Achieving Your Operating Plan

Annually, your leaders face pressure to beat your company’s prior year’s performance. With annual operating plans often based on as little as a one percent improvement in performance over the prior year, you should have a plan that is derived from strong objectives, strong consensus, and proven strategies and tactics. All too often, this is not the case.

Because your senior leaders are expected to create new yearly plans, frequently these plans are embedded into business units without any real consensus on their validity. In addition, these strategies are often approved before each team has a lock on how it will help each of them contribute to the company’s performance.

Ideally, before any plan is put forward, you will likely focus on how you can consistently achieve better results, especially if your organization is already stretched to the maximum. One of the steps you might take would include devising a list of your top ten priorities and the specific behaviors or actions required to deliver on each. Then, judiciously, you would provide needed resources - like training, new tools or systems, or capital improvements - and align incentives to reward end-of-year goal attainment. If previous tactics have resulted in uneven success, then it’s time to employ a strategy that will give results you can own - results that equal growth and improvement and an increase in your organization’s performance. If you are looking for a new way to realize annual performance increases, CLG’s Performance Catalyst^® is a good place to start.

CLG’s Performance Catalyst^®

Our Performance Catalyst^® can help you, your senior leaders and their teams achieve an operating plan that is effective and well-executed. We use a step-by-step approach to develop leadership alignment to your goals, and then identify the key performer groups that have the greatest impact on your bottom line.

To obtain results, we work with your people to identify the High-Impact Behaviors^SM key performers need, and help you implement a leadership process that makes those behaviors possible. Everyone has a stake in reaching goals. But to be effective, you need to reach your objectives in way that is so targeted that it leads to early wins and lasting successes. As one leader said, “CLG makes the day-to-day work meaningful, and as a result, we get it done.”

Our Performance Catalyst:

• Offers a practical, integrated approach to help you and your team meet or exceed your operating plan, year in and year out
• Identifies specific behaviors needed to achieve targeted results
• Ensures that leaders at all levels develop action plans for inspiring, aligning and sustaining critical behaviors
• Accelerates deployment of the strategic initiatives you need to execute as part of your operating plan
• Helps you measure “execution” proficiencies across your management team
• Details what must happen in order to sustain long term momentum

Holding On to Your Motivation

It can be difficult for you to keep your teams engaged if a specific annual goal is met earlier than expected. Or worse, when it’s clear that a goal is going to be missed, how do you keep people motivated for the remainder of the year? Perhaps the most challenging question is how to keep people motivated to improve performance year in and year out.

CLG shows you how to use behavioral leadership tools to develop commitment on a daily basis, regardless of the annual rewards people might gain or lose. We help your organization move beyond playing with the numbers simply to attain year-end rewards. We help you create a culture where people are deeply invested in continuous improvement because they know exactly how their actions contribute to their personal success and to the longevity of their organization.

Instead of redeploying old tactics and packaging them in a different wrapper, take a look at how CLG can partner with you to achieve the results today’s business environment demands. Our behavioral approach will put you on track to achieve a focused operating plan that reflects buy-in from all of your organization’s leadership.

Our clients have been able to achieve significant performance improvement year after year by implementing Performance Catalyst in the first year, and becoming more proficient and sophisticated in its application each subsequent year.

Learn more about CLG's Performance Catalyst^® here.