An effective business strategy needs more than an arbitrary directive from the CEO. Developing and implementing an effective strategy that moves your company objectives forward is required in today’s competitive marketplace. When that strategy breaks down it is typically due to lack of stakeholder buy in or lack of qualifed and capable talent driving the execution.
Great company leaders tell us that gaining key stakeholder alignment while developing their overall organizational is the key to a business strategy that delivers results and sustains the test of time.
All business operates around multiple cylinders that are crucial to bottom-line success.
The congruency and effectiveness of each business unit working symbiotically with the others directly impacts your company’s ability to grow sales, strengthen customer retention, sustain financial health and optimize the efforts of your workforce.
One of the ways you can accomplish stakeholder alingment is by bringing your team together for a Business Strategy session.
Through a series of leadership exercises, Socratic inquiries and facilitated brainstorming you can gain alignment on the current state (the good, the bad and the ugly) of the business.
Once you do that your team is freed up to begin brainstorming towards the ideal future state of the organization.
With good healthy discussion and some basic ground rules you will stimulate stakeholder alignment on which objectives and goals are required to bridge the gap between the two and ultimately, achieve success.
On a deeper level, you can evaluate the current state and the organizational barriers to growth by conducting an Organizational Assessment. Any good assessment begins with data collection. Data collection could be in the form of assessments, interviews and/or observation; all of these tools help you and your team to better understand the current state of your business as well as help you identify any barriers impeding your organization’s success.
Some of the first areas to analyze include employee & stakeholder alignment, workforce engagement, the leadership and management teams’ strengths, weaknesses and competency gaps, as well as major business process hurdles and roadblocks.
Lastly, it is important to fully understand the team’s aptitude for executing on the critical components of the business strategy.
Two of the best, most conclusive tools I have used as a prelude to Strategic Planning is the Organizational Health Check and the Innermetrix Leadership Assessment both which provide the reader with a diagnostic of the barriers to company and people performance. Additionally, when interpreted with an eye on the future both of these dynamic tools provide a recipe for building a highly engaged, productive and effective workforce as well as a healthy, stakeholder centered organization.
Organizational Effectiveness Health Check: Measures performance in eleven (11) core dimensions of business success and offer expertise in optimizing your strengths and closing the gap on the barriers impeding your objectives.
Leadership Assessment: As a business executive it is important that you surround yourself with highly competent, strategically aligned stakeholders & leaders with the ability and drive to execute on the business strategy. These days you can buy Executive Assessment and 360 degree feedback program on every Google page. What I recommend you look for is a single assessment that measures your leaders in 78 areas of competency, behaviors, work styles, motivations and emotional intelligence. When leaders are aware awake to their strengths, they can consciously work to optimize them. Similarly, when they are open to learning about their weaknesses they can chose how to mitigate them and or, if needed fix them.
A holistic approach to understanding your business serves as the first step in identifying areas that require further investigation and development. Awareness is the first key to high performance, doing something about it is the second.