When was the last time you did a business checkup? Have you found it difficult to diagnose what is holding your business back from stability and growth? Is your team struggling to make the necessary connections to realize your vision through to action? Are your leaders struggling to anticipate market changes? Is it difficult for your teams to pivot and provide relevant and quick responses to your market and customer needs? Has your strategic planning fallen flat on its face with a lack of accountability and implementation?
If employees are struggling to get their work done, if processes are outdated, if people don’t feel they have a voice—no amount of strategic planning will help. If you’re looking for the best strategic alignment process available to CEOs, it all begins with a company checkup, a physical if you will, with our business X-Ray™ and Stages of Growth roadmap. The Stages of Growth and the use of the X-Ray™ provides clarity to the most critical basic needs of organizational health: Alignment, Engagement and Implementation!
The X-Ray creates Alignment … and this process is the most effective way of immediately creating a common language of growth so your people can both understand and articulate the issues holding your organization back.
When you get everyone aligned around critical issues, it’s much easier to get Engagement because, after all, the participants in this process are articulating those issues themselves, and they are gaining understanding and perspective on how their teammates view their issues.
And if you can engage people in a dialogue around issues they care about, the path towards Implementation reveals itself. The Stages of Growth X-Ray™ enables the participants to identify the action steps needed to address the identified challenges and commit to getting their teams involved.
Alignment:
It’s easy for a CEO to know and understand where they want their company to go and how it will get there. Owners live with the day-to-day challenges of running their company and addressing those challenges. However, we have seen CEOs be surprised at comments from their leadership team that they were uncertain about the vision, and wondered why their CEO, didn’t focus on their issues, or see the pain points they could see that were holding them back. To the rest of the company, they had the impression that the leader only saw what they wanted to see. We have also seen CEOs be frustrated that their team appeared overly focused on issues that really didn’t seem all that pertinent to the company and its growth. This disconnect is unfortunately very typical and is why the X-Ray process is so critical to helping everyone see issues from individual points of view in order to create the critical alignment that is needed to grow and take meaningful action.
The X-Ray process starts out by immediately creating alignment around what the participants view as the company’s top five challenges. Enabled by this process, the entire team is able to agree on areas of concern that need to be addressed in a very short period of time. For the first time, everyone can articulate what those challenges are using the same language. And those challenges are then prioritized for action.
Engagement:
The Gallup studies show levels of disengagement among companies at increasing rates. The latest poll has it as high as 66%. If a CEO is running a Stage 4 company with 45 employees, that means almost 30 of those employees have checked out.
We can’t assume leadership teams are immune to this and the X-Ray process is designed to increase engagement by helping each person find their voice, be able to articulate what they are frustrated with, and share their concerns in an environment that is safe and designed to focus on organizational issues and productive forward movement, not to point the finger at any one individual.
When people are communicating real concerns, they get engaged.
When people feel they are being heard, they get engaged.
When people feel valued for their ideas and solutions, they get engaged.
The X-Ray process creates engagement as soon as people start talking, which happens within 5 minutes of starting the process. I know, that seems hard to believe, right? But, its proven and real. And to make it even better, that conversation continues throughout the entire process, allowing people’s ideas and concerns to be identified, shared, discussed and validated.
At the end of the X-Ray, everyone has a voice in what the company’s top five issues are, what the purpose of those issues are, who will own and be accountable for each issue, and what the outcome will be once those issues are resolved. This result is the very essence of engagement.
Implementation:
The X-Ray process kicks off the implementation piece by helping everyone gain clarity about what everyone perceives are their top issues. Once clarity around the WHAT is gained, the company can get to work on the HOW.
Moving forward, the X-Ray participants can engage their teams and the rest of the company, on what the prioritized focus will be for the organization going forward. All team members will be involved in tracking and measuring the progress of these top issues. It’s now not as easy to get hijacked by the ‘shiny objects’ because there is a visual reminder (their Stage of Growth Map) about what the company said they needed to work on over the coming months.
Gaining an accurate diagnosis of the organizational issues is about getting results, and any company that has gone through the Stages of Growth X-Ray process has already increased their chances of success because there is alignment among the participants, there is engagement within the company and everyone understands the steps necessary for implementation.
Do you want a diagnosis of how accountability, engagement and implementation shows up in your organization? We can help you identify this and other growth obstacles that may be building up in your organization through our Stages of Growth X-Ray™. In three distinct ways we can help you prepare for the next stage of growth:
- Online assessments that are stage-specific, people can get to the heart of the strategic growth issues quickly
- Provides a language of growth that gets to the root cause of growth barriers in a short period of time
- Creates alignment around the top issues that everyone agrees must be addressed right away.
Contact us today to start on your course to business growth.