Drawing from our extensive experience, gained both through leading businesses and offering consultancy services, we have come to recognize a prevalent need within many companies and teams. There is a demand for practical tools that can facilitate forward momentum. This requirement is particularly pronounced in the context of smaller to mid-sized businesses. In the past, when these companies had fewer employees or operated in a less volatile and more predictable environment where physical interactions were more frequent, achieving cohesion seemed more straightforward. Informal interactions, like coffee machine chats, lunchtime discussions, or pre-meeting gatherings, naturally facilitated broader conversations.
However, in today's landscape, the realization has set in that employees often miss the subtleties or misconstrue the company's direction. Much valuable energy is expended as a result. This recognition prompted the creation of the CPR model, a potent framework we developed. Its purpose is to aid companies in cultivating clarity and alignment among their workforce. Through this model, teams gain the ability to channel their efforts with assurance, effectively aligning them with the company's overarching goals and objectives.
Creating Organisational Alignment
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Creating Clarity:
Ensure that all employees and stakeholders are on the same page regarding the company’s vision/direction, strategy (how to close the gap from where you are now) and goals. Overall, clarity empowers businesses to make well-informed decisions, align efforts, adapt to changes, and build a strong foundation for success. Without clarity, companies may face confusion, frustration, disengagement, missed opportunities, and a lack of direction that can hinder their growth and long-term viability.
Define the desired Culture:
It is so crucial to be clear on what you expect from employees in terms of behaviour, collaboration, customer engagement, risk tolerance etc. What are the important values, what are the rules of the game? In other words what is your organisational DNA.
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Empowering People:
You can have the best product or service in the world but without the right people in the right place with the right tools you will not be successful. We believe that the employees are the true backbone of your company. But even if you have the best employees, you still need to pave the way in terms of expectations related to vision, goals, values etc.
Setting Priorities:
If you go after everything you won’t get anything. You have to make choices in order to not to dilute your efforts based on a mix of impact (risk-reward), urgency, competencies and resources always linking it back to the vision and overall direction.
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Taking Responsibility:
If you have been clear on what and how you want to achieve your vision and you translated that back to priorities and year end goals, teams and employees should be able to understand what their part in this journey is. They have to take responsibility so that all pieces add up to the overall goals. Obviously help is needed from you and your leaders to ensure it all adds up, but it is so powerful for employees to see and understand which piece of the pie they are responsible for. This will then automatically lead to accountability.
Measuring Results:
Remember that the most effective KPIs are those directly tied to the company's strategic goals and objectives. The selected KPIs should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), providing actionable insights to drive continuous improvement and success. Regularly tracking and analysing these KPIs can help businesses make informed decisions and stay on track toward their goals.
Ensure you have a mix of leading and lagging indicators. Leading KPIs are forward-looking metrics that help predict or influence future performance and outcomes, like new leads generated or customer satisfaction.
Lagging KPIs are historical metrics that measure past performance and outcomes. They are "lagging" because they report on results that have already occurred, like sales or customer retention.
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