Building a Platform for Leadership

When organizations pursue performance breakthroughs, changing strategies is not enough. They also must change “how the game gets played” — with new capabilities, new patterns of behavior, and shifts in power and influence that don’t come easily. Too often, leaders find themselves without a committed organization behind them — the CEO or general manager pushes, but execution drags. No one speaks the plain truth about the strategy’s roadblocks. Lacking alignment, the senior team gives conflicting messages. Cross-functional teamwork founders on competing metrics and priorities. Managers and employees who must drive the strategy lose heart, believing “this too shall pass.”

TruePoint’s Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) builds a platform for leadership — taking the organization’s game to new levels by giving chief executives and their senior teams a “mandate from the front lines” to quickly refine and rapidly implement new strategies. SFP structures a series of disciplined conversations about the company’s goals and strategy, starting with the senior team and then engaging a cross-section of down-the-line managers and employees. (See SFP Step-by-Step for a detailed summary.) These strategic conversations alternate between advocacy and inquiry. Leaders clearly advocate a new strategic direction — then listen to what others across the organization think about it.

TruePoint developed its Strategic Fitness Process more than 15 years ago to help leaders turn organizational drag into forward thrust. Since then, in more than 200 organizations around the world, we have implemented the Strategic Fitness Process to create collective, organization-wide conversations that confront the unvarnished truth about barriers to performance. SFP has been used by CEOs and business unit managers to mobilize their organizations and top teams to address a wide range of strategy execution issues. It has been applied successfully to implement mergers, reorganize new divisions of companies, and help CEOs launch major cultural transformations. It has proven particularly effective when new managers are taking charge. SFP has also been used in many countries and cultures throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The process has been applied at the corporate level, the business unit level, and at production plants; in sales and service field organizations of 10,000+ employees, and in corporate staff groups such as quality and human resource functions.

One division of a global technology company used SFP annually for five straight years to transform from laggard to company-leading performance. Strategic conversations created a company-wide mandate to “shift the game” from standalone products to integrated solutions. Profits increased six times over as flat sales turned into 10% annual growth. (See Our Clients for more case studies.)

Conversations structured by the Strategic Fitness Process are powerful, in part, because they are not employee feedback surveys or mere complaint sessions. Instead, they focus on the issues that matter most. Do we have a distinctive business strategy that key managers believe in? Do we have the capabilities to execute it? Do we have the leadership capabilities we will need to win? Also importantly, the Strategic Fitness Process fosters honesty without risk. People at all levels have a safe context to “speak truth to power” without fear for their jobs or concern that leaders will be hurt and defensive. This exposes “iceberg issues” before they emerge later to blindside leaders — as Steak n Shake CEO Peter Dunn puts it, “I never got decked by a punch I saw coming.”

The full impact of the Strategic Fitness Process comes from its ability to unlock the leadership capabilities of an organization’s own people. The catalysts for the process are a hand-picked task force of the company’s best, most trusted down-the-line leaders, who interview pivotal people in all parts of the organization. Hard truths uncovered by the company’s own managers simply cannot be ignored or explained away — the all-too-common outcome when outside consultants conduct interviews or thousands of employees are surveyed anonymously. This task force distills manager and employee feedback to identify critical issues affecting strategy, then shares this with the senior team. The task force also provides a sounding board as the senior team translates strategic insights into action — refining strategy, redesigning and aligning the organization, and decisively acting to eliminate the barriers to improving performance and commitment.

Leaders who engage in the Strategic Fitness Process can quickly and dramatically change how their businesses are organized and managed — driving bottom-line performance gains in the short term while building capacity to sustain that performance over time. As another key outcome, the Strategic Fitness Process develops leaders — the senior team achieves new unity and effectiveness, while task force members build their capacity to take a “general management” perspective on the business. Most importantly, these collective, honest conversations enhance everyone’s willingness to put the organization and its objectives ahead of self-interest. Therein lies the power of the Strategic Fitness Process to create the capacity and collective commitment to succeed.

See SFP Step-by-Step for a more detailed overview of the Strategic Fitness Process. Examples of how leaders have used SFP are also discussed in Our Clients as well as in “How to Have an Honest Conversation About Your Business Strategy,” the 2004 Harvard Business Review article by TruePoint’s Michael Beer and Russell A. Eisenstat.

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