Go Beyond the Breakers – Part 2

Now that you have clarity on who you are as an organization, and you know where you are going, how do you intentionally plan to get there? Aligning the activities of your organization at every level and maintaining accountability to ensure those activities are realizing your intended outcomes, creates a competitive advantage that will catalyze your organization toward your desired future. Let’s start by looking at a strategic approach to developing the activities for your staff.

 Alignment

While establishing core principles is the first step in creating your organizational design, knowing what your organization could look like in 10 years helps you effectively align and focus your efforts over the next few years, months, and weeks. For example, a company’s strategic plan is going to look very different if the businessowner has a goal to franchise one location to multiple cities over the next 10 years, versus positioning to sell their single location and retiring in the next 8 years. Once there is a refined picture of long-term direction and metrics, teams can begin to intentionally work backwards to develop the businesses’ organizational and personnel structure needed to reach and sustain these goals. Having clear growth goals that everyone in the organization is aware of and responsible for allows all your activities to be intentionally building toward your desired growth…not simply adjusting your strategy to put out the fires of today.

 Accountability

The key to Leap’s organizational design process, and any strategic planning process, is cohesion and alignment of the core principles and long-term and mid-term planning, to inform organizational leaders in building specific weekly tasks for every member, at every level, of the organization. The core principles outlined in part 1, must inform the daily and weekly activities. When you build with the end in mind, you have reverse engineered the daily and weekly activities that will truly cause the vision and mission to become a reality! Employees feel clear about what they are responsible for, and managers know what and how to keep everyone inspired, focused and accountable. Engagement throughout the organization increases because everyone works with a sense of purpose and importance toward the vision.

Weekly meeting rhythms are established to track employees’ progress of important KPIs that keep them moving forward toward the fulfillment of the goals set for the quarter. Because of the clarity that this process brings and everyone having a firm understanding of their expectations, nothing is a surprise. Leadership teams have a clear understanding of what needs to get done so they can track how everyone is moving the organization forward and personnel gaps that need to be filled are more quickly exposed. When leaders have confidence that the daily activities their staff are focused on, staying aligned with the intended goals, those leaders can be assured that they have broken out of the reactive cycle and can focus on creating an intended future.

 Leap Design

Every businessowner and leader knows that there is always more to get done than anyone has time for. Knowing the right activities to focus on is where Leap’s Design Process helps leaders get out of the breaker zone and gives them the confidence to know where to focus today to get where they desire to go tomorrow. At Leap, we believe in developing and coaching leadership teams through a process that utilizes long-term organizational clarity which weaves through every level of the organization and into every employee’s weekly activities. We walk with leaders through a customized process to draw out and clarify their strategic organizational design and improve leadership competencies so they can develop the work place around them.