OUR APPROACH

ACHIEVING THE GOALS THAT MATTER MOST TO YOUR ORGANIZATION

How We Deliver This Service

This service is best paired with our Leadership Council and Leadership Alignment services. Once you have a council of aligned leaders, you are ready to focus on break-through initiatives. While we can certainly help you make great progress on your goals without these two services, you will expedite your firm toward better outcomes if you engage those services too.

Our Goal Achievement service is delivered by closely collaborating with your leadership team. To do this, we engage in the following activity:

• Align leaders. This is about answering the question—what are we trying to achieve long-term? When leaders have clarity and alignment about their long-term goals, it becomes much easier to choose initiatives that map to their future.
• Institute the Meat Grinder. This is about answering the question—how do we vet initiatives and work plans to ensure we get rid of obvious weaknesses? The meat grinder is one of the best approaches we’ve discovered to ruling out initiatives that shouldn’t make the cut and improving work plans for initiatives that do make the cut.
• Limit initiatives. This is about answering the question—what three initiatives should we focus on this year? When a leadership team limits themselves to just three initiatives, they greatly increase the odds of achieving all three.
• Select goals. This is about answering the question—what initiative should we focus on right now? Most initiatives can be sequenced so leadership teams know what to focus on first, second and third over the course of a year. This also prevents overlapping priorities from inhibiting progress.
• Define Collective Objectives. This is about answering the question—how can we work on this together as a team? This approach ensures no one person is overwhelmed and it also allows the strengths of individual team members to contribute to the goal.
• Create work plans. This is about answering the question—how will we hold ourselves accountable to do the work? We recommend the use of Gantt Charts and simple project management tools to ensure work plans are realistic. More than anything, we seek to get buy-in from everyone involved so people fully commit to the initiative.
• Specify deadlines. This is about answering the question—when must the work be done? When leadership teams commit to a deadline, they are far more likely to achieve the goal.
• Execute the plans. This is about answering the question—what should we be doing right now? Most initiatives, in our experience, can be accomplished in 3-6 months if leadership teams hold themselves accountable to do the work. The Shattuck Group serves as an accountability partner to ensure the plans are either fully achieved as originally designed or modified to reflect new information and realities.
• Debrief. This is about answering the question—if we are brutally honest with ourselves, what grade have we earned as a team?

These activities are usually divided into three segments, aligning with the three goals an organization will achieve. We typically spend a bit of time up front introducing the major concepts to a leadership team before we engage in the first goal. Thereafter, each goal will be carefully vetted, planned, balanced across team members, executed and debriefed. An annual schedule often looks like this:

• Get alignment and clarity amongst leaders.
• Identify, plan and execute goal 1 until fully complete.
• Identify, plan and execute goal 2 until fully complete.
• Identify, plan and execute goal 3 until fully complete.

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