The Challenge

Highly-effective teams must navigate beyond three common result-killers hiding under all your talent, technology, and data: strategic obscurity, disjointed delivery, and leadership gaps. But how?

There are a lot of ways to be average.

Use our Strategy Delivery Compass below to discern what’s holding your teams back.

QUADRANT 1

Ad Hoc Delivery / Strategic Obscurity.

This quadrant is disproportionately the largest since there is a lot of variation in how teams operate within it. Some favor ideation and strategy development, while others favor hard work and hustle. The point is there are a lot of ways to move around and “make progress” between Ad Hoc Delivery and Strategic Obscurity, but it usually only results in “average” performance. At best.

QUADRANT 2

Strategic Coherence / Ad Hoc Delivery.

Teams with a lot of smart, informed people working in complex organizations and rapidly-evolving markets, can evolve into Quadrant 2, in which it becomes culturally normal to follow the latest trends and change course often. Despite all their great ideas and industry insights, their business results don’t match the quality of their strategic insights. Getting to real results is their main challenge.

QUADRANT 3

Powerful Deliver / Strategic Obscurity.

Teams in less volatile industries can develop a sort of efficiency tunnel vision in quadrant three, whereby they work so hard to refine their production processes that they forget to step back to consider if they’ve capitalizing on their greatest strategic opportunities or how their business model, products, or customer base could get disrupted.

QUADRANT 4

Strategic Coherence / Powerful Deliver.

These teams have not only done the hard work to build a coherent, inspiring strategy, but have also invested to build essential communication, structure, and delivery capabilities to execute the strategy. Their governance model continually translates and manages the flow of information and priorities between their strategy and delivery functions. These teams win and keep winning.

**Many teams get stuck in Quadrants 1-3, under an invisible ceiling we call the “Threshold of Average Results”.**

Below are a series of symptoms related to your strategy, production patterns, and results, which you may recognize. Together, these issues indicate your organization is not aligned to overcome the invisible Threshold of Average Results.

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STRATEGIC OBSCURITY

Ad hoc strategy is more common than you think, but even good strategy too often gets fuzzy on its way to business teams.

Lack of unity at the top.
Long investment cycles.
Siloed planning patterns.
Unclear sponsorship of key objectives.
Unclear logic behind priorities.
Decision bottlenecks.

A

DISJOINTED DELIVERY

When your execution model is inconsistent or unclear, teams grow disjointed, and results become unpredictable.

Rework, busywork, & manual work.
Too many priorities.
Too much work-in-process.
Ambiguous, slow decisions and dependencies between teams.
Weak communication & information sharing.
Wide variation in operating patterns.
Disconnected, disengaged people.

O

LEADERSHIP GAPS

If leaders don’t prepare their team for continuous delivery, it’s expensive, the best people eventually leave, and controls replace trust & innovation.

Chronic overruns in costs & schedules.
Weaker trust, higher internal transaction costs.
Tons of uninterpreted metrics that don’t drive action.
Culture of mediocrity, great talent turnover.
Institution of more management controls that stifle speed & innovation.
Loss of joy in the work.

**To break beyond the Threshold of Average Results, you need a holistic approach that braids strategic goals through every team and business process.**

The journey forward is not the same for everyone, but there are known patterns for building winning teams and powerful processes. Learn more about our Approach, and don’t hesitate to contact us for a brief phone call so we can answer your questions or see if we can help.

Learn how we help teams overcome average.

Our Approach

Edifiers Consulting

We are a management consulting firm based in El Paso, Texas, with a talent network across San Diego, Denver, and Dallas. We specialize in helping leaders drive awesome projects, streamline processes, and build stronger teams. We empower people, technology, and data to turn business goals into real results.