How to Prevent and Manage Family Business Conflict: Decision Making and the Family Business Constitution

by Matthew Levy Conflict among family members at home, at work, or in the board room can wreak havoc on individuals, family relationships and the stability of the family business. Managing decision making productively and preventing significant conflicts should be a primary objective for anyone in a family business.   For the Family in Business there are three main causes of conflict: Lack of alignment as it relates to vision, values, expectations and policies The challenges of managing disagreements Strong emotions and sometimes even volatility The Family Business Constitution Every family in business together should have a Family Business Constitution, [...]

Excel at Execution to Achieve your Strategy

By Matthew Levy As the economy gears up for another great year, managing growth is the game most businesses are playing.  If your company is going to excel at managing better and more predictable results, it must excel at managing execution. Typical Performance Management is Inadequate Typical employee performance management is inadequate even if it includes some formal goal setting and annual performance reviews.  The problem is that these rarely inspire true commitment to goals that align with strategy or the predictable achievement of these goals in any manageable way.  It also doesn’t create a performance culture or give management with the [...]

Overcome the Six Hurdles to Effective Execution Management

The Problem: People break promises and companies are bad at execution management, accountability and getting predictable results. The following are six barriers that are holding back  your company.  Putting in place an effective system for managing execution will allow your company to overcome these hurdles. Six Hurdles to Effective Execution Management: #1 People often don’t keep their promises Keeping promises are the bedrock, heart and soul, glue, and foundation of successful and predictable execution. Do your leaders demand that people do what they promise or do they consistently tolerate excuses? In companies where people keep their promises, goals are clear, [...]

Mining the Gems of Strategy in a Year-End Review

Problem: Most management teams fail to take advantage of the most strategic conversation available to them at year end -- the one that unveils the hidden gems of learning that can have a profound impact both on next year’s strategy and on operational plans. What is the crucial conversation you ask? It’s the year-end review of the success and failures of the past year. Having this discussion with the entire executive team present and doing it in a thorough way ensures that the gems of strategy are mined, extracted and polished to spectacular brilliance, ready to be applied immediately when [...]

Manage Execution to Grow Like the Inc. 5000

by Matthew Levy Inc. magazine’s September 2013 issue features the 32nd annual list of the Inc. 5000 – a collection representing some of the finest companies in the country.  There’s no one industry they hail from, no single geography, and are spread across B2B and B2C – from business services to financial services to consumer products to healthcare to energy and more.  Their revenues range from 2 million to over 10 billion dollars. What do they have in common? Performance – 3 year growth rates of 34% to 43,000%.  How did they get there and what does it take to [...]

Why Even Top Performers Stop Short of Doing Their Best Work

"I need my people to be honest with me ─ tell me what I need to hear ─ and push themselves to get the results without me having to push them." ─ a frustrated CEO and client The Problem: Sometimes, even the intelligent and talented fall short of stellar performance. Are they just afraid to push it when their results suffer? The Real-Life Situation: The VP of Supply Chain and a client was a very successful executive with a strong pedigree -- top of his class at West Point, MBA from a top school, and previously a strategy consultant. He [...]

End Sabotage and Cure Organizational Schizophrenia

Executives frequently disagree with decisions that the executive team – or the CEO – have already made.  Sometimes, we even disagree with how a decision was made.  However, after a decision is made, we make a choice to act in accordance with the decision or to act and speak consistently with what we wish the decision was.  While we don’t call it this enough, acting inconsistently with a decision that was made is – covertly or overtly and intentionally or unintentionally – an act of sabotage, negatively impacting the behaviors of others and diminishing the intended results. Furthermore, when we [...]

Don’t Miss Your Numbers, Call a Time-Out

Don't miss your numbers this year. Now is the time to get the company back on track before it's too late. Call a time-out and get the executive team offsite to assess the company's progress to date, resolve all the issues, and make plans to insure success for the year. Here is how...

Consultant Lists 10 Symptoms of Management Dysfunction

Miami, FL, December 5, 2007 -- John Thain, CEO of Merrill Lynch, has pledged to revamp the bank's culture in response to insufficient management team co-operation that he believes could have contributed to the $8bn mortgage write down according to the Financial Times on December 3, 2007. "Thain's acknowledgement of culture and Management Dysfunction as a key contributor to poor business results is a courageous admission and other CEOs should be investigating it as well," said Matthew Levy, CEO of Results Management Group. "The impact on corporate culture of poor executive level collaboration may be the single most underestimated cause [...]

2021-08-10T11:14:40-05:00By |Uncategorized|0 Comments

Transforming Corporate Results: Five Critical Factors for CEO Success

CEO success depends on the ability to fulfill the ultimate responsibility: leading the company boldly into the future and inspiring and guiding people to achieve specific results. After years of consulting with and coaching executives from the likes of GE, Motorola, Chevron, BHP Billiton and also many much smaller companies, I'm sure that that transforming corporate results must be driven from the top -- and then supported throughout the company. CEOs that are able to align their executive team with a bold and compelling vision, empower it to begin the task of mobilizing the rest of the company. Senior executives [...]

2021-08-10T10:35:19-05:00By |CEO, Executive Team, Leadership, Managing Execution, Organizational Alignment|Comments Off on Transforming Corporate Results: Five Critical Factors for CEO Success

Don’t Let Executive Team Dynamics Derail your Year-End Business Planning

Executive team dynamics can get in the way of developing and executing next year's strategies. Here’s why—and how to identify the elephant in the room. A healthy executive team rationally looks at last year’s performance and devises a clear strategy that sets the business up for success. But when team dynamics clouds the picture, strategies and budgets wind up weak or incomplete. And team members don’t fully commit to the plans, objectives, and actions necessary for success. Sometimes, these issues stem from legitimate disagreements about the best path forward. Other times, executives lack the skills and ability to align, a [...]

Get Results and Be Great with People

By Matthew Levy  Problem: The executives that I speak with want to get better results at work. Some people push too hard and are perceived as jerks or bossy overlords. Other people struggle to get results because they’re weak, don’t to ask for what they want, or don’t hold others accountable. The Place to Start is Awareness: The place to start is awareness. Awareness of our strategy and tactics is helpful. And, awareness about how we are perceived by others at work is valuable. We can learn from that. When preoccupation about how we are perceived becomes a distraction, disempowering, [...]

Will Your Executive Team Dynamic Contaminate Year-End Planning?

by Matthew Levy A dysfunctional executive team dynamic will create a weaker strategy and a budget executives don’t really believe in or commit to.  A strongly aligned and effective executive team will develop a more innovative strategy and a better budget. So, one of the most important and timely decisions a CEO must make now is whether or not to address executive team dynamics as part of planning for next year. Problem: As we enter the tail-end of the year, executives are balancing these three things simultaneously: Ensuring results for this year, Planning strategy for next year, and Creating a budget based [...]

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