Reorg ready roadmap: What great leaders do before, during, and after the change

Today, change isn’t just constant—it’s compounding.

AI is reshaping roles. Supply chains remain volatile. Customer expectations evolve faster than annual planning cycles can keep up. In this context, a strategy that looks great on paper often falls apart in practice. Imagine a team, for instance, who spent months crafting a detailed strategy—every milestone mapped, every risk assessed. But when conditions shifted, their well-laid plan quickly felt more like a burden than a beacon. Sound familiar?

This is a reality many organizations face. The traditional top-down approach to strategy, where a select few create the plan and hand it down, is cracking under the pressure of a faster, more complex world. Organizations need a strategy that’s dynamic, resilient, and, most importantly, actionable by everyone. To make this a reality, today’s leaders must bring strategy to life through a more inclusive, flexible model that empowers teams to contribute and adapt in real time.

In this new approach, strategic planning is about more than a set of priorities and goals—it’s about creating a two-way dialogue with people across the organization, building a culture of ownership, and embedding adaptability at every level. Here’s how to reinvent strategy in a way that turns it from an isolated exercise into a collective movement, creating a fast track to impact and ownership.

Create feedback loops closer to the customer

In conventional strategy sessions, plans are often crafted behind closed doors, only to be revealed once they’re fully formed. This approach may feel efficient, but it leaves out insights from those closest to the work—and to customers. Without input from these critical perspectives, strategies risk being disconnected from the realities on the ground.

This doesn’t mean handing over the strategy process to every employee or crowd-sourcing big decisions. Leaders still set the direction. The key is being intentional about when and where employee input will sharpen the strategy. Rather than starting with a blank slate, offer specific, targeted opportunities for feedback—especially from those on the front lines.

From: Senior leaders make the strategy and inform employees of the plan

To: Employees are engaged at critical moments early in the strategy planning process

An example: A SaaS company set an ambitious goal to double in size within three years—but early alignment was missing. Leaders were energized by big ideas but lacked a shared direction. To clarify the path forward, they created a set of strategic alternatives rooted in a clear purpose. Rather than relying solely on executive input, they brought in next-level leaders to pressure test early ideas and offer real-world feedback. These leaders piloted key parts of the strategy in their markets and then offered insights from their experiences that helped sharpen the long-term strategy. By intentionally involving the right people at the right moments, the organization gained clarity faster—and built stronger alignment early on.

By building feedback loops at the right moments, you can:

• Capture frontline insights that executives may not see, enriching the strategy.
• Generate early buy-in by giving employees a voice in shaping the “how” of the strategy where they are better positioned to know what will work.
• Align daily work with strategic goals by allowing employees to test the strategy and spot where it will work—and where it won’t.
• Create an environment where teams feel empowered to surface new insights and adapt.

A participatory approach at the right times along the strategy process doesn’t just inform the strategy—it makes it stronger and more grounded in real challenges, empowering employees to shape an outcome that feels both ambitious and achievable.

Cultivating ownership at every level

Even the best strategy is only as effective as the people who execute it. Ownership at all levels is essential to driving speed and adaptability, but it doesn’t happen by accident. When employees have clarity on how the strategy aligns to their individual roles and on the decisions they can own, they feel empowered and motivated to contribute to its success. This sense of ownership fosters a nimble, resilient organization.

By building purpose and clarity into every level of the plan, leaders can:

• Empower informed decisions at the right level that support company goals.
• Create momentum by showing employees their impact early on.
• Encourage continuous learning and adaptability anchored in the customer and market.
• Shift from static planning to an iterative, progress-driven mindset.

When employees see how their roles connect to larger goals and feel like they have the authority to make decisions, they are more willing—and prepared—to take ownership. This alignment, combined with a focus on purpose, drives momentum even in a shifting landscape.

From: Strategy execution is top-down, with decisions held at the leadership level.

To: Employees at all levels have clarity on how their roles connect to the strategy and where they can make decisions, fostering ownership and speed.

An example: One global healthcare company, having grown rapidly through acquisition, struggled with a fractured strategy—each business unit pulling in a different direction. Their turning point came not from a better plan, but from a unifying purpose. By helping teams see how they fit into a bigger vision, people could start seeing themselves in the future of the company. This shared purpose became a powerful driver of ownership—especially when disruption hit. When a major supply chain issue emerged just months later, teams didn’t splinter. Instead, they used that shared purpose as a compass, identifying new ways to deliver value and keep momentum going.

Align strategy and culture

All too often, strategy and culture are treated as separate domains. Yet, no matter how robust your strategic plan, it can only succeed if it aligns with the organization’s cultural norms and ways of working. For example, adopting a more agile operating model might mean shifting the culture toward quicker decision-making and cross-functional teamwork.

To create alignment between strategy and culture, leaders should:

• Identify key behaviors and ways of working that support strategic objectives—and those that are getting in the way.
• Focus on how these behaviors show up in everyday actions and decisions, and start making small shifts that reinforce what’s needed to execute the strategy.
• Experiment and iterate, and as you see success, formalize new ways of working.

When strategy and culture move in harmony, they generate powerful momentum. Strategy becomes part of the organization’s DNA, reinforcing behaviors that propel the company toward its goals.

From: Strategy and culture are treated as separate priorities.

To: Strategy and culture are intentionally aligned, with behaviors, ways of working, and decision-making reinforcing strategic goals.

An example: A company formed through a series of acquisitions faced a challenge: culture fragmentation. With each acquired unit operating by its own norms, there was no shared way of working—and no clear basis for making strategic tradeoffs. Before any strategy could take hold, leadership recognized that the organization needed a common foundation. The breakthrough wasn’t a new plan, but a cultural one: reconnecting people to why they were part of the same company and what future they were building together.

By identifying consistent ways of working across teams and aligning on a shared purpose, they built the cultural scaffolding needed to execute strategy effectively. When external conditions changed, teams responded not with confusion, but with cohesion. Cultural alignment became the engine that made adaptive strategy possible.

Build in flexibility and adaptability

Even the best strategies need room to flex. But too often, organizations treat adaptability as an exception—something reactive, triggered only when disruption hits.

In a world where the conditions you plan for rarely match the ones you execute in, flexibility can’t be an afterthought—it must be a built-in feature of how strategy takes shape and stays alive.

The problem? Most strategy processes are built for control, not change. They prioritize precision over learning, timelines over feedback, and reporting over reflection. The result: strategies that look solid on paper but crack under real-world pressure.

Everyone talks about agility. It’s become a fixture in executive keynotes and strategy decks. But what’s often missing is the how—the operating system that actually enables teams to move quickly and stay aligned when conditions shift.

To build that system, leaders need to rethink not just their planning cadences, but the behaviors, structures, and decision-making norms that shape how strategy is executed day to day.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Empower teams to surface real-time insights and propose tactical shifts—so strategy stays grounded in frontline reality.
• Support rapid adjustments without losing strategic direction—aligning short-term moves with long-term outcomes.
• Strengthen leaders’ resilience and decision-making under pressure—so they can lead through ambiguity without stalling progress.
• Establish structured feedback loops and clear decision rights—so teams know when to escalate, when to adjust, and when to act.

These shifts aren’t abstract ideals—they’re already reshaping how leading organizations approach strategy execution. One global logistics company, facing rapid expansion and constant external pressure—from shifting customer expectations to volatile supply chains—recognized that reacting faster wasn’t enough. They needed to design for adaptability from the start.

Instead of relying on rigid quarterly plans, they implemented a 30-, 60-, and 90-day strategy rhythm. These weren’t status updates—they were structured checkpoints designed to challenge assumptions, surface real-time insights, and recalibrate execution before small issues became big ones.

So, when disruption came—as it inevitably does—the teams didn’t freeze or fall behind. They flexed with purpose and kept moving, not because they had all the answers, but because they were built to shift. Adaptability wasn’t a reaction—it was how the organization worked, by design.

A new era of strategic planning

Strategic planning today isn’t about crafting the “perfect” plan—it’s about building the capability to learn, adapt, and align at scale. What’s different now? Disruption is no longer episodic—it’s constant, compounding, and often coming from directions leaders didn’t anticipate. AI is rewriting roles. Markets move overnight. And decision-making is no longer confined to the top—it’s distributed across teams, functions, and geographies.

In this environment, traditional planning cycles collapse under pressure. The organizations that thrive won’t be the ones with the most polished strategy deck—they’ll be the ones with the strongest strategic muscles: the ability to sense, shift, and stay aligned in real time.

By replacing rigid plans with dynamic systems, leaders can activate strategy as a living, participatory process—shaped by insight from every level, reinforced through culture, and tested through execution.

Because in a world that won’t wait, the real advantage isn’t having the right answers upfront—it’s building an organization that knows how to respond when the questions change.

It’s no secret to any organization or senior leadership team who has tried to drive transformation that getting change to happen – and stick – is harder than ever.

Change needs to happen faster, more frequently, and Boards and shareholders have less patience. When it comes to frustration about making change happen, the biggest thing we hear from our clients is that people are experiencing change fatigue. In fact, at this point, there is likely not a single organization that doesn't experience change fatigue. This makes the leaders’ job of engaging the organization in new behaviors and new ways of working harder than ever. Never mind trying to do it at scale. How do you include thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people in change in an organization?

Our research and experience show us that change is something that has to be inclusive in an organization. It can't be something that just happens to people or is passively received or forced upon them. The organization must be truly engaged with it, and people must feel a part of and like they're contributing to the larger transformation.  It’s the people side of change that moves the needle. Unfortunately, typical change efforts over focus on building new organizational structures, processes, and frameworks, and under focus on building the support for the people side. This is often limited to one-way push communications with no dialog or context, leaving leaders and their teams to figure it out on their own. It’s no wonder that people are tired!

So the question remains how to build that support and engagement effectively, at scale, when the organization – and the individuals – are so overwhelmed? As leaders, you need to be careful about how you engage with people so that it doesn't feel like something additional, burdensome, something that piles on more pressure to an already pressure-filled situation.

The power of meaningful work, autonomy, and connection

Interestingly, research indicates that people don't respond to carrots or sticks, which is why reward-based change programs or punitive ones aren’t effective. This is borne out by the experience of many leaders trying to get their teams back into the office after COVID – to their frustration, neither free pizza nor badge entry tracking linked to compensation get the desired result.

What the research shows actually drives behavior change in individuals is based on intrinsic motivators: when the work is meaningful, important, and a big source of energy. People respond to autonomy, empowerment, and connection to others – which in turn calls for a different kind of leadership to make that a reality.

How this translates into driving change is in the importance of making the daily connection with change, providing feedback and including it in the flow of work for every individual.

Making the daily connection, at scale

The good news is that this is possible. As part of our continuing efforts to innovate to help our clients solve this problem, we have partnered to enable organizations to create two-way engagement with change in the flow of daily work. Through an app called Yumi, organizations have the power to support individuals 1:1 with the on-the-job mindset and behavior shifts required to make the organizational transformation successful.

Built on the behavior change research mentioned earlier, Yumi is a simple and fun app used to support each person and team to adopt behaviors that are more effective and functional to support the strategic goals of the organization. At the same time, the app asks people for their experience and their opinions on it, which creates an empowering two way dialog. Individuals are able to share specifics on what’s working for them, what's not, and where they need more support. They can also provide insights into what they observe in their teams and in the organization and receive the same feedback from others. The app consolidates the data to share back to individuals and the organization, allowing both to make adjustments and try new ways to help enable the new behaviors. And because the app is reinforcing, social and energizing and takes only 3-5 minutes per day, it feels less burdensome and “extra.”

Some of the ways we have leveraged this tool to put change into action include:

• Culture activation and change
• Launching new values, behaviors, leadership principles
• Reinforcing/measuring new behaviors post-development programs
• Shift in ways of working that are largely behavioral – like decision making or agility
• Engaging lower levels of the organization in a change in strategy
• Building change ready habits

The bottom line is that the implementation and execution of anything in an organization happens from the small and large choices that individuals make thousands of times throughout the day, in terms of how they spend their time, how they interact with other people. Embracing the fact that people have autonomy and are able to make all these choices, and then taking the extra step to support them is what changes the game. Imagine the power of providing positive reinforcement in the moment on the critical things that are working, and specific and tips and suggestions on what your people could be doing to be even more successful with their teams and with the organization. And at the same time listening to them, empowering them and demonstrating how you’re using their input to evolve the change approach? What better way to turn change fatigue into new energy, new ideas and bottom-line impact?

To learn more about Yumi, and driving change at scale, listen to this podcast.

They also lack a scalable approach to taking decisions in alignment with the strategy. Even the smartest leaders and boards with the best data-driven strategies often fail to see one critical problem — strategy and execution cannot be bifurcated.

To propel game changing strategies into action, leaders need to first recognize their current reality, then: commit to decision makers and decision-making principles; articulate how and under what conditions real-time adjustments will be made; and create opportunities to connect employees to critical changes and messages in ways that are meaningful to their own roles and responsibilities. Here are the 3 agreements leaders need to make to make these steps real.

1. Agreement on co-authorship and decision-making principles

‍Strategy is about making choices. The clearer those choices are deeper into the organization, the easier it will be to execute on a strategy. What this means in practice is that everyone in your organization should 1) know how decisions impacting them and their work are made and 2) who is accountable for making those decisions.

• To support the how, set practical principles for making decisions that are aligned to your strategy and can be cascaded throughout your organization. These principles should be simple enough that everyone can remember them and clear enough that everyone can apply them in their context(s).

For example, if an organization is taking a margin protection strategy, then one principle might be, “if forced to choose between a high-revenue-growth or high-margin opportunity, we will prioritize the higher margin opportunity.” This does not mean that the organization will not pursue high revenue growth opportunities. Rather, it signals the mindset with which they want the broader organization to approach their businesses and opportunities. Defining the strategic vision in such granular yet principle-based terms allows decisions to be made more quickly and ensures that minimal time is lost cycling or recycling over a decision. It also implies that leadership teams can get to endorsement of an action, even if they can’t get to one hundred percent agreement.

• To define the who, start with the person or people closest to the subject or work to be done and logically work your way back to the person ultimately accountable for taking the decision. When employees understand where they fall within the decision accountability, it frees them up to be creative and impactful within clear, strategic parameters. This approach ensures that leaders are empowered, responsible, and accountable.

Many organizations use a “RACI” model when doing this. For every decision domain, your leaders should be able to answer: who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed?

World-class leaders know that they can’t do this in isolation. They also know that they can’t abdicate decisions for which they are accountable. They take a balanced approach of co-authoring decision principles with their leadership teams and building alignment around where each leader (themselves included) owns 51% of the vote¹. They empower their leadership team members to then scale this approach deeper into the organization.

Why is this upfront work so important to execution? If execution drives outcomes, leaders must hold each other accountable to achieving those outcomes. It is impossible to hold teams accountable to outcomes – whether metric or behaviorally based - without setting the expectation that individuals are accountable to other members of the team. The alternative is a finger-pointing competition within a team, especially when the outcome of a decision is not what was expected, and lessons learned need to be captured.In consensus-driven organizational cultures, or organizations in which leaders lead multiple layers of teams, defining accountability in these terms can be a challenge. It can feel like responsibility is being forced onto others. However, responsibility is earned. Leaders need to be clear that decision-making accountability at the right level is an opportunity for high performers to be empowered and that it is a reward, not a burden.

2. Agreement on a culture of Change Ready Leaders™ ²

^‍Strategies should not be set in stone. Too often, leaders set strategy into motion and then turn on autopilot, believing that with the destination set, execution will come easily. Meanwhile, the grand plan is too fixed to be responsive, is misunderstood, or is poorly prioritized throughout the organization. Change Ready Leaders™ constantly recalibrate, incorporate employee and market feedback into pivots, and study past successes (and misses!) to ensure they are moving forward in a way that best supports the business priorities. They view all results – even failures – as neutral data points, rather than immediately judging a result as “good” or “bad.”In today’s era of constant change, overreaction to new data and over reliance on past experiences quickly limit the options available to an organization and creates a lack of agility that is required in successful strategy execution. Change Ready Leaders™ acknowledge that we are better at problem solving together and by virtue of that use context, current data, and input from the ground to adjust and thrive.Inviting diverse perspectives into your exploration of the future and subsequent planning efforts is one way to mitigate for historical biases and gain buy-in from critical stakeholders throughout your organizations.

‍3. Agreement on tactics (building commitment)

‍A change in information does not equal a change in behavior. It’s not uncommon to see action-biased leaders overlook or gloss over the critical step of building buy-in and commitment in a way that shifts mindsets and behaviors.One way to achieve individual and organizational buy-in is to use time together (in-person or virtually) to socialize not only the guiding principles for business decisions, but also the “who” and “how” of the execution of those decisions within level appropriate segments throughout the organization. Over the last 30 years at BTS, we have observed that leaders and their teams feel more confident in their role to execute a strategy when they are:

• Given the chance to practice taking action in alignment with decision-making principles and factoring in new information to make strategic pivots
• Given an opportunity to co-author daily expectations describing the right level of their day-to-day involvement in building the future of an organization. This doesn't always have to be about brand-new strategies and directions - it’s just as frequently about communicating expectations and demonstrating what great looks like on a daily basis.

Next, be sure to put processes in place that guides and prompts action. Specifics are important here. In support of the new decision-making processes, guide and agree upon actions that can be implemented immediately at all levels of the organization. Showcase opportunities for growth at the individual and team level, to rally the team in alignment with the new direction.  Feels like there should be something about setting expectations of what great looks like in these processes/decisions.

Why do new strategies fall to the wayside mysteriously? Strategies may seem complex, but at their foundation, strategies are about making choices. Therefore, if the choices and rationale are clear, then execution can be formulaic and achievable. The better the organization sees itself in the strategy and feels empowered to act and react closer to the point of execution, the more Change Ready™ an organization will be when strategies inevitably need to shift. By setting clear decision making-principles, fostering agility through process, and gaining buy-in across organization-wide, you’ll build critical agreement and fuse strategy and execution seamlessly.

‍Sources

‍¹51% of the Vote concept from the “Multipliers” research by Liz Wiseman

‍²Change Ready Leader research from BTS Change and Transformation Center of Expertise

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:

1. Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
2. Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
3. Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
4. Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
5. Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
6. 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.
7. User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
8. Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
9. Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
10. 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.

Learn more about business simulations

Learn how BTS Business Simulations can help with your initiatives.

Fill out the form below to have a BTS representative contact you.

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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.

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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.