It seems like an obvious truth: leadership teams must deliver a strategy aligned with their company’s goals. Yet, despite this seeming simplicity, leadership team alignment is a concept many organizations struggle with more often than we might imagine. The effectiveness of a leadership team hinges on several factors, including its ability to overcome deeper complexities, understand its collective performance, and collaboratively solve organizational challenges. This episode of the Life + Leadership Podcast unpacks these complexities and offers clear guidance to help your team deliver on strategic goals, both now and in the future.
The Root of the Challenge: Clarity & Competing Visions
One of the primary complexities leadership teams often uncover is a lack of clarity on the company’s direction itself. While it might seem counterintuitive that a company’s path forward could be unclear, it’s unfortunately common. This can stem from external complexities like global tariffs impacting pricing, sales strategy, or sourcing, leaving industries uncertain of their trajectory.
In larger enterprise companies, this lack of clarity can also originate from the board not providing sufficient direction or setting goals that don’t align with customer needs. This scenario can leave CEOs feeling like they’re playing an “unwinnable game.” While most companies understand the basic needs to service customers and achieve revenue and profitability, anything beyond that in terms of a sophisticated strategic plan or vision is often either unclear or treated as a mere exercise without proper implementation.
Even when a leadership team achieves clarity on the company’s direction, a second major challenge emerges: each member may have a different idea of how to get there, inadvertently resulting in competing strategies. This problem often begins when executive teams lack clarity about their unique collective work. Many executive teams function more as a group where meetings are primarily “update meetings,” with each executive reporting on their department’s progress towards individual goals. Collaborative goals shared across the executive team itself are often missing.
How do executive teams contribute to organizational readiness for new initiatives?
Executive teams play a crucial role in preparing an organization for new initiatives by assessing cultural readiness and talent needs. Consider a company launching a new product that requires different expertise. While the company might focus internally on resourcing with existing talent, the executive team’s crucial role should be to assess if the company culture is ready for a new product and, if not, how to adjust it. They also need to determine if new talent acquisition is necessary for a successful launch, rather than solely relying on existing personnel. These are not just enterprise-level goals, but rather strategic efforts that require collaborative executive team conversations and efforts to prepare the organization. A room full of your most expensive talent reporting on functional areas is not the place for actual teamwork; it’s a listening exercise.
More sophisticated executive teams recognize the interdependencies of their work and actively work at those intersections during team meetings, rather than just updating each other. For instance, if sales and fulfillment teams have major interdependencies, their respective leaders in a sophisticated executive team would discuss how their work intersects, what obstacles they need to remove for optimal performance, and share observations from their interconnected work. This ensures that executives are thinking about the end-to-end flow of work to deliver products or services to customers.
Lack of clarity and collaborative work results in brilliant leaders, driven to achieve their departmental goals “at all costs,” potentially “trampling on each other”. If the end result and the milestones to achieve it for the enterprise aren’t crystal clear, the leadership team cannot effectively back into their own supportive goals. Both individual executives and the executive team should have milestones corresponding to the enterprise’s goals.
Building the Foundation: A Multi-Layered Approach to Goals
A healthy, sophisticated executive team understands and implements a multi-layered goal structure.
- If the enterprise goal is to go from A to Z, there should be organizational-level steps (e.g., step A.1, A.2, A.3) indicating progress.
- Beneath that, a crucial missing layer in many organizations is the executive team’s goals, which outline what the executive team will deliver together to hit the enterprise goals.
- Below that, functional areas like marketing, sales, finance, and operations have their own goals.
The “connective tissue” of the executive team’s goals is essential.
Bright Arrow, as a coaching organization, helps leadership teams refine and deliver on their goals that support enterprise objectives. While external business consultants can help set up multi-layered goal frameworks, coaches help teams orient to macro goals, refine existing ones, and coach them through delivery. Bringing in outside sets of eyes from business consultants, specialized consultants, or coaches can be a great investment, helping organizations run faster and paying off repeatedly.
From Strategy to Execution: Making It Real Day-to-Day
Even with enterprise goals and executive team goals in place, the challenging part can be translating these strategic plans into day-to-day operations. Leadership team alignment is key for this translation. There should be a very clear narrative about the organization’s direction that every employee can grasp. Ideally, every employee should be able to quote the top three to five things the company aims to deliver and understand how their unique department fits into that scheme.
This operational alignment is fostered by healthy company rhythms, such as:
- All-company meetings.
- Consistent one-on-one meetings with employees.
- Agendas that clearly connect team work to enterprise goals.
- Periodic reviews to assess how new tasks, unexpected issues, or “shiny pennies” connect to the strategic plan.
Many organizations miss connecting their well-defined strategic plans to the broader business. For instance, executives might struggle to explain how employees will get a bonus because they can’t articulate the goals tied to compensation. Tying day-to-day operations to strategic goals is crucial for employee compensation and represents an ethical responsibility.
A critical obligation of the executive team is to set enterprise goals. Even if working with a board, the executive team should bring a draft and drive clarity. In tumultuous times, maintaining steady-state goals from the previous year might be progress, but it still needs to be explicitly stated and cascaded down. A common pitfall is setting goals, getting board approval, and then failing to trickle them down or consistently measure progress and repeat them throughout the organization.
One example of best practice involved an organization where the executive team set crystal-clear, short, and measurable goals annually. These goals were written in a way that even junior employees could understand their importance without needing to manage a P&L. The CEO would then quarterly reiterate these strategic goals, measure performance, explain deviations, and outline what was needed from the entire employee population.
This consistent narrative empowered leaders and employees alike. Furthermore, the CFO would quarterly provide financial literacy education (e.g., explaining EBITDA) for all employees, helping them understand the business and their role’s impact. While the level of detail varies for different stakeholder groups (employees vs. senior leaders vs. executive team), everyone should understand the macro vision and enterprise goals.
Staying clear and prioritizing enterprise objectives over other work (unless new priorities are explicitly defined) is essential for strong enterprise goals.
Strategic Planning: An Investment in Future Leadership
Here’s a checklist for CEOs and executive teams to ensure effective strategic delivery:
- Are enterprise-level goals crisp, clear, and easy-to-understand?
- Are they communicated appropriately to every stakeholder group and consistently kept in front of them?
- Is the executive team clear on their unique contributions to enterprise goals (separate from their teams’ work)?
- Does each team have specific, clear goals that support and align with enterprise goals, and are those kept in front of the teams?
- Are working agendas for every team structured so day-to-day operations connect back to enterprise goals and the strategic plan?
This process is not a small lift; annual planning is a significant undertaking. It should not be completed in just a week or two. Fully cascading strategic planning operationally down into the business can take a month or two of planning across multiple layers of leadership, starting with the CEO, board, and executive team, moving to senior leadership, and then to department leaders.
Importantly, this rigorous strategic planning process serves as a development opportunity for future C-suite leaders. Directors and VPs who engage in their own strategic planning in support of enterprise goals are groomed for the next level of leadership, addressing a critical gap in leadership development over the next decade.
Ultimately, strong enterprise goals are not just a “nice to have”; they are your North Star. Your executive team must have a clear vision of their aims, understand their unique contributions, and effectively connect strategy to daily operations. This isn’t just about setting goals; it’s about clear communication, consistent reinforcement for all leaders and employees, and ensuring every team operates in alignment. This complex but vital work of strategic planning is the work of leadership, and doing it well is paramount for organizational performance and the development of the next generation of leaders.
Learn how Bright Arrow Coaching’s executive team coaching services can help your team perform at its best by contacting us or visiting our services page.
It seems like an obvious truth: leadership teams must deliver a strategy aligned with their company’s goals. Yet, despite this seeming simplicity, many leadership teams grapple with getting it right more often than we might imagine. The effectiveness of a leadership team hinges on several factors. One, its ability to overcome deeper complexities. Two, understand its collective performance. Three collaboratively solve organizational challenges. This episode of the Life + Leadership podcast unpacks these complexities and offers clear guidance to help your team alignment thrive and achieve strategic goals, both now and in the future.
The Root of the Challenge: Clarity & Competing Visions
One of the primary complexities leadership teams often uncover is a lack of clarity on the company’s direction itself. While it might seem counterintuitive that a company’s path forward could be unclear, it’s unfortunately common. This can stem from external complexities like global tariffs impacting pricing, sales strategy, or sourcing, leaving industries uncertain of their trajectory.
In larger enterprise companies, this lack of clarity can also originate from the board not providing sufficient direction or setting goals that don’t align with customer needs. This scenario can leave CEOs feeling like they’re playing an “unwinnable game”. While most companies understand the basic needs to service customers and achieve revenue and be profitable, anything beyond that in terms of a sophisticated strategic plan or vision is often either unclear or treated as a mere exercise without proper implementation.
Even when a leadership team achieves clarity on the company’s direction, a second major challenge emerges: each member may have a different idea of how to get there, inadvertently resulting in competing strategies. This problem often begins when executive teams lack clarity about their unique collective work. Many executive teams function more as a group where meetings are primarily “update meetings,” with each executive reporting on their department’s progress towards individual goals. Collaborative goals shared across the executive team itself are often missing.
Consider a company launching a new product that requires different expertise. While the company might focus internally on resourcing with existing talent, the executive team’s crucial role should be to assess if the company culture is ready for a new product and, if not, how to adjust it. They also need to determine if new talent acquisition is necessary for a successful launch, rather than solely relying on existing personnel. These are not just enterprise-level goals, but rather strategic efforts that require collaborative executive team conversations and efforts to prepare the organization. A room full of your most expensive talent reporting on functional areas is not the place for actual team work; it’s a listening exercise.
More sophisticated executive teams recognize the interdependencies of their work and actively work at those intersections during team meetings, rather than just updating each other. For instance, if sales and fulfillment teams have major interdependencies, their respective leaders (e.g., Sarah and Tom) in a sophisticated executive team would discuss how their work intersects, what obstacles they need to remove for optimal performance, and share observations from their interconnected work. This ensures that executives are thinking about the end-to-end flow of work to deliver products or services to customers.
This lack of clarity and collaborative work results in brilliant leaders, driven to achieve their departmental goals “at all costs,” may end up “trampling on each other”. If the end result and the milestones to achieve it for the enterprise aren’t crystal clear, the leadership team cannot effectively back into their own supportive goals. Both individual executives and the executive team should have milestones corresponding to the enterprise’s goal achievement.
Building the Foundation: A Multi-Layered Approach to Goals
A healthy, sophisticated executive team understands and implements a multi-layered goal structure. If the enterprise goal is to go from A to Z, there should be organizational-level steps (e.g., step 1.1, 1.2, 1.3) indicating progress. Beneath that, a crucial missing layer in many organizations is the executive team’s goals, which outline what the executive team will deliver to hit the enterprise goals. Below that, functional areas like marketing, sales, finance, and operations have their own goals. The “connective tissue” of the executive team’s goals is essential.
Bright Arrow, as a coaching organization, helps leadership teams refine and deliver on their goals that support enterprise objectives. While external business consultants can help set up multi-layered goal frameworks, coaches help teams orient to macro goals, refine existing ones, and coach them through delivery. Bringing in outside sets of eyes from business consultants, specialized consultants, or coaches can be a great investment, helping organizations run faster and paying off repeatedly.
From Strategy to Execution: Making It Real Day-to-Day
Even with enterprise goals and executive team goals in place, the challenging part can be translating these strategic plans into day-to-day operations. Alignment at the executive level is key for this translation. There should be a very clear narrative about the organization’s direction that every employee can grasp. Ideally, every employee should be able to quote the top three to five things the company aims to deliver and understand how their unique department fits into that scheme.
This operational alignment is fostered by healthy company rhythms, such as:
- All-company meetings.
- Consistent one-on-one meetings with employees.
- Agendas that clearly connect team work to enterprise goals.
- Periodic reviews to assess how new tasks, unexpected issues, or “shiny pennies” connect to the strategic plan.
Many organizations miss connecting their well-defined strategic plans to the broader business. For instance, executives might struggle to explain how employees will bonus because they can’t articulate the goals tied to compensation. Tying day-to-day operations to strategic goals is crucial for employee compensation and represents an ethical responsibility.
A critical obligation of the executive team is to set enterprise goals. Even if working with a board, the executive team should bring a draft and drive clarity. In tumultuous times, even maintaining steady-state goals from the previous year might be progress, but it still needs to be explicitly stated and cascaded down. A common pitfall is setting goals, getting board approval, and then failing to trickle them down or consistently measure progress and repeat them throughout the organization.
One example of best practice involved an organization where the executive team set crystal-clear, short, and measurable goals annually. These goals were written in a way that even junior employees could understand their importance without needing to manage a P&L. The CEO would then quarterly reiterate these strategic goals, measure performance, explain deviations, and outline what was needed from the entire employee population.
This consistent narrative empowered leaders and employees alike. Furthermore, the CFO would quarterly provide financial literacy education (e.g., explaining EBITDA) for all employees, helping them understand the business and their role’s impact. While the level of detail varies for different stakeholder groups (employees vs. senior leaders vs. executive team), everyone should understand the macro vision and enterprise goals.
Staying clear and prioritizing enterprise objectives over other work (unless new priorities are explicitly defined) is essential for strong enterprise goals.
Strategic Planning: An Investment in Future Leadership
Here’s a checklist for CEOs and executive teams to ensure effective strategic delivery:
- Crisp, clear, and easy-to-understand enterprise-level goals?
- Communicated appropriately to every stakeholder group and consistently kept in front of them?
- Executive team clear on their unique contributions to enterprise goals (separate from their teams’ work)?
- Each team has specific, clear goals that support and align with enterprise goals, and are those kept in front of the teams?
- Working agendas for every team so day-to-day operations connect back to enterprise goals and the strategic plan?
This process is not a small lift; annual planning is a significant undertaking. It should not be completed in just a week or two. Fully cascading strategic planning operationally down into the business can take a month or two of planning across multiple layers of leadership, starting with the CEO, board, and executive team, moving to senior leadership, and then to department leaders.
Importantly, this rigorous strategic planning process serves as a development opportunity for future C-suite leaders. Directors and VPs who engage in their own strategic planning in support of enterprise goals are groomed for the next level of leadership, addressing a critical gap in leadership development over the next decade.
Ultimately, strong enterprise goals are not just a “nice to have”; they are your North Star. Your executive team must have a clear vision of their aims, understand their unique contributions, and effectively connect strategy to daily operations. This isn’t just about setting goals; it’s about clear communication, consistent reinforcement for all leaders and employees, and ensuring every team operates in alignment. This complex but vital work of strategic planning is the work of leadership, and doing it well is paramount for organizational performance and the development of the next generation of leaders.
Learn how Bright Arrow Coaching’s executive team coaching services can help your team perform at it’s best by contacting us or visiting our services page.
In this Episode:
Tegan Trovato, Founder and CEO of Bright Arrow Coaching:
Bright Arrow Bio
LinkedIn Profile
Podcast Transcript:
Why Enterprise Goals Matter at Every Level
As an executive team, it is our primary obligation to set enterprise goals. If you’re working with a board, they’re looking to you to bring them a draft, and they may have really strong opinions on what those goals need to be.
If they don’t, or if you’re the one who really drives a lot of those for your board, or you don’t have a board, it is your job as an executive team to paint a picture of what the path forward is going to look like. And in tumultuous times, it may be steady state. Your goals from last year may be your goals for this year, because you simply don’t want to go backwards.
And sometimes that is progress in a business context like we’re in right now. But you still need to be explicit about it. It’s our job to say it, and to share it, and to make sure it cascades down.
Another thing we can often see is that organizations may set goals, and their board may buy in, but then it never gets trickled down. So the executive team is like, oh, that’s done. We got those approved.
And then we don’t do a great job of walking it through the organization. Or we may do it once, and then we’re like, good luck, go get it. But we’re not really measuring progress, and we’re not repeating those goals.
So I will tell you, one of the organizations I worked in years ago did a fantastic job of this. And I learned so much by working closely with the executive team. And just being a broader employee, I learned so much.
So here’s what that looked like. The executive team would set goals every year like clockwork. They were crystal clear, and they were short, and they were measurable.
And even as a more junior employee, if someone in the organization were a junior employee, it was written in a way that they could understand it. They didn’t have to run a P&L. They did not have to manage other people.
They understood what the goal was and why it was important. And so the CEO would get up multiple times a year, like quarterly, and say, as a reminder, these were our strategic goals for our enterprise. Here’s how we’re measuring it.
Here’s our performance to that measurement. If we’re off, here’s why I believe we’re off. And here’s what I need from the entire employee population or to get us on track.
Well, if that doesn’t help set a stage, then nothing will. Because every executive could, from that meeting, go right back into the organization and keep running that narrative, managing their team to the end that everyone was looking for. And there were no surprises.
It also empowered the heck out of leaders to go unapologetically drive for those results. Like, hey, you heard it. You heard it straight from the CEO’s mouth.
I didn’t make this up. We’re all going to go for it together. Let’s go.
So I loved that. I also appreciated that they created financial literacy and business acumen for every level employee. So the CFO used to get up every quarter and drill into everybody’s head what EBITDA stood for.
You know, like, these are things we don’t think about when we live in EBITDA and P&Ls. Like, this is our language. This is what we look at all the time.
But most of the employee population does not. And most employees really appreciate the education. And they understand, then, what business is about.
And they understand how their role impacts those things. And it was not a big lift for the executive team to do that. It was the same canned financial education every quarter.
It was beautiful. And I still can give the same canned definition that CFO gave back then. So I think that there’s an education component to setting enterprise goals.
And I think that our ability to keep the enterprise goals in front of the entire employee population is essential. Now, you know, as well as I do, there’s a version for the employees, broadly. And there’s a version for senior leaders.
And there’s a different version for the executive team. They’re all the same goal. But some have different detail, depending on the stakeholder group.
I mean, you could have stopped me as an employee back then. At any point, I would have been able to tell you our top three focus areas. Simple and crisp.
Like, it would be logo acquisition, aka new client acquisition. Or it would be to increase EBITDA, right? Like, easy enough.
Now, if I was an executive team member, there would be a lot more specifics to that goal. But you get what I’m trying to explain here. Everyone knew the macro vision and the enterprise goals.
And so it was easy to keep connecting to that. The more sophisticated your organization is, the more money you have to play with, the more you can tie those goals into your HRAS systems and into your planning and truly create some cascades. We all know, though, that a whole bunch of work outside of those things always crops up.
So our ability to stay clear and to prioritize the enterprise objectives over other work, unless we are really explicitly clear that we should prioritize new things that come up, that’s also part of what helps to create really strong enterprise goals. It seems obvious to say that leadership teams need to deliver a strategy that’s aligned towards the company’s goals. Sounds basic.
But I have to tell you that leadership teams are more commonly struggling to get this right than we’d like to imagine. And it’s because in order to be effective, there’s this need to overcome the deeper complexities and this need that we must understand at a deeper level how we perform as a leadership team and solve for the organization’s challenges. So today, we’re going to unpack these challenges.
We’re going to unpack the complexities and help you and your team really try to deliver on this year’s strategic goals and those in the future.
When Executive Teams Operate in Silos
So the first complexity we often uncover in our team coaching, executive team coaching, is a lack of clarity on the company direction itself. I would love to think that I just said that and most of you were like, that shouldn’t happen very often.
But most of you probably said, yep, that’s my team. Or I have been on a team where that is the case. So it is unfortunately understandable that a lot of companies have a lack of clarity on their direction.
So the reason that might be is number one, all of the complexities in the world at large are leaving a lot of organizations and industries right now unclear on their path forward because we’re not sure, you know, with tariffs, how does this impact our pricing? And how does that impact our sales strategy and our ability to source materials and talent to deliver on our basic functions as a company? So this is just one example.
But even outside of what’s more recent and unexpected for organizations, traditionally, enterprise companies may not feel like they’re clear on their enterprise level goals because the board itself may not have provided a lot of clarity about what they’re supportive of or the goals they have are not as in alignment with what the customer’s goals for the organization need to be. This is why I often feel like our CEOs have such an unwinnable game. That’s one of many examples I might cite there.
So as you hear these things, it makes sense that we would have some lack of clarity on a strategic direction. Most companies know we need to service our customers. We have to hit a certain amount of revenue to cover our costs and be lucrative and profitable.
So those things are pretty standard. But anything beyond that and sophistication in terms of strategic plan and vision either is not clear or it’s been done as an exercise and not implemented. That is also something that’s really common.
So the second complexity is that even when we do have clarity on the company direction, each member of the leadership team has a different idea of how they’re going to get there. And on accident, we end up working in competing strategies in order to deliver on those goals. So where that problem tends to start, in my opinion, is in the executive team not having clarity about what their unique work is.
So a lot of times we will meet executive teams who are functioning more as a group and their team meetings are simply update meetings. So each executive gives an update on their progress towards the completion of their department’s goals that they oversee in the spirit of hitting the enterprise goals. And what we see is missing is that there are no collaborations or collaborative goals shared across the executive team itself.
For example, you have a company who has decided that in order to bring a product to market, they’re going to need a different kind of expertise because they haven’t delivered that product before. So this may be known. And the company acquires the product, they start working on the delivery of that product to their customers, and then they focus internally on like, how do we figure this out and get this done with the people we have?
And really the executive team’s job was to stop and assess if their culture is ready to deliver a new product. And if not, how do they write the culture? Because that is a leader in executive team’s job.
And two, do we need to acquire talent and not just use the talent we have in order to create a successful launch with a new product? So thinking about talent for the near term and the success of their growth should be an executive team conversation and then a collaborative effort in order to ready the organization, even if you’re already in flight on delivering that product. So that’s one small example and probably not the most sophisticated example of where an executive team has work they need to align on that is different from the enterprise’s goals, but in support of the delivery of that strategic plan.
And that list could go on. We have seen quite a variety of opportunities that have been overlooked by executive teams as they chart their path towards delivering on the strategic plan. So when you think about a room full of your most expensive talent reporting up on their functional areas, it is not a place for doing actual work as a team.
It’s a listening exercise. And so they aren’t actually working towards the delivery of something together because they’re simply updating each other. For executive teams, if they do have clarity on company direction, if each member of that executive team has a different idea on how to get there, they’re simply using the time when they’re together as a team to update each other on what their individual team has done towards progress.
A more sophisticated executive team understands the interdependencies of each other’s work and they are working at the intersection of each other’s work in those team meetings versus using the team meetings to update each other. So like Sarah and Tom, their teams have major interdependencies one is sales, one is fulfillment. In traditional executive teams, in all honesty, Tom and Sarah will each just report up on their functional area and that is how that team meeting goes.
In a more sophisticated executive team, those two people would talk about where their work intersects and what they each need to do to remove obstacles so that each of their team performs at their best. And the two of them are sharing the observations and themes that they see from their seat that’s coming out of their work when their two teams are working together. That’s one example.
So if you think about the flow of work for a company to deliver its product or service for their customers end to end, you want your executives thinking about where they all intersect and that should be what they’re actually doing when they’re together in the room versus using the time to just update each other on what each of their functions has done. Another thought that comes to mind for me when we think about how each member of a team might have a different idea on how they get there and ending up with competing strategies. The way we end up with competing strategies is that you have really brilliant people leading each of these areas and they are going to go get it and they are going to go get it at about all costs.
And that’s why we love them. That’s why we need the senior leaders. But that also is what leads us to trampling on each other.
So if we’re not super clear on what the end result is and we haven’t articulated what the milestones are to achieve those results for the enterprise, then we can’t as a leadership team back into our own goals that support that. If we know as an enterprise that our goal is to go from A to Z, then you should have step 1.1, step 1.2, step 1.3 that will tell you at an organization level how we are moving towards that goal. Beneath that should be your executive team’s goals that say as an executive team, we will be delivering these sub-goals so that we hit the enterprise goals.
And a lot of times that layer is missing, but what does exist is the layer below the executive team. So marketing has goals, sales has goals, finance has goals, operations has goals, but you can see how what’s missing is that connective tissue in the middle. And so really healthy, sophisticated executive teams have done that work to say layer one is our enterprise strategy, layer two are our executive team’s goals, layer three are our functional area goals and strategies.
Just to be clear, Bright Arrow does not come in and set that many layers of goals. That’s a different business consulting model and frankly, there are frameworks out there that are plug and play right out of the box to help organizations do this. We end up meeting teams when they have either not done that and we have to help them start orienting to some macro goals or they have some decent goals, they would like our help refining them and making sure they’re real enough and they can deliver on them and then we help coach them through the delivery of those goals.
So I just wanna make sure I’m not confusing anyone who’s listening about where coaching plays a role and how business consulting might be different. And I am really pleased with the amount of options there are out there for enterprise goal setting. We do help leadership teams set their goals that support the enterprise goals and then it’s the executive team’s job to set their department goals in support of all that.
And can we just appreciate for a minute that it really does take a lot of hands on deck in order for an enterprise to run at its best and that makes sense. When we’re inside of the organization, we are blind to a lot of what’s going on and we can’t see a lot of the opportunity and we can’t see the amount of dysfunction and so having outside sets of eyes from either business consultants, specialized consultants or coaches is a great investment. It helps us run faster.
It pays off over and over again.
Connecting Strategy to Daily Operations
So imagine then that you are one of our favored executive teams and not only do you have enterprise goals, but you have executive team goals and how you’re gonna work to make sure you and your people deliver on those goals. But what about the day-to-day operations?
Frankly, the easier part may be all of the difficult stuff I just described. The hardest part can be translating these beautiful strategic plans into day-to-day operations. And there is, the alignment at the executive level is key in order to make that happen.
There should be very clear narrative around where the organization’s heading. Every employee should be able to quote the top three to five things that the company aims to deliver and be able to understand how their unique department fits into the scheme of that delivery. And that comes with having really healthy company rhythms like all company meetings, one-on-ones that we keep with our employees, agendas that connect to the enterprise goals with even in our teams that we’re clear how our team working agendas connect with the enterprise goals and some kind of periodic review of what’s landed on our plates and does the organic stuff, the shiny penny, the customer fires, like what’s landed on our plates and how does that connect to the strategic plan and to what it is we’re supposed to deliver over the year. So I think it’s really fascinating how many organizations are missing the first couple of pieces we talked about.
But then let’s say they do that well, which is an expensive endeavor in time and money, then to not be able to connect it to the broader business, that’s also really common. I cannot tell you how many executives we’ve sat with who are like, I can’t even tell my employees how they’re going to bonus this year. They know they’re eligible for a bonus, but I have no idea what our goals are to even tell them how they’re going to make that bonus.
That’s more common than anyone listening cares to have to think. So that obviously would be tied to their delivery of the day-to-day operations is what ties to our employees’ compensation a lot of times at the end of the day. So we have an ethical responsibility to be able to say what those goals are and ensure that the day-to-day operations align with that.
All right, so if I were going to give you a checklist as a CEO or executive team, it goes like this. Do we have crisp, clear, and easy-to-understand enterprise-level goals? Yes.
Check that box, move on to the next. Have we communicated them in an appropriate way to every stakeholder group? And how well are we keeping it in front of them in some kind of cadence or rhythm?
How clear is the executive team in understanding their unique contributions towards the delivery of the enterprise goals, keeping in mind that this is separate from the work that their teams are doing on their behalf? Finally, do each of our teams have goals that are supportive and aligned to each one of those enterprise goals? Are they specific and clear?
And are we keeping those in front of our teams? And finally, do we have working agendas for every team so that day-to-day operations all connect, all of our activity connects back to those enterprise goals and the delivery of our strategic plan? It’s not a small lift.
This is why annual planning is a big deal. It’s also why I think it’s a bummer that we do that at the end of our year when we’re exhausted most of the time. But it is one of the most important exercises and it should not be as easy to do in a week or two.
If you do all of those things, including cascading it operationally down into your business, there should be layers of people planning on this over a month or two even. So it starts with our CEO and board and executive team, moves into the next layer of senior leadership team, and then arguably your department leaders should have their own planning process. And keep in mind, doing it this way is part of how you’re developing your future C-suite.
So all those directors and VPs who should have to do their own strategic planning in support of the enterprise goals, that is them getting into the practice of an annual strategic plan and creating the operating rhythms for your organization. It’s their grooming and development for the next level of leadership. And we have a big gap to solve for there over the next 10 years.
So consider this as part of their growth as well. So with that, I hope we’ve expanded your mind about what could be possible with executive coaching. I would always love to hear back from you.
If you have challenges to this information, if you have more questions about how to find a great coach. Otherwise, keep doing your great work out there and we’ll see you in the next episode.
