Our Organization Alignment model is a tool for understanding organizational needs and leading organizational change. The alignment process is designed to help senior leadership teams create a vision for their organization’s future and a road map for achieving that vision.
It usually involves a series of meetings that include presentations, discussions, and experiential activities that help participants lead significant organizational changes and align the rest of the organization to support implementation. Major topics include:
• Understanding the Organization Alignment model
• Identifying key stakeholders – customers, suppliers, senior leaders, valued partners, team members, etc.
• Identifying forces in the environment that are drivers of change
• Identifying the organization’s desired reputation (core values)
• Creating a Stakeholder Scorecard
• Assessing the organization’s current reputation with its most important stakeholders
• Identifying strategies for closing gaps between the organization’s desired reputation and its current reputation
• Identifying structures, roles, processes, and systems that need to be strengthened to implement new strategies
• Identifying changes in the organization’s culture (leadership, communication, decision-making, teamwork, recognition, etc.) that need to change so that the strategies will be perceived by key stakeholders
Since these working sessions are a blend of learning and immediate application to current organizational challenges, they are always customized. The starting point is usually an initial assessment - interviews with all participants and sometimes focus groups with key people at lower levels - followed by a 2-day workshop. That is typically followed by a series of 1-day or half-day meetings to continue working on the most pressing issues.
Following these workshops, participants are expected to cascade the results down to their respective organizations – on their own or with Charter Oak support. In most cases we also do Organization Alignment Coaching with the senior leader of the team to help them implement changes. In some instances we do that with other key leaders as well.
As part of this process Organizational Assessments based on Stakeholder Scorecards can also be conducted. These comprehensive reports establish a basis for development activities and a baseline for measuring progress over time.