A ship can only travel in one direction: where is your company headed?

As a great Captain of your business, you have spent a lot of time ensuring it is lean, efficient, and ready to scale. You have put together key roles and responsibilities and have filled those roles with great people.?

Everything seems set for success. Yet, week by week and month by month, growth doesn’t follow.?

People are working hard doing their part, but things are slowing down instead of accelerating.

What is happening?

A lot of times companies get stuck because they forget one critical piece:?

Alignment?

Even when you have taken the time to put together an amazing team, this is not going to bring the expected results if everyone is working in totally different directions, instead of having clear objectives in mind all the time.?

Start with 3 easy steps:

Create a clear vision

In the past, I was thinking vision, mission, and values were nice buzzwords for big companies. I was wrong.?

Not having a vision is like jumping on a boat for a very long trip, with no idea where it is going.

Vision should explain clearly what you want to create, and your values tell your team how you want to get there. They become easy to reference North Stars to remember what you are doing and why.

Share it widely

It might seem obvious, but it doesn’t help to put something in place that only CXOs know about.?

I was working as a consultant for a company and on the first day, they sent me a 70-page document with vision, values, and full strategy plan. Interestingly, the same was never shared with any of their teams. They thought it was not relevant.

Make sure that everyone is aware of it from day one in the company, that they fully understand what it means and can embody it in their work.?

This is not a one-off event, like presenting during an all-hand and forgetting about it. It should be discussed, clarified, and even questioned if it is still relevant or needs steering at any time.

Translate it in practical steps

The last piece is moving down from big to small and making this actionable. Going from vision to values, to strategy, to goals, to projects, to tasks.??

If you strive to be a client-first organization, what does it mean for every person in your organization in the way they tackle their day-to-day job?

The idea is to save time on decision-making, as it’s easier to know what you have to do if you know where you should be going. Also, it helps delegate and decentralise a lot more: managers do not need to spend time instructing how to get to the goals, you have just given a clear map that everyone can follow.

Once this is set and everyone is going steadily in the same direction, it will benefit the whole organization, with more goals reached and faster execution.

To a safe journey,?

Serena

Need help bringing alignment and growth to your business? You can start assessing where you are stuck and what you should tackle first, by downloading your free Guide

I am also open to discuss how to get you from where you are now to where you want to be, you can book it here