Have You Unlocked Your Organization’s True Strategic Potential?
Alignment. Engagement. Implementation.
Without these a company will flounder. But as many companies conduct their Strategic Planning Retreats, those plans will stall or encounter too many obstacles because of the lack of buy-in or alignment from their team.
Strategic Planning is the time when every business leader starts thinking about their next year. About the new opportunities. About new products. New services. Maybe expanding to new space. Adding more equipment.
We’ve seen CEOs and their Executive Teams meet regularly to plan and talk about their plan for the next year. Sometimes, they even start inviting some key employees to join in a one-day retreat where everyone talks about ‘new opportunities’. Reality is, most leaders have already discussed their plans ahead of time and take care to make sure the results from their ‘retreat’ mapped what they want the outcomes to be. Sometimes, as an organization gets even bigger, they hire a ‘business consultant’ to run the strategic planning session for them.
Our point is this. Many of these strategic planning efforts were for naught because the leadership didn’t take the time to ‘tap into the intelligence’ of their staff. They didn’t account for their own issues, concerns, priorities.
Some leaders fail to take into account how their staff viewed the growth of their business. They simply talk the talk and it sounds something like this:
“We’re pursuing new opportunities and since we are all in this together, according to our strategic plan, this will be a win-win for everyone! So, we just need you to get on board because we’re taking the company to the next level!”
In reality, employees live in a different world than the leaders do and organizations need to do more to engage them as they work to grow the company.
If we break down the pep talk, it sounds something like this to the staff:
CEO: We’re pursuing new opportunities….
Staff: Here we go again!
CEO: We’re all in this together …
Staff: They have no clue what I do!
CEO: According to our strategic plan …
Staff: I have no clue what they do!
CEO: This will be a win-win for everyone …
Staff: I’m tired of not being paid what I’m worth!
CEO: Just need you to get on board …..
Staff: Can’t they see I’m working all the time?!
CEO: We’re taking the company to the next level …
Staff: How big do we have to get?
If you’ve run a company, you know exactly what we’re talking about! Leaders get excited about the new potential, the new opportunities. The staff not so much.
Our point in all of this is to remind you of the value of the Stages of Growth X-Ray™ process in getting to the root cause of issues and concerns. Of providing a means for each person to be heard on issues relevant to the success of the business. Helping each person understand others’ perspectives and working toward alignment of critical issues.
We’re not against strategic planning, we actually offer strategic planning facilitation. However, we firmly believe that to get alignment, engagement and implementation, you have to start with getting key employees involved in first identifying and fixing the real problems holding you back so you can later get your people excited about something new.
In many cases, the X-Ray identifies the strategic issues that the company needs to focus on while providing tactical approaches, driven by consensus of priorities, and gets everyone working on the issues that keeps everyone up at night. Only by going deep into the critical issues the employees feel are creating the pain, will a CEO be able to create alignment.
Once you have alignment, because working on the issues the team feels are real, you get engagement. And with engagement, and a clear-prioritized list of accountable initiatives, you have a solid plan for implementation.
We want to help you successfully arm yourselves with great information when you work on your strategic plan. Contact us today to find out how the Stages of Growth X-Ray can help create more alignment, engagement, and real implementation to help you reach your organization’s growth goals.
The 7 Stages of Growth Enterprise Development Model was developed by James Fischer. The 7 Stages of Growth are based on a six year study of successful entrepreneurial companies in the Front Range of Colorado and Silicon Valley in California and interviews with over 650 CEOs to understand and decipher the patterns, the behavior and the characteristics of growth in entrepreneurial enterprises.