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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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...

Aligning Executives with the Board: $8 million to the Bottom Line

Despite all the rage of the balanced scorecard, management by objectives (MBO), and the lip service paid to alignment, many CEOs still struggle to know the extent of their employees' commitment to corporate objectives. Putting the number on the power point slide, the scorecard, or getting the "yes" nod, doesn't necessarily ensure appropriate action. Whatever the strategy or objective, it is crucial to pay close attention to exactly what your executives are committed to and for what they are willing to be held accountable. Results Management Group was hired by a publicly held global manufacturer of electronic equipment to assist in [...]

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 [...]

Go to Top