We take you through a five-step process to become high performing. (You may not need all five steps. You only do what is missing.)

Step One: Create a cohesive leadership team
Coming together to achieve extraordinary results

How do your top leaders work together to manage the business? What is their shared vision of the future? Do they work from a plan to achieve that vision? How do they set goals and define priorities? How clear are their metrics? How much do they trust each other? How do they communicate and make decisions? How do they hold each other accountable? How well do they collaborate cross-functionally? How do they balance daily goals against long-term development of the organization? How do they work out inevitable conflicts and competing priorities?

Companies are limited in their success if their top leaders don't work together to manage, not just their functional areas, but the entire enterprise. We guide you through a process of defining and improving your charter, design, and relationships so you can become a cohesive team with a common focus that achieves outstanding business results.

"Roger Allen builds a zone of safety where senior executives can say the unutterable, constructively challenge assumptions, enter into the creative chaos of the unknown, and come out clearer, more united, and empowered for success."
— DD Hilke, Museum President

"...Personality conflicts began to develop between us after our first year together. We all began to use your methods to solve our misunderstandings. At the present time, I simply couldn't be happier with our interrelationships. We are still very different, but our acceptance of each other's traits is at a very high level. We now make an excellent team."
— Roger Walton, President of Petroleum Data Systems

Step Two: Assess the current state of your organization
Diagnose before you prescribe

You don't want to begin making changes until you have a good understanding of the current organization—from current business results to how people are organized to accomplish their work. We use the Transformation Model as a framework for helping you understand your organization. It reduces the complexity of an organization to seven key elements that must be understood and aligned for a business to be successful.

We help you understand:

• The key measures of success within your company/industry. The metrics you have in place to measure your performance. And how successful are you against each of those metrics.
• Your external business climate/environment (audience, competitors, market conditions, economic/political, technological changes, etc.) Your most critical assumptions about the future. How you are adapting to meet the challenges/opportunities presented by your environment.
• Your clarity around your business strategy. Understanding of your customers. Benefits you provide them. Your long-term competitive strategy. How you differentiate yourself from your competitors. Clarity about your mission and guiding principles and how well do you live them.
• How well-defined and efficient your core business processes are. The end result benefits they provide your customers. The resources you need to accomplish the work of the organization and adequacy of these resources.
• How your structure supports your mission. How people are grouped and linked to coordinate their work. The roles of different groups such as senior management, middle management, supervisors, technical support and employees. The extent to which people have the information, authority, resources and training to do their jobs.
• The adequacy of your coordinating systems (information-sharing, goal-setting, performance feedback, etc.) and development systems (recruitment, selection, training, recognition, compensation, etc.). The strengths and weaknesses of these (and other) systems and how well they support you in accomplishing your core mission?
• The morale and culture of your organization. How well people treat each other. The underlying attitudes and work habits of different levels of the organization. And so on.

"After attending, I felt like someone had turned on the lights in a dimly lit room. For the first time I truly understood how our company functioned and what we needed to do to improve our performance."
— Program participant, Coach Leatherware

Step Three: Envision the future
You can't drive forward by looking into the rearview mirror

Step three is to clarify your business strategy and direction. Most organizations face stiff challenges in the marketplace and too many respond to these challenges by trying to do what they have done in the past. Those that succeed welcome change and renew themselves by aligning with current and future realities. Strategy is making conscious choices about how the to deliver value to your customers and distinguish yourself from your competitors. A successful business strategy includes:

• Understanding the playing field. Who are your stakeholders and their requirements? How are your customers changing? What technologies are changing the way you do business? What are the trends, opportunities, and threats that are out their on the horizon?
• Forecasting the future. What will the business situation look like in the future? What are your most important assumptions that will impact your business and how will you respond?
• Creating a core ideology. What is the legacy you want to leave? How can you engender commitment from your employees and make your organization a great place to work? What is your mission? Values and guiding principles?
• Defining strategic direction. What is your ideal vision regarding customer service, finances, internal operations and culture? How do you define your customers? What are your deliverables? What core competencies can you leverage?
• Differentiating from the competition. What is your long-term business focus? What competitive differentiators do you have to be really good at? What can you be mediocre at? For each customer segment, what is your value proposition?
• Establishing objectives and goals. What are your most important key result areas and how do you measure them? What are your short-term goals and long-term objectives? What initiatives will take you to the future? What are the elements of your master plan?

Step Four: Design the organization
All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get!

Results are not haphazard. They don't happen by chance. A hallmark of a high performance organization is that they have designed all their systems (workflow, use of work space, organization structure, roles and responsibilities, communication and information-sharing, decision-making, performance feedback, personnel policies, how people are rewarded, etc.) to match that philosophy. Only a holistic and systemic view of the organization in which all aspects of organizational life are aligned to that philosophy will become high performing.

We take you through a process to create an efficient and high performance infrastructure. Redesign typically results in dramatic improvements in quality, customer service, decreased cycle times, lower turnover and absenteeism and improved productivity gains. Its impact includes changes in management methods, simplification of the flow of work through the organization, reorganization of roles and responsibilities, realignment of department boundaries, flattening of the overall structure of the organization and changes to coordinating and development systems. The steps are modified and streamlined to the nature and size of your business.

"One of our major customers went through a major realignment to improve their competitive position. This necessitated that we examine how to best align our organization to provide the best service to our customer. Roger Allen acted as facilitator and consultant through the alignment process and did an excellent job of structuring the process and bringing the team members together around sensitive and difficult issues."
— Christopher M. Vukas, Vice President, AT&T Credit Corporation

Step Five: Align your people

In spite of our amazing technological advances, it is people who do the work of the organization and are ultimately responsible for its success. Even the most powerful person within your organization would accomplish little if not for the web of relationships and people on whom he or she depends. Research today proves that success in business is about 1/3 due to technology, processes and technical skills and about 2/3 due to leadership, interpersonal and "soft" skills. You can have the most brilliant strategy or latest technology in the world but if your people don't have a sense of ownership and commitment it isn't going to happen. It is people who do the work of an organization and are ultimately responsible for its success.

Aligning people begins with leadership. Leadership is more than formal authority, power, or position. It is about engaging the hearts and minds of people and getting them to work effectively together to achieve extraordinary results. Effective leaders inspire others. They empower. They build trust. They transform attitudes and behavior. They elicit motivation and commitment. The challenge of leadership is to harness the capability and collaboration of people and to rally a staff, team, or workforce behind your vision and get them to perform at the very apex of their ability. We train your supervisors and managers about their roles and responsibilities and how to lead in a high performance environment.

We also align employees through training, team building and development activities in which they learn to take full responsibility for making decisions, solving problems and continuously improving the quality of their work. Everyone involved with a particular core process are members of the same team and are empowered with full authority for the success of a whole product, service or major segment of work.

"On more than a few occasions, the skills you teach have carried me out of some gut-wrenching predicaments into enjoyable and fruitful relationships."
— Fred Zirkle, Former President of KeyTronic, Corp.

"After 25 years of hands-on business management and four years of consulting to business owners, I can say with utmost confidence that the products you have developed are unparalleled in their ability to deliver positive organizational change."
— John M. Ward, President, Leadership Management Institute, LLC

Summary

There is an old truism that "If you keep doing what you've been doing you'll keep getting what you've been getting". Most leaders, owners or managers have not yet tapped the full potential of their workforce, and yet they won't do so by doing more or even better of what they've done in the past. We help you create an organization that will achieve outstanding results. Send us an email or give us a call to explore how you can benefit from high performance.