Strategic Planning & Team Alignment
Designing and facilitating conversations with business executives to prioritize core objectives, establish direction with clear intention, and to ensure stakeholders are working toward common goals is what we do.
Getting a Baseline
Unveil the disconnect, pull your executive team into a room and without discussion have them post what they feel are the most critical things to accomplish over the next six months to a year. This exercise reveals a wildly diverse set of opinions, at least that has been our experience after conducting numerous sessions like this for mid-market companies.
You may also find that they’ll only list initiatives or projects that result in significant change to the business and operations. Managing their teams to higher levels of performance, planning cultural change to enable operational success, everything that managers should do as a part of their “managerial” duties are likely to be left out. We’ve seen more than one CEO say, “You can’t get too busy to manage your teams, that’s your job (expletives removed)!”
What’s really surprising is that this condition, lying just below the surface, is remarkably consistent, even in companies that feel OK about how they are doing. It hobbles companies and often gets attributed to simply being, “… the way things are done around here,” but it doesn’t have to be.
How to Achieve Team Alignment
Think provides Executive Advisory services to mid-market companies, we facilitate the process of unifying executive team alignment. This is not a process for the timid at heart. Our consultants know how to stand in a room of high-powered senior executives and work them toward a common goal. Each engagement is unique, requires different skills, and results in different options for execution, but does result in strategic alignment.
Sometimes the result is the development of a “North Star” or overall guiding principle or goal and the plans to reach it. Other times, the goal is known and is obscured by the number of options that need to be considered to reach it, so we break them down and develop a plan for moving forward. Some companies find that they need to look at technology differently (re-invent their tech stack). In other instances, it requires looking at teams and process differently.
Think specializes at bringing the very best ideas that others are leveraging in the mid-market to guide others who face similar needs. We also specialize at making sure plans and agreements that are reached are actually executed.
Over the years Think has evolved what is essentially our Rapid Control Process (a BKPM project initiation process) to provide similar outcomes to strategic planning and team alignment. Contact us to learn more about our process and how it has work for others. Find new ways to focus your teams.