5 Big Ways to Amplify and Accelerate Impact and Business Results

The following is adapted from Thrive.

You have an incredible vision for your business, and your ideas have rich potential… so why can’t you more successfully launch and land key initiatives? Why do your ideas constantly fall short of their potential impact when you move them from theory into practice? 

As a firm focused on transforming workforce engagement and performance, we’ve seen time and time again that the “good bones” of an idea only takes it so far. To really amplify and accelerate business impact and results, you need to gain employee trust, earn buy-in and commitment,  understand and leverage frontline worker perspective, use an approach to keeping score that increases transparency and focus, foster tight organizational alignment. Let’s take a deeper look at each of these steps. 

1. Start By Building Trust. 

When it comes to organizational performance, trust is one of the most effective accelerators, and lack of trust is one of the greatest decelerators.

Inherently, people know this, yet many leaders fail to successfully build this critical element into the fabric of the organization. We have heard leaders say that they don’t have time for the “soft stuff” and that “employees aren’t customers.” Talk about a lack of enlightenment and awareness! 

Trust is a fundamental element that leads to buy-in and commitment, which we’ll get to in a moment. 

Easy ways to amplify trust in your organization include:

• Conducting employee engagement studies and sharing the results.
• Including frontline employees in developing solutions to challenges raised in engagement studies.
• Having regular one-on-ones with direct reports and conducting skip-level one-on-ones with employees who do not directly report to you. Ask questions and listen.
• Sending handwritten thank-you notes to employees, recognizing them for their contributions. Be specific, so they know exactly what you appreciate and value.
• Putting open-book management into practice.
• Producing a weekly state-of-the-union video message and sharing it with the company (or your department). Let people know what is on your mind, what is important to you, and where you need their help.
• Having zero tolerance for employees whose behavior does not align with the company vision and values.

Building trust will look different for every company, but these are a few ideas to help get the ball rolling. Once you gain trust, the next step gets a little easier...

2. Earn Buy-in and Commitment From Your Employees 

When it comes to shifting performance, after establishing trust, leaders need to move to gaining buy-in to the organization’s strategies. Committed employees have more authentic excitement about, and ownership in your organization’s path forward. They are ready to actively support and participate the whole team. 

This buy-in starts with the most senior leaders in the organization (which, oftentimes, is where we see alignment lacking the most). One helpful exercise would be to have everyone make a list for the following prompt: “Why this organizational transformation is a nonnegotiable for you, personally?” Just like in the movie Remember the Titans, this is part of your leadership team’s off-season workout. They must find common ground and deep-rooted connection, and form unrelenting team commitment.

Here are two accelerators to increase the likelihood of buy-in to your transformation: vision-casting and transparency.

#1: Vision-Casting 

Create a vision (for the organization and for any strategy) that conveys where you are going and why it matters. More than words on paper, the vision provides guidance as to what is most important and becomes a unifying mechanism across the company. Create and refine organizational or team values and the corresponding organizational behaviors that serve as guardrails for how individuals make decisions and operate day to day.

#2: Transparency 

Take the strategic planning process outside the ivory tower. Senior leadership is paid to make critical decisions, and they do need to set the course for an organization. That said, leaders also need to bring diverse thinking into this process. Over are the days of three people designing the company strategy in isolation and then dictating to everyone else what they must do are long gone—that approach is outdated and ineffective. 

Today’s approach must be inclusive, garnering input from within the organization. Whether through committees, focus groups, action learning projects, surveys, or a blend of these, people besides the most senior leaders must be included in the process. Leaders also need to leverage technology, creating space for online, face-to-face interactions so they can garner input from across the globe. This gets maximum traction in driving the strategy to successful execution. 

3. Understand and Leverage Frontline Worker Perspective

Frontline employees must be involved in business transformation efforts. Period. Not only because they have the most intimate knowledge of the actual work that needs to be done, but also because involving them in the process increases their trust in leadership—it makes them advocates for the strategic changes at hand. 

People feel a sense of ownership when they have a voice, and that’s what we’re after. Ownership allows employees to actively participate in change, so they feel like things are happening for and with them, not to them.

To effectively engage people in the formulation and execution of a strategy, you must make it real to them. Once leaders draft basic ideas for overarching goals and strategies, engage frontline employees in refining those strategies and developing the core tactics of executing them. 

One way to do this is through a process called “tiger teams.” Link the big goals to every business unit, department, team, and individual by forming small, cross-functional teams of employees. Provide executive sponsorship and advice to the groups so they have support, and give them the autonomy to build specific detail for the strategies and supporting tactics to achieve company goals.

As an example, if one of the main goals for a firm is to grow the business through a customer intimacy strategy, a tiger team can build the pathways to achieve this goal. They might suggest doing some voice-of-the-customer work to ensure the company really understands customer needs and points of pain. The group might suggest deploying or enhancing real-time customer feedback mechanisms to increase flexibility and responsiveness. 

4. Use an Approach to Keeping Score That Increases Transparency and Focus

If you are an executive, you most likely have some kind of “scorecard” composed of all the leading factors in your organization—financial, operational, customer-facing, etc. Ideally, you have a balance of the areas that are measured and they align with organizational strategies, as opposed to just the ones that are falling behind. 

Why? Because while understanding, owning, and driving lagging indicators is extremely important, the organization will begin to underachieve when those indicators become your sole focus.

Consider the impact to sustainable success if you measure revenue and profit, without considering employee engagement, internal employee growth and promotions, succession planning, safety, quality defects, or customer sentiments.

A more balanced scorecard creates a healthy blend of people and culture, the elements that drive profitability, and key operations. With balanced metrics, you’re much more likely to get the business results you desire. 

You can start by asking yourself these questions: What categories need to be added to your balanced scorecard? How can you more effectively measure and communicate the metrics that matter and the company’s progress toward achieving those key metrics?

5. Foster Tight Organizational Alignment. 

There is an assumption that all leaders are aligned and fully engaged when a company rolls out a new strategy. This isn’t always true. Often, there is a great need for senior leadership to meet together and ensure they all have the same definition of success— that there is true alignment.

Issues arise when individual leaders prioritize their personal initiatives and agendas before those of the organization. Too often, when we first meet a leadership team to help them accelerate performance, we hear leaders say things like, “I understand we need to move in this direction, and I’m totally behind it, but I need funding to complete this other project for my division.” 

That. Is. Not. Alignment.

When leaders say they agree with the strategy, but still spend time, energy, effort, and probably money (overtly or in hidden costs), working on other things that don’t directly connect to the main strategies, they work against a system and culture of high engagement and performance.

Let’s look at a specific example: Say “providing undeniable client impact” is an important business outcome at your company, but your innovation levels are off the chart and start taking over. Each day, you dream up new product or service offerings, engage in creative business-development activities, or take interest in a new marketing campaign in the company. This may seem like a positive thing, but you end up devoting energy to things that aren’t aligned to the most important priorities, stealing away energy and focus from the things that drive your primary business outcomes.

Start Moving Great Ideas Forward

If you have a plan to move forward and transform your business, consider these major ways to accelerate and amplify your results. Use the frameworks and approaches we’ve provided in this article to operate with clarity and transparency, measuring what matters most and putting your people in a position to move your organization forward.

Ultimately, by gaining employee trust and buy-in, implementing the perspective of frontline workers, keeping a balanced scorecard, and maintaining tight organizational alignment, you will begin to see a company culture that welcomes new initiatives and evolves faster than you could have imagined. 

For more advice on business transformation, you can find Thrive on Amazon.

Andrew Freedman is a lifelong advocate for maximizing human potential and creating positive change, personally and professionally. For over 25 years, he’s been a driving force in designing strategies that provide leaders a foundation to translate individual, team, and organizational talent into tangible business growth. As Managing Partner of SHIFT Consulting, he’s helped countless companies across diverse industries flourish through vibrant company cultures and a high performance mindset. Additionally, through his work as an affiliate faculty member of the University of Baltimore, Andrew’s continued goal is to use his insatiable passion for human performance to inspire new generations of business leaders with the art and science of creating and executing successful, people-focused business strategies.

Paul is President, Founder, and Chief Performance Architect at Exemplary Performance LLC. Designing high-performance work systems is Paul’s passion. Working across sectors (financial services, high technology, telecommunications, etc.) and functions (sales, product development, customer service, operations, management, etc.), Paul leverages his experience with Fortune 500 organizations to help clients achieve exceptional results by optimizing the performance of teams and individuals.