Plan
Leadership strategy is not only a subset of your overall commercial strategy, it is its lifeblood. We work with you to identify the critical leadership roles necessary for success, assess those competencies necessary by level, establish both a bench and pipeline of leadership talent to feed into these, and create succession plans to ensure the turbulence of unexpected losses are minimized.
Teams
The impact of the leadership team goes significantly beyond the ability of any one leader’s influence – in both potentially positive and negative directions. We work with your leadership team to harness the synergy (and process gain) that can come from a high performing team. We do this by examining the composition and characteristics of the team, identifying strengths and blindspots, aligning team members with overall strategic intent, creating strong team rules of engagement, building trust and managing conflict for performance improvement.
Awareness
Self and team awareness sits at the heart of both leader effectiveness and leadership development. This awareness is not only based on the leader’s ability to assess leader impact on outcomes and the leaders’ areas for development – it also must be in the context of a solid understanding of an appropriate leadership framework. Drawing upon our strong Industrial-Organizational Psychology background, we use the most robust psychometric diagnostic tools in personality, values, beliefs and attitudes to assist leaders and leadership teams build this awareness. Further to this, we also design and deploy company specific multi-source feedback tools to best match leader development with strategic direction.
Development
One of the best investments companies will ever make is in the development of their leaders. We work with your company to identify and harness your internal engines for leadership development; multi-source feedback, mentorship, coaching, action learning, networks and job rotation. We also develop and deliver targeted leadership development for both individuals and cohorts. These range from short executive education style workshops, to executive coaching to real world company project based development, to competency focused expansion of behavioral repertoire.
Execution
Strategy provides focus, as well as aligned allocation of effort and resources. We take your industry expertise & commercial strategy and help you create the space where your people are wildly successful. The best strategies are built around a singular intent, driven by a small number of imperatives and simple enough to create organizational agility. The modern competitive landscape is typified by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. A simple strategy capable of adaptive execution will serve far better under these conditions.
Change
The truly agile organization must be change ready. Too much reactive and poorly thought out change, can create both cynicism and change fatigue. We work with your company to minimize the shock / intensity of change, anchor it with those foundational elements of your business and use it to build momentum for growth. Building tuning and adaptation into your organizational rhythm will prepare your workforce for the unexpected shifts that may occur in a volatile marketplace.
Culture
It’s said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. This coupled with the fact that culture exists at many levels in organizations suggests that culture should be deliberately managed, particularly at the ground level (micro-culture). We work with your leadership to understand how they best can embed and reinforce the right culture – reinforcing workforce values, beliefs and attitudes as drivers for behaviors that are critical to your strategy. We work with you to assess, diagnose and build cultural change plans to move your culture from its current to its ideal state.
Alignment
Any shift in strategy can create legacy elements (orphans) of previous approaches that are misaligned with your current direction. We work with you to assess your key and critical processes (such as funding, decision making, incentive programs, project hand-off, customer service…) to ensure they are smooth, elegant, and aligned with your strategy. We also work with you to ensure your leadership is aligned with your strategy, both horizontally (reducing silos) and vertically (cascading).
Labor Shortage Solution
In recent years, a lack of human capital to fill skilled labor positions is the number one business challenge companies face. Traditional means of recruiting and hiring fail 1/5th of the time, and new employee turnover is at 23% as opposed to 16% for those employed with their companies over 1 year. In order to change the pattern, alternative talents pools must be uncovered.
Roughly 200,000 military personnel exit the US Armed Forces every year. This eager and loyal workforce is looking for the right company to work with and for over the long-term, and hoping to build a second career where they can serve America in a whole new way.
Superior Process
We pride ourselves on developing a process that has allowed our clients to engage military personnel prior to their exiting the armed forces in order to know what drives them in choosing their first civilian job. By educating our clients on the complex structure and occupational specialities of our military branches as well as how to engage with transition bases in order to find the appropriate experience, we have enabled them to hire and retain an employee that is an excellent fit. We teach you to use the following process to achieve your recruiting and retention goals.
Goal
Our main goal is simple – to help you acquire and keep much needed skilled labor employees. When we help you devise and implement a plan to both find the right veteran for your organization and keep them for the coming years, we know our clients will be successful in increasing their value in their market.
Benefits
The benefits of hiring a veteran go far beyond helping someone that served our country. Quantifiable advantages are:
- revenue improvement when one in four new hires is a veteran;
- an increase in employee performance as compared to non-veterans;
- lower rate of turnover;
- potential for tax credits and additional training funded by the government;
- possible funding of relocation to your position city/state;
- increased experience with the practice of safety methods.
Intent is the flag you plant in the future, the direction and destination you want for you team.
It should answer “in order to…”
It is a message to your workforce to give them direction and understanding of your strategic outcomes and what they are designed to achieve.
It should be able to stand alone.
For your most gifted workers (resourced sufficiently), they should be successful even if given nothing else.
We start with intent because that drives everything else.
The best strategies are simple and adaptable. No strategy is ever perfectly enacted because the world is not perfectly knowable. Before you develop your strategy, identify your strategic imperatives. These drive every else that follows.
Use broad brush strokes, too many priorities equal none. Pick 2 or 3 that must be achieved to reach your intent. Your people shouldn’t have to refer to a document to know if what they are doing leads to a critical outcome. Help them draw the line between what they are doing and ultimate success.
Be open to opportunistic adaptations to help you better, faster, more efficiently reach your intent. Maintain broad and current situational awareness as your strategy unfolds.
Talent goes well beyond the mechanics of organizational design, role requirements and workforce capabilities. It should flow from your strategy. What are the non-redundant, mission critical roles to achieve success?
Do you have your best players with the right talents in these positions? Is decision making authority delegated to the right level to maximize effectiveness, efficiency and employee engagement?
Are your lines of communication joined up across your structure to both provide you with the situational awareness needed for significant shift and adaptation, and to your key roles as they make decisions in pursuit of the strategy?
Culture exists on many levels in large organizations. Broad corporate culture provides the boundaries for our operations (indeed – our organizational identity), while micro-cultures provide predictable, sustainable performance – notably in the absence of direct supervision.
What are the values, beliefs and attitudes that your work force needs to possess to drive the behaviors critical to your strategy?
What are you doing to embed & reinforce these core beliefs?
How do you recruit, induct, develop, promote, retain, retire or excommunicate based on these?
As with strategy – simple is better, less is more.
The hardest part of this process is to ensure that your day to day practices are aligned with every other element you have developed.
Is your LTIP correctly incentivizing your critical contributors?
Are your metrics measuring your workforce’s requirement to perform?
Are your key and critical processes (e.g. funding, decision making, project handoff, customer service…) smooth, elegant and straightforward?
Where can you better automate, routinize, delegate?
We also provide both customized and tailored leadership & strategy workshops, seminars and key-note addresses to stimulate thought and develop skills. the following are examples of these: