“Okay, how do we get started?” he asked.
“You begin by sharing your vision with them. What success looks like to you. What you want and how they can be a part of it. Then we will ask them to create their own vision as it relates to their department and specific job. We want the entire team to see themselves being successful in their jobs. We will then meld their collective visions with yours, into one, by conducting a bottom-up, company-wide vision exercise. The feedback from this exercise will be revealing and highly motivational. The goal is to achieve a psychology of shared destiny.”
Many CEOs, presidents, and business owners find themselves in similar situations as Eric. It’s as if they are stuck in a state of stressful inertia: repeating the same mistakes over and over and not knowing how to become unstuck.
The Synergy Strategic Planning Model is a transformational force that shifts thinking and releases stuck brainpower and energy. It moves an organization away from inertia, lethargy, sameness, and the “blame game,” to motivation, growth, and profitability.
Synergy Strategic Planning
The difference between Traditional Strategic Planning and Synergy Strategic Planning is within the depth and breadth of the managerial leadership focus. In Traditional Strategic Planning, the process is completed at the top by the executive team. It is then committed to writing and, in some cases, word-smithed by an advertising agency and then distributed down into the organization with orders to make the change happen.
In the Synergy Strategic Planning Model, the core principle is that organizational effectiveness is achieved through committed leaders who see the organization as a whole, and that change happens quickly through empowered individuals working in teams toward a shared destiny.
When companies decide to make change, they often overlook the important and vital ingredient that will make all the difference—involving their people in the process! They make the mistake of thinking that everyone will see the benefit of the change. They assume that everyone’s goals, aims, and wishes are aligned toward the mission. If you have ever experienced a merger gone wrong or been through any kind of organizational change, you would have undoubtedly experienced the resistance that many people have to change.
You cannot order change, like you order a pizza. Just because the board of directors says it should be so, does not mean that it will be so. Ordering change may work for some people but not for the majority. Making successful change happen in organizations requires a critical mass of agreement and support. That’s one of the key reasons and benefits of Synergy Strategic Planning.
Synergy Strategic Planning is a process of defining a company’s mission, vision, and goals. It includes determining a set of core values, which strengthens the relationships between the leadership team, employees, customers, and suppliers. It is a blueprint of the way in which it chooses to do business. It acts as a business’s moral compass.
Synergy Strategic Planning requires clarity of thought in determining the key factors for the success of a business by knowing and acknowledging its strengths and weaknesses, what opportunities exist, and what may be a threat to achieving success. It takes into consideration core competencies and core offerings, and is a business discipline that calls for strength of leadership, high–performance teamwork, and unshakable determined focus. There is nothing more powerful than a passionate team of people, willingly aligning their goals with the company mission and working toward a shared destiny. It is the energy source of success.
A Psychology of Shared Destiny
A psychology of shared destiny is a power source for growth and profitability. It is a leadership duty and management responsibility to inspire and empower everyone to share in a common vision, a clear set of values, and clearly defined goals. This can be a very difficult thing to accomplish because many leaders are stuck with a false idea of power and control. False power and control can be very intoxicating and hard to let go of because it’s good to be king! To be feared! This way of being the king feeds the ego, the imagined self, and creates an illusion of power.
It takes a real shift in thinking and it takes strength of character and personal confidence in one’s own ability to recognize that true leadership power is earned through honesty, competency, trust, and respect. You cannot lead others if you cannot lead yourself. You have to trust yourself enough to trust others, and in so doing, allow them to perform to their highest potential. This is a more noble way to be king! People love to work for and support secure leaders, and be a part of high energy organizations that afford them the opportunity to grow and develop.
Shared destiny is an essential piece of the success puzzle and a powerful financial engine. Trust between the executive team and the rest of the organization is without question one of the key ingredients to company-wide ownership of the mission.
Most people will not align themselves with bad business practices, executive greed, exploitation, verbal and emotional abuse, betrayal, and false promises. Avoid the mistake of thinking that employees will support any of these unethical practices under the disguise of being a team player.
Most people can read between the lines; they share thoughts, assumptions, and information at the speed of the Internet. In today’s businesses, good, bad, assumed, and created news travels really fast. That’s why constant and transparent information sharing is critical and vital to organizational change. Facilitating change should follow a set of ethical principles to build a bridge of trustworthiness for employees to walk over without fear.
Experienced consultants and “outside” change agents are invaluable, well-versed, and specialists in rapidly and successfully winning over the hearts and minds of a team. Change agents don’t want to captain the ship, they want to “pilot” it out of the harbor. A good captain of business recognizes and uses this talent to cost effectively move the organization forward, knowing that failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
A good leader knows that the difference between a high-performance team and a group of people lies in the following: the strength of the relationships, the work environment, the importance of the goal, and the personal and financial rewards. In a high-performance business team, these factors are stronger, more positive, and applied more often—resulting in increased productivity, reduced costs, and elevated revenues.
You Are in the Business of Directing Energy
A vision is a clearly-defined mind image of what the final picture of success looks like. It is a uniquely human ability to imagine and visualize in detail where we plan to end up. To visualize is the most powerful ability we have. When we focus on a specific vision, and we discipline ourselves to hold an image constantly, our bodies become energized to bring about the vision’s physical materialization. Imagination is the source of possibility and the foundation of probability. It is the playground of potential, where the seeds of greatness are sown and the power of belief begins.
Every day we draw great inspiration from the heroes of imagination who have come from every walk of life. The Wright Brothers, Einstein, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Flemming, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Ford imagined radios, televisions, telephones, computers, incandescent light bulbs, automobiles, aircrafts, highways, spacecrafts, and the Internet—and like Martin Luther King, most of them