Launching a successful commercial kickoff: Avoiding three common mistakes that lead to unnecessary friction
Traditionally, a commercial kickoff is a milestone event — part of a company’s DNA, and the place to reignite and recharge the field by celebrating accomplishments, driving excitement among sales reps, and building alignment around the organization’s future.
It provides an excellent opportunity for organizations to advance their objectives and strategic imperatives. Unfortunately, through our experience, these events often miss the mark in expectations from leadership, the field, and overall return on investment. We find that critical elements to plan and execute a commercial kickoff successfully are overlooked at some point during the process, creating friction among those responsible for planning and managing the event.
These three critical elements are: (1) ensuring alignment across relevant, diverse stakeholder groups, (2) maintaining a focus on the target audience, and (3) recognizing the impact of changes on event design. Attending to these elements ensures a balance between executing a memorable event, making the event relevant to the target audience, and driving business outcomes for the future.
Designing, developing, and executing a sales event: does this happen to you?
Typically, a commercial kickoff starts when a sales leader sees a need to celebrate accomplishments, drive excitement among sellers, and build alignment around the organization’s future. A committee is quickly assembled with representation from stakeholder groups such as marketing, sales enablement, and operations; they then develop a budget and announce the commercial kickoff, and everyone involved in planning quickly shifts into execution mode.
The committee comes up with a plan and assigns responsibilities. Committee members then go off on their own along with their respective teams, conducting periodic check-ins as a full committee to gauge progress. It quickly becomes apparent that groups are working in siloes with different priorities. For example, one group focuses on event program management, including venue choice or platform identification, event objectives, agenda, speakers, and communications. Other members of the commercial kickoff team are focused on content development.
Inevitably, something always happens that leads to minor and, in some cases, significant changes to the event. For example, sales leaders who are sponsoring the event are not always involved until a few weeks before, when they begin to realize that minor changes are necessary. However, there are other instances when organizations need to make drastic changes to their commercial kickoff plans. Whether adjusting for minor or significant changes, these changes lead to re-work, stress, and late nights for the people putting the event together – all major contributors to friction between team members and others in the organization. More alarming, these challenges can ultimately impact the ability to achieve the desired outcomes from a commercial kickoff.
There are three common mistakes organizations and planning committees make that lead to unnecessary friction when launching a commercial kickoff. By avoiding these mistakes, you will experience better planning, coordination, and alignment between sales leaders, marketing, event planning, sales enablement, and operations, which will help you achieve the desired business outcomes for your commercial kickoff.
Mistake 1
Planning is not aligned across all event stakeholders
Too often, planning efforts fail to consider competing stakeholder interests and perspectives that influence members of the planning committee as they develop an overall event plan.
- The Event Team wants attendees to remember the experience. Therefore, their priorities are the location (if in-person), the platform (if virtual), registration, and communications.
- Sales Enablement wants attendees to walk away better equipped to engage customers. Therefore, their priorities are breakout sessions that focus on tools and skill development.
- Product Marketing wants attendees to understand product and solution features and benefits, use cases, and “what’s new.” Therefore, their priority is education.
- Sales Leaders want attendees to leave inspired and motivated to execute the strategy. Therefore, their priorities are the main stage messaging and the overall vibe of the experience.
Solution
Ensuring alignment to the business objectives early in the process and understanding the critical decision points the team needs to make will reduce unnecessary friction throughout event planning and execution. Experience tells us that organizations with the most successful commercial kickoffs do the following:
- Align all vital stakeholders on goals or desired outcomes for the event.
- Solicit input from all stakeholders to identify themes.
- Maintain clarity on the red thread throughout the event.
- Coordinate planning and execution efforts by working as one unit, rather than in silos.
Mistake 2
Losing sight of what the target audience needs from the event
When balancing multiple perspectives and priorities, it can be easy to lose sight of what the target audience needs to get out of the event. While everything that an organization does is in service of customers, it is critical to keep in mind that commercial kickoffs are intended to serve the salesforce to help them do their best work serving customers. Traditionally, organizations have over-rotated on celebration, inspiration, and information-sharing during commercial kickoffs. However, these do not address sales reps’ comprehensive needs in today’s environment.
In reality, today’s sales reps struggle to achieve work-life balance because they are working longer days, jumping from meeting to meeting, experiencing less separation between work and home, and struggling to disconnect from work outside of working hours. Sales reps have demonstrated the prevailing feeling of being disconnected or isolated from their colleagues and their organizations. They are spending more time with their immediate families and re-evaluating what is important to them. It’s essential to recognize that some sales reps will decide whether or not to continue working for organizations after a commercial kickoff.
Solution
A concept called “everboarding” describes the notion that onboarding or activating customers never stops because products and services are ever-evolving. “Everboarding” is also applicable to your existing salesforce. Everboarding is informed by learning science – the realization that one-shot approaches like having a single day to onboard a new employee or share something new with employees in a single session will not endure. An everboarding strategy is a shift from sharing information during a single event to ongoing reinforcement. The organization, marketplace, and sellers constantly evolve, but teams are left to make sense of these changes. Successful organizations, particularly now, are taking the “everboarding” approach with their teams to continually engage and activate their team in the go-to-market strategy. A commercial kickoff represents an opportunity to engage participants in meaningful dialogue, workshop ideas, problem-solving, reflect, and plan intentional experiments in the field.
Mistake 3
Failing to recognize the impact of significant changes on the design of the event
There are external and internal events that can lead the team to reassess a commercial kickoff. With limited time to pull off a commercial kickoff event after any significant change, the team, including vendors, is thrust into action. Unfortunately, sometimes the group takes action without having a clear line of sight on the overall impact of their decision or based on incorrect assumptions. In these situations, stress builds, and missteps or errors become widespread.
Solution
Significant changes may require redesigning the event rather than simply adjusting or modifying sessions. There is a subtle difference between the two, but one that will determine the impact and effectiveness of the event. Given any significant changes, redesigning the event entails taking a step back and considering how you can best accomplish the event’s objectives. We know what you’re thinking – that you don’t have time for that, because the event is only weeks away – and we understand your urgency in these situations. However, taking the necessary actions early on will save you time, re-work, and overall frustration. Here are a few steps you can take to make the redesign work to your advantage:
- Quickly convince stakeholders to align the event’s objectives given a need to redesign and explore what needs adjusting given proposed changes.
- Evaluate the limitations of the platforms (registration, learning delivery, virtual event, etc.) that can materially impact achieving the objectives of the event.
- Redesign the event by considering the impact of the changes on the scope of the event (national, regional, or global), length of sessions, the balance between main stage and breakout sessions, strategies for participant engagement, speaker selection, and also the impact of the red thread throughout the event.
Conclusion
A commercial kickoff represents an excellent opportunity for organizations to acknowledge their sales force’s contributions and advance organizational objectives and strategic imperatives. However, it is also essential to balance executing a memorable event, making the event relevant to the intended audience, and driving business outcomes. To successfully plan and execute a commercial kickoff, event planners must not overlook the three most essential aspects to execute a commercial kickoff successfully: (1) ensuring alignment across relevant stakeholder groups, (2) maintaining a focus on the target audience, and (3) recognizing the impact of changes on event design. Ensuring that these elements are top-of-mind considerations throughout the commercial kickoff development journey will allow for a memorable event that’s relevant to the target audience and drives business outcomes for the future.
References
- Miller, R.C. (undated article). Commercial kickoffs: The Mistake You’re Making, https://www.forcemanagement.com/blog/mistake-youre-making-when-planning-your-sko
- Spotio (February 4, 2020). Guide to the Perfect Commercial kickoff Meeting, https://spotio.com/blog/sales-kickoff-meeting/ Pipedrive (updated blog post). Commercial kickoff: How to Start the New Year with a Bang, https://spotio.com/blog/sales-kickoff-meeting/
- Robinson, R (updated blog post). 12 commercial kickoff meeting strategies and best practices for bringing your team together https://blog.close.com/sales-kickoff-meeting/
- Wang, E. (November 17, 2020). Everboarding is the next level of customer onboarding, https://medium.com/bento-app/everboarding-is-the-next-level-of-customer-onboarding-6aa52e2595d8
Related content
Traditionally, Sales Kick-Offs (SKOs) were large, centralized gatherings, designed to align teams, spark momentum, and roll out the company’s go-to-market strategy. But as global businesses expanded, that one-size-fits-all approach began to show its limits.
Even before 2025, forward-thinking companies were experimenting with more localized formats to meet rising complexity and regional nuance. As international operations expanded, centralized SKOs began to strain under the weight of market variability, logistical challenges, and cultural differences. Regional activations emerged as a way to make strategy more relevant, and more actionable, at the local level.
Then came COVID-19. Travel restrictions, distributed teams, and new ways of working forced companies to reconsider the value, and feasibility, of large-scale gatherings. Virtual and regional alternatives emerged not just as stopgaps, but as smarter, faster, more focused activations.
That shift planted the seeds for what’s now taking hold: a hybrid model, where flagship events are amplified, not replaced, by a network of hyper-local strategy activations.
Why hyper-local SKOs have gained traction in 2025
Tighter budgets, tariff volatility, region-specific complexity, and faster-moving markets have made the traditional SKO model harder to justify, at least for now. But what’s emerging isn’t a downgrade. It’s a high-impact alternative built for today’s realities.
Hyper-local SKOs offer:
- Budget-conscious impact: Less spent on travel, more invested in enablement.
- Regional relevance: Local markets demand tailored approaches.
- Faster execution: Smaller events mean shorter planning cycles and more agility.
- Stronger engagement: Intimate settings foster real dialogue, trust, and retention.
Done right, hyper-local SKOs deliver sharper alignment, deeper enablement, and faster activation, without the logistical drag.
But this approach only works when it’s connected to something bigger:
- A clear, unifying story
- A strategy that flexes by region
- Tools and experiences that build competence, not just motivation
They’re not replacing the flagship event, they’re extending its reach, bringing strategy to life where performance happens in the field.
What to consider if you’re going local in 2026
- Start with a unified strategy
Without a cohesive message, fragmentation becomes a real risk. That’s why leading companies align early on messaging, strategic pillars, and storylines, then empower regional leaders to bring them to life in context.
Centralized intent, decentralized delivery. That’s the sweet spot. - Use simulation and AI-enabled practice to scale what matters
Smaller doesn’t mean shallower. Digital tools, like AI-powered practice platforms and immersive simulations, let teams stress-test decisions, sharpen skills, and internalize strategy.
Instead of hearing strategy, reps experience it and leave ready to act. - Cut costs, without cutting connection
The savings from reduced travel and venue spend are real, but the return comes from reinvesting in high-value enablement: stronger coaching, sharper content, localized insights, and sustained follow-through.
Be thoughtful about how you redirect your budget. Spend to increase the outcome you desire.
- Match the way your teams actually sell
Modern GTM teams flex by region, segment, and product line. Hyper-local SKOs let teams focus on what’s actually happening in their markets.
It’s not just about relevance, it’s about reps feeling seen and set up to win. - Create space for meaningful dialogue
Large SKOs can default to performance over participation. Local formats flip the script. Smaller rooms enable deeper conversations and real-time alignment.
Candor goes up. Trust goes up. Impact goes up. - Move faster, stay closer to the market
Planning a traditional SKO can take six months or more. In a world where pricing shifts monthly and competition evolves weekly, that delay is a liability.
Local events can launch quickly and adjust mid-stream, by design. - It’s not a replacement. It’s a complement.
The flagship SKO still has value, especially to launch a new strategy or bring global teams together. But leading organizations are building a drumbeat of activation through local SKOs that reinforce, tailor, and sustain that initial momentum.
Think about the tradeoffs and choose a flagship SKO versus localized experience based on the desired goal of the event.
Understand the risks and how to avoid them
Hyper-local SKOs bring opportunity, but also potential pitfalls if not well-integrated. Key risks include:
- Fragmentation of message and priorities
Without a strong central narrative, messaging drifts, and alignment erodes. - Uneven quality and experience
When local teams aren’t equally equipped, outcomes vary. Some teams leave inspired. Others don’t. - Loss of cross-regional connection
Flagship SKOs build culture through shared experience. Without intentional connection, silos can deepen. - Underinvestment in enablement
If companies view local SKOs purely as cost-saving, they risk missing the moment to truly invest in seller capability. - Leadership misalignment
If local and global leaders aren’t working from the same playbook, sellers get mixed messages, and lose confidence.
How to mitigate these risks:
- Anchor every SKO to a common strategic narrative
- Equip regional leaders with tools, training, and facilitation support
- Invest in shared enablement assets like simulations and AI tools
- Create cross-regional touchpoints to build culture and community
- Track impact and reinforce key messages over time
Finding new ways to perform and adapt
In a time of uncertainty, the best sales organizations aren’t pulling back on alignment, they’re finding new ways to deliver it.
Hyper-local SKOs offer a strategic evolution: reducing spend, increasing relevance, and accelerating execution.
It’s not just a budget decision.
It’s a better way to make what matters go further.
The question isn’t “What can we do with less?”
It’s “How do we get more out of every moment?”
In 2025, sales organizations are navigating more than just competitive landscapes. They’re contending with intensifying trade tensions, evolving geopolitical alliances, and the cascading effects of global tariffs. These forces aren’t abstract, they’re showing up daily in pricing pressure, delayed shipments, shifting forecasts, and customer churn. And they’re transforming how companies approach go-to-market strategy, starting with how they design and deliver their Sales Kick-Offs (SKOs).
Tariffs are no longer edge-case scenarios. They’re sending ripple effects across every link in the value chain. Sales teams are contending with pricing instability as supplier costs swing unexpectedly. Delivery timelines are harder to pin down. Customers are pushing back on cost hikes or walking away altogether. And forecasting? It’s become a moving target. What was once considered a background risk is now a central variable in sales planning.
In this climate of constant flux, SKOs are evolving from motivational moments into serious strategic platforms. Several themes are rising to the surface:
1. Redefining “adaptability” in sales strategy
Tariffs have amplified economic turbulence. With global cost structures in near-constant motion, organizations are being forced to sharpen how, and how fast, they respond. While “agility” has been a staple of business language since COVID-19, today’s landscape demands something deeper: adaptability built on scenario planning, data fluency, and customer-centered pivots.
Sales teams are being asked to do more than react. They’re adjusting pricing mid-cycle, sourcing new suppliers, and rethinking product priorities based on margin impact or availability. SKOs need to reflect this reality. It’s not just about preparing for change—it’s about practicing for it. Teams need exposure to the messiness of mid-quarter shifts, trade-offs across functions, and pressure-filled decisions that can’t wait.
2. Flexible pricing models are pushing teams to focus on customer value
As tariff-related costs climb, many companies are left with little choice but to raise prices. But doing so without a strong value narrative is risky, especially in a market shaped by caution, cost sensitivity, and competitive noise.
Sellers can’t afford to lead with price. They need to lead with relevance. That means helping customers connect the dots between solutions and the outcomes that matter to them—faster ROI, mitigated risk, and sustained performance. The more the landscape shifts, the more essential it becomes to differentiate through clarity and confidence, not discounts.
3. Relationship-building, referrals, and longer sales cycles
In unpredictable environments, trust becomes a competitive advantage. Tariffs introduce new friction—delivery delays, price changes, procurement constraints—that sellers must help customers navigate. As buyers face more internal scrutiny, decisions slow down. Sales cycles stretch. Consensus is harder to build.
All of this puts relationship quality front and center. Sellers who understand their customer’s world, anticipate challenges, and offer real partnership—not just pitches—are the ones who earn the right to stay in the conversation. Advisory behaviors and referral networks matter more than ever. Investing in long-term trust has become a short-term differentiator.
4. Shaking things up with cross-functional insights
The effects of tariffs aren’t siloed. They ripple through procurement, finance, operations, and strategy. Sales teams without visibility into those pressures risk overpromising or missing opportunities for smarter collaboration.
That’s why more organizations are bringing cross-functional voices into the SKO. Procurement leaders are spotlighting sourcing constraints. Finance is unpacking cost structures and trade-offs. Operations is clarifying where flexibility exists and where it doesn’t. These perspectives help sellers see the system they operate within and bridge the gaps that often slow down execution—from misaligned incentives to regional friction.
5. Leveraging AI and data to support shifting targets for frontline sellers
In a tariff-impacted world, data is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a real-time edge. As market signals shift faster than humans alone can track, AI-powered tools and predictive analytics help surface patterns, sharpen messaging, and guide better decisions.
Forward-looking companies are embedding AI into the SKO itself. Tools like BTS’s Verity give reps the ability to practice, iterate, and refine in real time, coaching them through tough conversations, pricing trade-offs, and shifting buyer behavior. It’s not about replacing reps. It’s about expanding their ability to adapt, stay sharp, and lead confidently through constant change.
6. Preparing for longer sales cycles and negotiations
As cost pressures rise, customers are taking longer to commit. Deals are dragging. More stakeholders are weighing in. Pricing discussions are stretching further than before.
SKOs are a chance to help teams get ready for that reality. Sellers need to build fluency in managing drawn-out conversations, navigating objections, and reinforcing value over time. Practicing those skills now ensures they can show up with confidence and consistency, especially when the path to close is slower and more complex than expected.
Rethinking your SKOs for shifting ground
Tariffs aren’t a temporary disruption—they’re part of a broader pattern of global instability that sales organizations must plan around. The question isn’t how to avoid the turbulence. It’s how to lead through it.
That’s what the best SKOs are doing in 2025 and into 2026: grounding teams in the real conditions they’re facing, building strategic muscle, and creating alignment across the business. It’s not about hype. It’s about capability.
Done right, your SKO becomes more than a kickoff. It becomes a catalyst—one that equips your team to win on uncertain ground.
We help teams follow mindful design principles for these strategic gatherings to drive purpose, ownership, personalization, and intention, delivering valuable experiences for your organization.Commercial kickoffs can be more than just celebration and education. Embedding strategy and change at scale requires a deliberate focus on these four critical elements: alignment, provocation, activation and celebration.
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You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.
It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”
Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.
We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?
To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”
For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.
This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.
To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.
The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.
romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.
As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.
As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .
Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.
Leading with Purpose, Part 1
Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.
When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.1 They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.
Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.
As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”
I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.
In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”
Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.
According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.