The Power of Strategic Commitment: Achieving Extraordinary Results Through Total Alignment and Engagement

The Power of Strategic Commitment: Achieving Extraordinary Results Through Total Alignment and Engagement

The Power of Strategic Commitment: Achieving Extraordinary Results Through Total Alignment and Engagement

The Power of Strategic Commitment: Achieving Extraordinary Results Through Total Alignment and Engagement

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Overview

Employee engagement, accountability, and true commitment—not management’s well-thought-out initiatives—are the real key to achieving results. In The Power of Strategic Commitment readers learn how to improve strategic processes by enlisting the support of managers, employees, boards, suppliers, investors, and others to promote company-wide ownership. The book outlines the key factors that determine commitment and reveals how readers can continuously measure buy-in, involve everyone in creating their own piece of a larger organizational future, tailor commitment strategies for individual employees, keep everyone on the road to achieving stated goals, hire fully-engaged talent, and create a commitment-inspiring rewards system.Most managers and executives don’t have a clear system for ensuring the support they need from those around them. But creating and sustaining the kind of buy-in that drives results starts with you. The Power of Strategic Commitment provides practical methods for getting everyone to not only accept and support, but actually embrace organizational initiatives and promote long-term success.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780814434406
Publisher: AMACOM
Publication date: 05/27/2009
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Josh Leibner (Bridgewater, NJ) and Gershon Mader (Toronto, Canada) are founding partners of Quantum Performance, Inc., a management consulting firm with global clients including Capital One, Cisco Systems, Prudential Financial, Cushman & Wakefield and many others.

Alan Weiss (East Greenwich, RI) is a consultant, speaker, and author whose consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients including Hewlett-Packard, Merck, and hundreds of other top organizations.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Let’s be honest. Most initiatives to improve organizational performance do not deliver. Whether the aim is to become leaner, more productive, customer-intimate, or growth-oriented, the majority of organizational programs fail to accomplish their goals. Most of these efforts don’t cut costs, improve productivity, boost customer satisfaction, or raise revenue to the levels that the organization’s leaders expected or promised to the board and Wall Street. Some initiatives, in fact, fail outright because of lack of ownership and follow-through. All in all, the track record of corporate initiatives is a sorry one—one that only Dilbert creator Scott Adams could take joy in.

Most senior managers understand that no matter how clear and valid their strategy and objectives are, if people are not genuinely on the same page working with each other, rather than against or independent of each other, they will not achieve the success they want. But these same managers don’t know how to generate real commitment and alignment to their strategies. One clear indication is the lack of enthusiasm that most senior managers exhibit for the strategic planning process. As one executive put it, “Strategic planning—that’s when you go offsite as a team, agree on a bunch of priorities for the year, then go back to work and do what you were going to do anyway.”

From our combined consulting experience spanning eighty-plus years, 500 clients, and sixty countries, working with companies of all types and at all levels, we have found that the root cause for most failed or unfulfilled strategies is not any actual shortcomings in the strategies themselves. In fact, we have seen brilliant strategies fail in the worst way—despite being exactly what the company needed at the time, well researched and analyzed, and presented compellingly at all levels.

The Power of Strategic Commitment teaches how true ownership and commitment, and not merely compliance, is achieved throughout an organization, even when the environment is filled with the typical toxic organizational issues of distrust, politics, turfism, butt-covering, blame, and timidity. The book addresses the role, for example, of a “chief commitment officer,” ways to build commitment that cost nothing, and the fallacy of money as a motivator for behavior change. Strategic commitment issues in nonprofits, education, and government, as well as traditional for-profits, are all covered.

Using this book, you’ll be able to identify apathy, resignation, and cynicism, and then transform them into an environment of total alignment and commitment within your organization. The process starts by sharpening your antennae to spot compliance masquerading as commitment, and understanding the six key drivers that ensure organizational commitment, even under the most dire of circumstances. Numerous real-life examples are given from Global 1000 executives who have succeeded using these tools. All of the quotes used in the book come from direct interviews or interactions with clients, or recollections from the individuals cited. Actual names were used when possible, with fictionalized names used in some cases.

This book is a modest insurance policy to guarantee that the $400,000 spent on strategic planning is, indeed, well spent.

Please note: Beginning with In Search of Excellence almost 30 years ago (1982, HarperCollins), people have carped that companies used as examples have often fallen out of favor. That’s because Peters and Waterman at the time, just as we are today, were using contemporary examples of sound processes. But variables often interfere: changed leadership, mergers, poor decisions, poor discipline, etc. We can’t ensure that our examples will stay true to strategic commitment, but we can laud those that were doing so when we wrote this.

—Josh Leibner

Bridgewater, New Jersey

—Gershon Mader

Toronto, Ontario

—Alan Weiss

East Greenwich, Rhode Island

December 2008

Excerpted from THE POWER OF STRATEGIC COMMITMENT. Copyright © 2009 by Josh Leibner and Gershon Mader. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.

All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Why Commitment TrumpsCompliance

Why Commitment Is More Important Than Ever

Chapter 2: What Is Strategic Commitment?

If It’s So Important, Why Don’t I Know About It?

Chapter 3: Working Back from the Future

How to Generate Strategic Commitment

Chapter 4: Pushing Through the Thermal Layer

How to Engage Middle Managers in Strategic

Commitment

Chapter 5: Leading from the Front

“Follow me!” (Not, “I’ll Be There in a Minute .?.?.”)

Chapter 6: Taking a Stand—The Key to Strategic Commitment

Why the Aztecs Put a Stake in the Ground

Chapter 7: Building and Restoring Trust

Essential Competencies for Generating StrategicCommitment

Chapter 8: Return on Strategic Commitment

On Competitive Edge and Profit Margins

Chapter 9: Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way—HR at the Crossroads

The Role of HR in Generating Strategic Commitment

Chapter 10: Strategic Commitment as Organizational Lifestyle

Integrating the Process into Organizational DNA

Chapter 11: The Diversity of Strategic Commitment

There Is No Such Thing as “But We’re Different”

Afterword: Strategic Commitment IsEssential in Volatile Economies

Appendix: Tips, Techniques, and Tools for Generating, Monitoring, and Addressing Setbacks Related to Strategic

Commitment

Index

About the Authors

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