Building Your Blueprint: The Leader's Playbook for Creating Strategy & Team Alignment

By Catherine Z. Ach

Creating strategy and team alignment are two of the most important responsibilities leaders have today. Yet most of them never develop the skills required to succeed in this essential aspect of their role.

In Building Your Blueprint: The Leader's

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manuscripts LLC
• Release date: Feb 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889268734

Book preview

Catherine_Ach_ebook.jpg

BUILDING YOUR BLUEPRINT

BUILDING YOUR BLUEPRINT:

THE LEADER’S PLAYBOOK FOR CREATING STRATEGY AND TEAM ALIGNMENT

CATHERINE Z. ACH

Copyright © 2024 CATHERINE Z. ACH

All rights reserved.

BUILDING YOUR BLUEPRINT:

The Leader’s Playbook For Creating Strategy and Team Alignment

ISBN

979-8-88926-874-1 Paperback

979-8-88926-881-9 Hardcover

979-8-88926-873-4 Ebook

To my clients of the last twenty-five years,

with deepest gratitude

Contents

Author’s Note

Welcome and Introduction

Altitude Chart

Phase 1: Marketplace Analysis

Phase 2: Strategic Planning

Phase 3: Annual Planning

Phase 4: Team Alignment

Final Comments and Next Steps

Completed Blueprint

Facilitator Materials

Acknowledgments

Playbook Notes

Author’s Note

Strategic thinking is a critical part of getting and staying ahead. This is now as true for individual contributors as it is for CEOs.

—The Editors of

HBR

’s Special Issue on How to Think More Strategically, Spring 2023

I have coached senior leaders in a wide range of organizations on how to increase their day-to-day effectiveness for the last thirty years. One thing I have learned is that being able to think and plan strategically is an essential leadership skill and has a very high correlation to overall leader effectiveness. But the reality is most leaders have never developed this skill. They have learned the required processes and tasks to succeed operationally, and many have moved into management and leadership positions to help others do the same. The problem is they have never really been trained in many of the core leadership competencies.

Before starting my own consulting firm in 2000, I already knew this skill area was a gap for senior leaders. I was working at Baxter Healthcare at the time, and leaders frequently contacted me as an internal consultant with requests to assist them in mapping out the long-term strategy for their teams and organizations. Having led numerous large-scale global initiatives for Baxter and also having worked with several leading strategists as the director of strategic change, I was able to construct a four-phase process to assist leaders in creating strategy and aligning their teams for successful execution. It is called the Strategic Blueprint Process (SBP), and it is a proven approach that builds a collective sense of the future and helps leaders design a plan that can be executed at every level of their organization.

This process has been refined over many years and is the focus of my book. I believe leaders need to build more muscle in the strategic thinking and planning space, and my tried-and-true approach can show them how to do this effectively. I have been deep in this work for almost three decades, and I am committed to helping leaders move up the curve more quickly so they can lead their teams through the creation and implementation of their long-term plan.

This book is written for leaders in both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. It is designed as a step-by-step guide to help you facilitate all four phases of the work in order to produce a two-page blueprint for your team. All of the support materials for this process are included in the back of my playbook, whether you’re conducting it virtually or in a live setting.

My core purpose is to inspire and enable leaders to realize their full potential and lift others up in the process. I wrote this book as a way of honoring that purpose. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and may you feel more inspired and enabled as you travel along this path.

Welcome and Introduction

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it’s pretty much the whole game today.

—Gary Hamel, American economist and business consultant

Just before 1:00 p.m. on a rainy Monday afternoon, I was waiting to meet with my new client—a recently promoted SVP—for the first time. He had just taken over the company’s fastest-growing business unit.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the CEO swing into the SVP’s office within moments of our meeting start time. I was now overhearing a conversation I’m sure I shouldn’t have been privy to.

Given the recent supply chain issues we’ve seen across our industry, how do you plan to adjust the growth plan for your business? the CEO asked. The SVP offered a straightforward response, but one focused primarily on the next couple of years.

The CEO challenged him again. No, I mean over the long term. What are the changes you plan to make in order to achieve our targeted top- and bottom-line growth?

My client paused, trying to gather his thoughts. Clearly, he didn’t have a well-formulated response. In fact, I had been hired the week before to help him with that exact challenge.

I heard the SVP say, That’s one of my top priorities in this new role. I will do some strategic planning work with my team over the next few weeks and then review the results with you. That way, we can share our plan with the board next month.

Leaders face questions like this all the time. Their responsibility is to determine the growth plan for their company, business unit, or division. Without this plan, a leader cannot provide the required direction to their team. They also cannot contribute as expected to the enterprise. Clearly, this is not a setup for success.

Taking On the Challenge

Before we go any further, let’s define what we mean by a leader. A leader is someone who:

Inspires passion and motivation in followers

Creates a vision and the path to realizing it

Ensures their team has the support and tools required to achieve their goals.

In my many years of coaching executives, I have come to understand the three primary roles leaders play include setting direction, overseeing execution, and unleashing talent. While we can capture these roles in a few simple words, we know this position is anything but simple. You, as a leader, have to consider many nuances and subtleties in any given situation. Experience can teach us a lot, but you need to learn many skills to be effective in your role, and you often miss the chance to develop these skills before moving up the ladder.

Creating strategy and team alignment are two of the most important responsibilities leaders have today. Yet, relatively few leaders receive the training and guidance they need to perform these duties effectively. In addition, there are so many pressures on you today to produce operational results that it becomes difficult to carve out the time to think and plan strategically. We all know how quickly the urgent crowds out the important in teams and organizations where numbers drive both metrics and rewards. To make this situation even more challenging, the reality of the business world today is organizations continue to restructure, layers