Bridging the gap between Strategy and Results requires examination of the health and alignment of your top leadership team.  An effective executive team should easily be able to answer these four questions:

1. Do your team members understand each other‘s differences, priorities, and styles?
2. Does your team meet weekly for strategic thinking?
3. Does your team participate in ongoing executive education?
4. Is the team able to engage in constructive debates and all members feel comfortable participating?

They seem simple enough.  However, most executive teams will not be able to answer all of these questions in the affirmative or worse they will have different answers.

On your executive team, you will have a range of experiences, backgrounds, skills, habits, attitudes, beliefs, personalities and problem solving capabilities. There is power in understanding and leveraging these differences to help bridge the large gap between strategy and results.

As part of your meetings rhythm, your weekly executive staff meeting (I recommend holding these in the AM Tuesdays), when done properly, will ensure sustained executive team alignment while eliminating the risk of veering too far off course as you execute your quarterly priority.

With the disruptive rate of change, it is essential to invest the time in high quality and on-going executive education.  Unfortunately, in this crazy busy world, many teams fall pray to the “we don’t have time” excuse and stop learning, which will over time widen the strategy to results gap.  Prioritize on-going education or die.

Who dominates your Executive team meetings?  No one is the only right answer.  In the real world, you will always have one or two team members that tend to dominate the conversation with ill effects.  As such, you have to practice and create a habit of everyone actively participating, debating, listening, disagreeing, discussing, exploring, and understanding.  And, finally fully supporting decisions made.

If the answer is No to any of these 4 questions, you have work to do to ensure that every team member answers all four questions with a yes.

SeeMetrics Partners believes you can achieve real results and rewarding relationships through a rigorous practice of the Rockefeller Habits.  Ensuring executive team alignment is the first of the Rockefeller Habits.  Check out Bahaa Moukadaem’s podcasts and future blogs to find out more.