Translating Strategy into High Performance Capability
The Value Delivery Spine The age-old challenge for organization leaders is two-fold — determining the most effective direction for the organization and then aligning the organization to that purpose. This challenge is the purview of CEOs, political, military, municipal, community, and other organizational leaders, who are in the high stakes position of understanding the ecosystem in which their organization lives and discerning the path that allows the organization to thrive.
This article focuses on how to align an organization to its purpose. This aligning-effort requires, in turn, capturing the hearts and minds of the team and then building the structures within the organization to support the direction. This process of setting direction, capturing hearts and minds, and then building support structures happens naturally under every leader for every organization since the dawn of leadership. That is not to say that it happens well. That directional alignment may fail. Alignment has a long history of frequent failure. Even for organizations that succeed in aligning, success might be marginal, yielding a slow shift due to poor performance and inefficient structures. This article outlines an approach to ensure our organization is aligned to the emerging purpose and supercharges the shift towards the new direction.