Executive Team Alignment
Overview of Steve Lishansky’s Strategic Alignment Process™
Optimizing the strategic alignment of executive teams:
Optimize International’s Steve Lishansky is an expert at facilitating groups. His unique, fast Strategic Alignment Process™ improves organizational effectiveness by achieving:
- Clear articulation and alignment of vision, mission, goals, and strategies in ways that create understanding, clarity and focus for more effective thinking, decision making, and action
- A powerful vision and mission that focuses everyone on a future that is compelling to work toward right now. This is the “compass” for navigating the best decisions and action. In a highly effective, focused, and well functioning organization, the vision and mission drive the goals. Clear goals drive the strategies. This structure of decision making produces the greatest speed, impact, and quality of results.
Principles of strategic alignment – Organizations are most effective when:
- The foundations of decision making are clear at all levels.
- There is high-quality cooperation, collaboration, and communication at every level.
- The executive team agrees on and clearly communicates their vision, mission, and goals.
- Leadership effectively aligns the entire workforce with the vision, mission, goals, and strategies.
- Everyone in the organization knows, understands, and focuses on the most important priories.
- Infrastructure, operations, budgeting, and compensation align with the vision, mission, and goals.
The Strategic Alignment Process™ – Steps to Success:
Step 1 – Designing the strategic alignment session:
- Interview the program sponsor
- Conduct brief interviews and surveys with key participants
- Clarify desired outcomes and critical issues
- Understand specific obstacles and opportunities that could help or hinder the process and results
- Develop the meeting agenda
- Design the meeting processes to optimize results
Step 2 – Achieving the desired outcomes of the session:
- Achieve collective clarity, consensus, and agreement on the strategic alignment elements
- Establish ownership of key priorities
- Build a communication strategy to the rest of the organization
- Agree on next steps to continue the momentum
Step 3 – Session follow up:
- Provide a timetable to complete post-session agreements
- Deliver suggestions to maintain and build on the momentum achieved
- Facilitate a strategic review of organizational plans and results (optional)
- Develop additional processes to expand the impact and results of the team (optional)
