The Secret of High-Performing Teams: Coherent Planning, Alignment, and Execution.

Dynamic CEOs charging ahead to build their businesses inspire by their vision and commitment. But do they manage to establish a detailed road map for growth that their teams can actually follow? Without practical planning – and the effort to nurture a growth mindset while teaching their team how to achieve their targets – energy and resources will be unfocused, progress will remain untracked, and the team will never reach its potential.

A common response is to task the CEO with planning. But visionaries have trouble prioritizing planning processes and the process itself is critical to the success of the effort. Another approach is to dive deeply into detail, overcomplicating planning. Better to keep it simple from the start and elaborate scenarios in more detail as the teams are ready. A third habit is to hold more meetings. The instinct to discuss may be right, but this can often be a waste of time. Plans must be written down and reviewed in concise, well-run team sessions, no more than necessary.

Mapping out a growth strategy for most midsized management teams means taking them on a journey to get them accustomed to a higher level of discipline and performance. A better solution is to task a qualified leader from the senior team to head up the planning process. Adopt a simple planning tool to provide a basic template for the task. And establish an ambitious but manageable cadence for reviewing progress against identifiable milestones. This approach will help connect the team to the company’s vision and ambition through practical, achievable goals, significantly increasing prospects for success.

“When the pandemic hit and travel was severely restricted, we adopted a ‘survive to thrive’ approach,” says George Dom, COO of the San Luis Obispo, CA-based private business aviation company ACI Jet . “Thankfully, when the country began to open-up and people had places to travel, our business picked up and we’ve had two solid years of growth. Although we had only recently initiated our planning process with regular reviews, the leadership team had the tools to focus very specifically on their targets and challenges. The monthly reviews kept us aligned and able to adapt quickly.”

Planning: Keep it Simple, Focused, and Relevant

A successful planning process takes time, commitment, resources and leadership. Key features of a robust planning approach include:

1. Commit to the notion that planning and plan review is a discipline worth investing in. Scrambling won’t scale!
2. Appoint a company leader who likes planning and is a strong manager to be in charge of setting up the plans and driving regular review of those plans. An internal owner is needed.
3. Select a resource, such as an outside planning tool, to help you develop the plan and follow a tried-and-tested methodology. Don’t re-invent the planning wheel.
4. Stand up the plans quickly, so you can start using them early. They won’t be perfect, but that’s fine at the start.
5. Establish a monthly plan review cadence. This is key. It’s the striving to stay on plan that creates the real value – not necessarily the plan itself.
6. Every six months, reassess the plan, to incorporate continual improvements and make the plan and review process better. Continue this for 2-3 years, and planning will become increasingly effective, allowing for increasing rates of growth.

Instinct, hard work, good teams and great products – these assets can enable entrepreneurs to launch and sustain companies even without a clear strategy. The world changes minute to minute, and planning can sometimes feel like a luxury in the face of a dynamic environment.

Yet the old quip holds as true as ever: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Even if the company doesn’t fail outright, it will likely fail to reach its potential. It will not be prepared to respond to opportunities to the fullest or will endure a harder journey to reach its goals than it would with a disciplined plan and planning process. Disregard Ben Franklin at your peril.

Alignment + Situational Awareness + Decision Space = Empowered Engagement

Founded in 1998 by William Borgsmiller, ACI Jet started as a small company with one twin-prop airplane. Driven by the founder’s perseverance and business acumen, ACI Jet has grown into a full-service business-aviation company, with more than 300 employees, a fleet of 15 jets, an aircraft maintenance and repair station, and fixed-base operations in San Luis Obispo, Santa Ana and Paso Robles.

Borgsmiller has been very successful in growing the company – including taking over a rival business – and attracting investment. But in recent years, it became clear that a disciplined planning process with a concise plan and regular reviews was necessary to track and encourage growth, focus the teams, and preserve alignment across the company.

To lead this, Borgsmiller brought in George Dom as COO in 2019. Dom has significant leadership experience from 26 years as an officer, strike-fighter pilot, and instructor in the Navy and as a business leader and strategist. Dom combines a personable style with a résumé that earns respect, having served as an instructor at the Navy Fighter Weapons School (known as TOPGUN), commanded a fleet FA-18 squadron, the Blue Angels jet demonstration squadron, and a combat-ready air wing of 2,500 personnel and 70 tactical aircraft in eight squadrons on two US aircraft carriers. He studied US National Security Strategy at the National Defense University and served on the staff of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Strategy and Policy Directorate. ?

Well used to maintaining order amid fast-changing environments, Dom quickly saw that one of the first priorities to address was communication.

“Bill is a terrific leader with great integrity and very smart,” says Dom. “But like many entrepreneurs, he was moving so fast sometimes that he wasn't keeping other people informed.”

Executives and their teams were not always sure what was going on and priorities could change very quickly. As a result, the company lacked alignment and situational awareness. ?

Dom sought to build a sense of “empowered engagement,” leading discussion sessions about teamwork by drawing on military examples – including sharing Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s book Team of Teams and its follow-on, One Mission, organizing monthly all-hands company meetings to present updates and host wide-open Q&A. “We tell them that all questions are good questions. We’re not afraid to address whatever topic is causing concern or heartburn,” Dom says.

A key to this sense of empowerment has been defining everyone’s authority and levels of decision-making, so they have the freedom to operate without waiting for permission. This has encouraged people to take initiative to solve problems and seize opportunities, starting with the executive team and cascading down through the levels of management to the front lines.

“People have really enjoyed getting to the specificity where they know, O.K., here’s my area of responsibility and authority. And it’s not static. Our aim with each leader is to expand their authority over time as people earn trust and confidence, so their decision space grows,” says Dom.

These preliminary steps were important in launching a successful planning process as they got leaders at all levels informed, engaged and enthusiastic about taking part. They selected an external planning system as a resource to draw on tested approaches and help the leadership team agree the core company mission, vision, objectives, strategies and plans – all boiled down to its essence on a single page.

It took time for the teams to understand the planning process and the initial plans were not the best. But the aim for the first year, 2020, was just to get the planning process started, establish the habit of the monthly reviews, and build from there.

“All I wanted to do that first year was to take them through the process of building the plans and then meeting every month to talk about the plans and see how they’re doing,” recalls Dom. A monthly cadence of three 1-hour meetings was established: each member of the leadership team met individually with the CEO and COO, the leadership team met together to share ideas and make decisions, and the entire company was invited to a virtual town hall for a fast-paced, 30-minute update on ACI Jet's priorities for the following month with wide-open Q&A.

By the second year of the planning process in 2021, the plans improved, becoming more specific and realistic to make informed decisions. This included developing annual budgets for each business unit with financial targets and key performance indicators they could track that provided actionable insights. ?

This helped the unit leaders become increasingly fluent in their budgets and P&Ls, able to present their plans to their teams with clarity and coherence. Business leaders became very focused on their key objectives, linked to clear strategies and action plans, and reviewed against the vision, mission and objectives outlined in the CEO’s plan for the company.

“The latest step is to include the business units' managers into the planning and performance process by working with their executives to develop their own plans. They are very much hands on, let's-get-it-done kind of leaders. So they love the specificity of where we are going, what’s important, and how they can contribute to ACI's success,” says Dom.

They meet monthly with their business unit leader to report on their progress, identify challenges needing support, and exchange 2-way feedback. Above all, they were impressed to see the direct alignment among the plans— from the CEO to the executive team to the managers— and felt valued to be "let into the tent” to participate in discussions about overall company objectives and performance.

It's Not Easy, But It's Worth It!

Building a culture of planning and regular reviews takes time. It is about doing the hard thinking to define specific goals and strategies, not as a one-time event, but rather as a livestream into the future, regularly reviewing results against plans, reassessing, and adapting. That is the real value.

A critical contributor to success is having the leadership fully on board, participating in the process and leading by example, starting with the CEO. The initiative should ideally be championed by a member of the senior team who will support and maintain the efforts of a consultant who may bring in an approach to planning that brings the process alive internally.

It is essential to be patient – get everyone on board, take it step by step, and do not become discouraged. Even initial plans, which may seem a bit simplistic, will make a real contribution, not only in focusing everyday efforts but also in improved communication while building the habits and practice of working with the plans.

As ACI Jet COO Dom says, “I’m certain that the alignment, transparency, and accountability of our disciplined?planning process will take us from being very good to becoming a great company in 2022 and beyond. We’re going to take off because it’s now part of ACI's DNA."