What will you adopt & abandon as a leader in 2024? Making progress in 2024 is as much about what you stop doing as about what you start doing.
Our 2024 Business Leader Success Insights Report developed by our strategic partner Mindshop provides a wealth of insights on how to shape your strategies in the year ahead by prioritising what to adopt & abandon in order to accelerate your performance.
What three ideas will you adopt and abandon in 2024? How can we help address the elements you want to abandon, and implement the ideas you want to adopt?
Align your team and reap the financial reward
October 2018In February 2017 I was fortunate enough to present to three Mindshop “Business Leader” groups the topic of, “Getting Things Done.” (Mindshop leader groups meet quarterly and are themed around the latest challenges that leaders are facing globally).18 months later I have noticed greater alignment amongst one of the CEO attendees and their team. So how has this happened? I will explain later, but first some background.The term “Team Alignment” in Google search gets 116 million results so it is a well-covered topic. Of real interest to me is the business case in terms of what positive impact does team alignment have on the results of a business, otherwise why bother?An early study published in the Strategic Management Journal in 1992 (1), discovered that 30% of the variation in profit between 113 businesses was accounted for by the degree of organisational alignment within those businesses. Later studies have supported the early study. SAP research (2), for example, compared the most and least financially successful of a sample of corporations of different sizes. They found that 44% of the most successful corporations had their managerial goals completely aligned; none of the least successful had such alignment.Many businesses I have watched and worked with over the years have had lots of ideas on alignment and have spent considerable dollars on team building and leadership programs, but in my view, have not really succeeded on the alignment issue. So let’s examine why I started to see changes in one company post the Mindshop workshops.
What was the inspiration for “alignment” at the February 2017 Workshop?
The genesis was the topic Objectives and Key Results (“OKR’s”).
What are OKR's?
The concept of OKRs is accredited to John Doerr who introduced OKRs during his time at Google. An interview with John can be found by clicking on the following link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-yeDb7stlw . John talks about Objectives being the “What we want to do”, and the Results are the “how we are going to do it”. His view is that OKRs are a great tool to ensure team alignment.
How to introduce OKRs – A Case Study
I will share with you what I thought was the best approach. The business is a privately held mid- market business in the $50m to $500m bracket.The important place to start is ensuring the leadership team understand “the Why” of OKRs. By “the why” we mean that OKRs align teams, and aligned teams lead to a better chance of positive financial results. In this case a session was held with the executive team by the CEO introducing the concept of OKR’s and why alignment is so important. In the session we showed the workshop slides.Secondly, ensure it is easy for the team to understand. Don’t make it complicated. In the training session we showed the following slide which depicts how the OKRs of a General Manager of a USA NFL team would flow through layers of the organisation. Every team member could put his or her hands up, and say that their OKRs directly connect to the GMs. How many organisations can honestly say this? Once people see this slide they get it.
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Thirdly, I would suggest piloting OKRs for 12 months with the senior team or with one vertical team rather than role out to the whole business. It is up to you, but we found that by piloting it with the senior team for 12 months, we found some OKRs weren’t that important and so we deleted them, while others we missed were added in. In the 12 month period we trialled the accountability process and in this case study example we used quarterly reviews of One Page Plans. The pilot also increased the level of understanding of the concept with the executive team. With a year under their belts, the entire executive team felt confident enough to role OKRs out to the rest of the business, which they are in the process of doing at the time of writing this blog.
So if you want to improve your financial results, get better at team alignment. We know the way to get team alignment is to introduce OKRs and reap the reward!.
Mike Burke is an Accredited Mindshop Facilitator and specialises in business and leader success.
mburke@bcag.net.auhttp://www.bcag.net.auhttps://twitter.com/michaelburke173https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelburke173