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 [...]

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, [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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...

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
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