Your organization has so many moving parts. Are they fitting together? Or are they working at odds with each other? How do you get them to collaborate, being all aligned together, moving in the same direction? M&A is here to help you step away from the day-to-day operations, get to a higher level view of your business by including input from all the relevant stakeholders and operational units. With M&A supporting you with professional facilitation, you will develop a comprehensive and cohesive strategic plan for your future success.
Your Challenges
Is your organization facing any of these challenges?
Your organization is a living, breathing entity that has to navigate changing environments, personnel, and opportunities. Do any of these issues look familiar?
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Teams Moving in Different Directions.
All members of the team, at every level, must focus on the same priorities if you expect to achieve your organization's goals and objectives.
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Lack of Clear Vision for the Future.
Success requires a clear Vision. If it's engaging, vivid, and clear everyone will understand what business success looks like.
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Making No Progress During Meetings.
The vast majority of meetings take up valuable time, energy, and money for lack of an agreed understanding before, during and afterwards. Clear direction makes for a clear agenda.
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Inefficient Internal Communication.
Teams that don't talk to each other lead to confusion, duplicate work, and underutilization of staff. The end result of these communication silos in your organization create an unfulfilling workplace experience. and misdirection.
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Workplace Culture that Needs Improvement.
Does everyone understand the clear values you would like in place to support the vision. The culture you create sets the stage for the behaviors, actions, and decisions of your employees. Without clear values in place to support your vision, even the best plans won’t be effective.
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Changes in Personnel Cause Disconnect.
As new members of your team come and go, it creates potential room for disruption in communication and processes. Every new staff member brings with them new ideas and direction, but you want them to work in the frameworks you've established to meet your vision, and be successful.
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Taking the time to step back from thee day-to-day to determine direction and alignment is essential in addressing one, or actually all, of these issues.
Our Solutions
Making strategic alignment and tactical implementation easy.
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By aligning your organization around a clear strategic plan, and supporting the implementation of that strategic plan, M&A gets everyone quickly on the same page, as well as creates accountability as a result of achievable, measurable and realistic goals
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M&A specializes in:
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Strategic Planning Facilitation. Create clarity, alignment and buy-in around the future strategic direction of your organization. Virtually or in person. Making sure everyone is heard, contributes to the end result in order to achieve total buy-in through structured and professionally facilitated conversations. This builds credibility with your all your stakeholders and helps you understand what they value as well.​
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Strategic Alignment. Strategic alignment helps you keep everyone on the same page so you can transform your people, strategy, and culture. Our strategic planning consultants can help.
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Tactical Alignment. Taking the goals and objectives given to each team as a result of the Strategic Alignment, and developing realistic, measurable, and achievable goals that work within vision and move the organization forward.
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Supporting Greater Strategic Thinking So You Can Make More Progress
With M&A facilitating your strategic planning process, we will transfer knowledge that will support your team in both making strategic decisions, and having an easy-to-follow process that you can cascade to the rest of your organization.
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Strategy is all about choices, and it comes down to focusing on what to do next. Sometimes those choices can be challenging, but at the end of our work together your team will be clear about what they need to work on, why they need to work on it now, and where your team is going long-term.
Establishing a framework to prioritize decisions and focus on accomplishing a few things well will help your organization make more progress, minimize costs, and maximize the resources of time, money and energy that your team has available.
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The M&A Approach
Helping You Achieve Alignment
A lack of alignment causes uncertainty, frustration, a lack of progress, and is the largest source of under-performance at any time. It is one of the biggest challenges we see organizations face. Unless you create alignment, every team member, working on they're own projects, will have a different idea of what success looks like.
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Aligning Your Team around One Destination
Alignment means establishing strategic elements such as your Vision, Mission, Values, Priorities, Goals, and Actions. Other benefits include operational components that address how do they communicate, who is doing what, and how are we going to track progress.
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Progress Requires Process
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At M&A we recommend a 2-step process. Each one of these steps can certainly be done as standalone to address specific issues, and will help your organization move forward. But taken together, will help you achieve full alignment
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STEP 1: Strategic Alignment Planning.
This top-down approach brings together the thoughts, ideas, and direction of your major stakeholders. Bringing together Board Members and C-level management in a room, with professional facilitation, creates higher level discussions, leading to understanding of all parties, and greater buy-in to the end results.​​
The end product of this session are specific goals and objectives relating to the issues, which are great in and of themselves. But those typically get handed down to team leaders who were not involved in the discussions, and may or may not understand or buy.
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STEP 2: Tactical Alignment.
Ideally, we take the objectives developed in the Strategic Alignment portion and have specific sessions with each team assigned to achieve them. The end product results actions plans attached to the goals that are achievable, measurable, and realistic, by people who will actually be held accountable.
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As an example, a goal is established at the Strategic Alignment level that says the organization will increase its loan volume by 10% within 12 months. The people that set the goal aren't necessarily the people who know how, or will work on the goal.
A Tactical session with the lending team can get down into the weeds and come up with Action Plans on how to make the goal happen in an achievable fashion. The facilitator ensues those plans are understandable by all, have specific due dates, and have team members responsible attached to them.