Building Effective Individuals
Never has there been a time when individual effectiveness has been more important. Corporate structures are delayered; virtual teams and remote workers are the norm; in short, the nature of work has shifted. The challenge of cascading goals to every employee is difficult to imagine. However, your organisation will benefit tremendously when everyone is focused, engaged, and contributing their best efforts to produce exceptional results.
Why Improve Individuals' Effectiveness?
After you decide on your strategy and the people to execute on that strategy, the next most important decision is how your workforce executes — how they help push your organisation toward greatness. The four inputs necessary to achieve greatness within your organisation all lie with your people:
Input 1: Workers at all levels of the organisation must be clear about and committed to the outcomes that define success–your organisation's top goals.
Input 2: Workers must understand which of their actions will have the greatest impact on your organisation's top goals.
Input 3: Mechanisms must be put in place to propel goal achievement, allowing workers to know whether or not they are winning or losing.
Input 4: Workers need to have a regular "cadence" of accountability and engagement around the goals. In xQ research, the very best teams meet regularly—weekly or daily.
With a focus on the inputs of greatness you are able to course adjust quickly if needed, keeping you people flexible and determined to win.
How Can FranklinCovey Help?
FranklinCovey has spent over 16 years studying productive employees—with our roots stemming from Stephen R. Covey's ground-shaking work in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Over the years FranklinCovey has found that the most productive employees possess the following foundational traits:
- They are focused and disciplined
- They are trustworthy
- They possess good business judgement
- They are proactive in attitude and actions
- They work well with others—are team players
- They are good listeners and communicators
FranklinCovey equips workers with the foundational capabilities they need in order to be effective in today's world. We engage the whole person.
Our clients develop more than just a culture of disciplined execution. They instill the desire and passion to perform with excellence with everyone focused and executing on the organisations top goals.
Developing Leaders Who Get Results
Leaders Make The Difference In Great Organisations
In any organisation, the real work is done by teams. Sure, each individual has a role to play, but it isn't the lone gunslingers—even the superstars—who have the most influence on an organisation. It is the collection of individuals—the team—aligned to a singular critical objective that moves the organisation forward. The highest point of leverage in influencing the effectiveness of the team is the team's leader.
Are Your Leaders Ready for Today's Challenges
The strength of your leaders has never been more important than it is today in determining the success of your organisation. However "old-school" leadership styles just don't work in the knowledge worker age.
People cannot be managed as if they are simply assets–or worse, liabilities–viewed in the organisational scheme on the same level as office furniture or computers.
In order to unleash the potential of their teams, today's leaders must see workers as "whole people," who each have a unique contribution to make in moving the organisation forward. Leaders must manage the knowledge each worker brings to the table, not just the tasks those workers are responsible for completing.
The Changing Definition of Great Leadership
In the industrial age, the definition of leadership was centered on individual's skill sets, and to a large extent, personality.
- Could leaders command respect?
- Could they demonstrate a certain level of business acumen?
- Did they go to the right management school?
- Did the leader seem like a leader?
All important questions, but what was missing was the "character" aspect of leadership—the standards for integrity and ethics. The old definition implied that a leader who created fear was better than one who inspired trust.
So is competency and character enough? It is if you expect your leaders to get superior results for a quarter or two. But if you want your leaders to achieve sustainable levels of breakthrough performance year after year, they must also possess vision. Not just the ability to see what can be, but an understanding of their role in achieving it. And an understanding of how real work gets done through the efforts of other people.
The Four Imperatives of Great Leaders
In order for leaders to become great, they must meet four imperatives:
- Inspire trust among direct reports, superiors, and peers
- Align systems and work processes so they facilitate rather than hinder achievement
- Clarify purposes by articulating why goals are established and how individual work contributes to those goals
- Unleash the unique talents and contributions of people on their teams
In meeting these essential requirements, leaders ensure that they will be able to tap the full potential of their team in achieving the organisation's most important goals. And they will be able to achieve superior results not just in the short term, but year after year—consistently, measurably, predictably.
How Can FranklinCovey Help?
FranklinCovey's flagship leadership development programme, Leadership: Great Leaders, Great Teams, Great Results, takes a "mind-set, skill-set, tool-set" approach to developing leaders who can unleash the talent and capability of their team against the organisation's highest priorities.
In addition to drawing from a proven legacy of developing effective leaders, FranklinCovey's Leadership programme also taps into the best thinking of well-known leadership experts such as Jack Welch, Ram Charan, and Fred Reicheld to create a unique, aspirational, yet immensely practical experience.
Leaders will learn how to align the four essential systems that drive success, including:
- execution—the discipline of focusing on a few critical objectives with a process for achieving those objectives
- talent—attracting, positioning, and developing individual workers in order to tap into their full potential
- core work processes—creating clearly-understood and aligned work processes for each function of the team
- customer feedback—understanding the one thing you need to know about how your customers perceive you
The fact is, no organisation has ever become great without exceptional leadership—without leaders who can connect the efforts of their teams to the critical objectives of the organisation, who can tap the full potential of each individual on their team, who can align systems and clarify purposes. And who can inspire trust. Do your leaders make your organisation great?
Improving Team Level Execution
Execution Turns Ideas Into Reality
It's simple. Ideas turn into reality when the people tasked with the work have clarity and focus and discipline to spend their time and resources only on the things that drive the goals forward.
Work teams that are focused and executing on your most important objectives:
- Drive financial performance
- Improve customer loyalty
- Magnify the contribution your company makes to the world
But what separates organisations that achieve greatness from those that don't, even in the face of similar market conditions and workforce talent? It comes down to one thing; execution. While strategies are launched and goals are set with the best of intentions, the inability to execute is a pervasive, universal challenge.
Success Starts with "Moving the Middle" to a Higher Standard of Execution
In a day of unprecedented opportunity—and risk—the importance for teams in your organisation to consistently execute on your most critical objectives cannot be overstated. And in every organisation, you will find pockets of great execution—a "top 20%" of performance. The problem lies in moving the middle, the 60% of your workforce that simply meets expectations, toward the level of performance that drives the top 20%.
This improvement doesn't produce incremental results. It creates breakthrough achievement.
FranklinCovey Understands the Problem of Execution—and the Solution
As the recognised leader in helping individuals and organisations achieve greatness, FranklinCovey has dedicated itself to understanding the complex problem of execution and how to effectively address its causes at an unprecedented level.
In pursuit of this challenge, FranklinCovey has:
- Researched deep within the operations of hundreds of organisations to determine precisely why companies fail to execute
- Applied the best thinking of recognised experts and the data from extensive research
- Created a unique process that combines training, consulting, implementation, and tools into a powerful, proven solution
How Can FranklinCovey Help?
FranklinCovey's The 4 Disciplines of Execution Managers Certification certifies managers to lead a process that will enable their teams to achieve unprecedented results against their goals. By changing the way managers engage their teams, they can make dramatic improvements in the impact their teams will have on organisational performance.
This process includes four key steps, including:
- Identifying the two or three most critical, difference-making objectives
- Focusing relentlessly on the specific leading indicators of achievement of those objectives
- Creating compelling and visible scoreboards to track progress
- Instilling an ongoing, self-perpetuating cadence of accountability at the team and individual levels
Create a Culture of Performance
FranklinCovey's The 4 Disciplines of Execution Managers Certification will help managers reduce the inconsistency of individual behaviours by giving team members a process by which they can align their efforts with the most critical objectives of the organisation. As a result, managers will be able to lead their teams within a common framework of focus, measurement, and accountability.