Are you setting your organization/yourself up to fail?

We studied the differences between low-performing and high-performing organizations as they worked to translate business strategic planning into desired business results and found that leadership in high-performing organizations made a clear connection between their business strategy and a leadership strategy.

In top-performing organizations, the C-Suite team understood they needed to invest in a robust leadership strategy if they were to successfully execute and refine their business strategy.

This recognition raises the decision-bar about leadership development to that of the strategic level. When this senior team set strategy, they also took a hard look at the organization’s ability to implement those strategies — and created parallel processes in developing both skills and behaviors required to achieve performance goals.

A leadership strategy goes much deeper than a generalized belief in developing leaders and organizational talent. For starters, we found four elements needed for an effective leadership strategy — and none are simple. Leadership in high-performing organizations will set a leadership development strategy that:

1. Identifies the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) of the organization that result in success.
2. Provides a Culture whereby individuals can perform at their best levels.
3. Creates a Talent Pipeline that is strong (A+ talent) and sustainable.
4. Supports an Organization Design for execution of the overarching business strategy.

While these four (4) leadership development strategies are imperative to operate at a high-performance level, leadership must first focus on understanding what exactly drives their business and what will shape their culture to enable the chosen strategy for execution.

From there, almost all progress is made from selecting the best potential from the high-potential talent pool available and preparing that them to respond to the organizational demands. Crafting the organizational structures and necessary KPI’s to make sure that desired outcomes are being achieved.

By making the leadership strategy explicit and to stay on course, the organization begins to unlock the inherent performance potential of the organization in order to bridge any existing strategy/performance gap.

6 Things Leaders Do for High-Performance

A solid strategy is no guarantee for success. We’ve seen plenty of organizations that have a strategy which looks good on paper, but falls far short or fails to deliver any results.

The ability to collective lead strategically is a defining characteristic of executive teams in high-performing organizations. In order to do so, leadership must:

1. Invest significant time and effort on strategic drivers as an impact on leadership.
2. Devise a strategy for strategic planning coupled with leading strategically regarding ongoing organizational impact.
3. Know that good strategic leadership at the organizational level is somewhat different from effective leadership by individuals scattered about the organization.
4. Realize that when strategy lacks meaning/definition for most stakeholders, it’s unlikely that they will understand strategic directives and execute to their highest potential.
5. Pay attention to leadership strategy along with the business strategy in order to reach performance potential.
6. Identify and focus on their most pressing leadership challenges and invest in developing the leadership capabilities to meet those challenges. 

The Five Practices that you will fail

So, what are The Five Practices that you will fail at? Download the white paper to find out and take a deeper look at what will help guide you/your organization away from failure and towards success! Fill out the form below…

Best,

Sam Palazzolo