drafts of the Framework with next levels of the organization, involving and engaging them and helping guide the organization as it pursues its goals.

The Strategic Business Framework is:

• The organization’s response to agreed upon realities about the market, competition, and organizational capabilities
• Part of a process to help create shared accountability and ownership for the success of the enterprise
• Part of a process to help align the Senior Team and the rest of the organization around key priorities
• A mechanism for driving strategic choices, prioritization, and execution
• A vehicle for articulating, teaching, and communicating the organization’s strategic focus
• An opportunity to establish a common language that helps drive understanding and alignment
  

Crafting a compelling strategy is only half the battle – executing against it delivers bottom-line results.

The broader the sense of ownership throughout the organization, the more concerted the collective effort and the swifter the execution of the strategy. Coordinated, collective action can only happen if all key stakeholders are committed to the goal and plan. Through our work with client organizations, we’ve developed solutions that help ensure stakeholder commitment and engagement. These include:

• Senior Team operating mechanisms that ensure ongoing focus on and engagement in executing on key strategic initiatives.
• Helping the Senior Team use the Strategic Business Framework to prioritize work for the organization and – just as importantly – to say “no” to projects and initiatives.
• Engaging and activating next levels of the organization in delivering on key priorities, as well as helping all employees see and understand how they contribute to organizational success.
• Cross-functional Business Acceleration Teams that drive rapid, forward progress on key initiatives and on removing barriers to successful execution.
• Developing change leaders throughout the organization that amplify the voices and actions of the Senior Team, help focus others on key priorities, and ensure strategy execution is sustained over the long-term.