The State of The Climb

The state of the climb is an often overlooked but really critical component of cascading out an inspiring purpose, creating alignment within the organization to really get people to come together and work together towards common goals. The way I like to encourage people to start working through the agenda for this is one you want to try to, depending on the structure of the company, the size of the company, you want to try to get everybody together. If that's not possible, if you have multiple locations and it just doesn't make sense, or you're too big to get everybody together, you might want to do this as a roadshow and once a quarter or twice a year, go around and do this as kind of a town hall type meeting with everyone in the organization. Again, however, you have to kind of break that down. Some really large organizations will do this with all of the mid management, kind of all the leaders within the organization. They may or may not choose to cascade it down to every team member. And you've really got to figure out what's going to be best for your organization, depending on your size and your complexities. But again, this is a great thing to kind of just talk through as an issue with your guide. If, if it's not easy to get everybody together once a quarter or at least twice a year to go through something like this, but in these state of the climb meetings, it's always helpful to start the meeting by just revisiting your just cause, your purpose, your strategic niche as an organization, why you believe what you believe, share that inspiring purpose and really help people kind of connect with it on an emotional level. This is often a good time to share some stories from the quarter of things that the organization has accomplished that are advancing your just cause and helping you fulfill your purpose. Those personal stories can help people really get bought in and understand it better. Then I like to typically go to core values and start talking about our core values. And because we believe this and because we have this specific purpose, this is why our core values are so important. In order to fulfill this purpose and advance this just cause, we have to have people who are aligned with these values talk about what the behaviors look like. It's also good to give some specific examples from the time period we're addressing here. If it's a quarter or if it's six months to really look at examples of individuals who've done a great job with certain core values, this is a good time to call them out and to recognize them for those behaviors. Sometimes you might find that you chose to fire a client or a customer because they violated your core values. That's a really powerful thing for employees to hear if it's something you've actually done. Because what you're really doing and what you're really saying there is we're protecting our company and we're protecting our employees from people who don't value the same things that we value. And so that can again create a lot of solidarity and unity within an organization. After we've had a chance to go through core values, I like to talk about the summit of the mountain we're climbing. What is that bhag and just restate that for the organization especially focus on the qualitative components of it, because that's what's going to get them more, more inspired and more exc. And then once we've set the context and restated to everyone and refocused on the summit, I like to then go into our one phrase strategy. Assuming you have one as you're doing this, if not, add it as you get it developed. But this is why our one phrase strategy is so important. This is why it matters. If we're going to achieve this bhag, if we're going to reach the summit of this mountain, we as an organization all have to obsess about this one phrase strategy and make sure we're delivering on it every single day and every interaction that we have, oftentimes both an internal and external thing, but helping them really tie down and understand the one phrase strategy. From there, go to the three year vision and just talk through the components of the three year vision that you want to share with the audience that you have. Sometimes in your three year vision, there are certain things you want to redact that you may not want to share. It's entirely up to you. But go through the three year vision. Help them see that picture of where we're going as an organization. And then once you've done that, we start bringing it down to the ground. Share with them what our growth plan is for the year. And so if we're one or two quarters into the year, we still share with them this is where we're going to end the year. They should start seeing progress and feeling momentum as we get deeper into the year after we've done that. Share with them what the quarterly priorities are, talk through those quarterly priorities and then when you're done with that, open the floor for Q and A and encourage them to ask questions. What don't they understand? What do they disagree with? What are we missing? That maybe they want to make sure we have on our radar that we're aware of and giving them a voice to speak up in that meeting. What you'll find is that if you consistently focus on these and you do them well and you stick with it, over time, employees will begin to trust the direction that leadership is taking us and they'll begin to trust more the decisions that are being made. The reason for that is if we are showing them a three year vision for the organization and they see that the one year growth plan we've established gets us significantly closer to that three year vision, and then they see our quarterly priorities as things we're actually committing to and we're actually getting done. And we're beginning to steadily move toward that one year growth plan and we're getting closer and closer to our three year vision. The more they see us actually setting great plans and actually executing on them and following through, the more trust that they're going to have for us and for the decisions that we're making as leaders in the organization. So with the state of the climb, I've also seen situations where organizations will have a videographer come in and they'll do this as a video that they can then cascade out to various regions. I've got one company that I work with that's in multiple regions across the US and they, they film this every quarter. And then what they do is at a local, regional, or I'm sorry, at a regional level, they'll get everyone together, they'll watch the video together, which usually from the founder and CEO, and then on a local level they'll have the Q and A and they'll talk through it. And so the local leaders have been to the corporate office where this was filmed. They've done it together with the executive team or the leadership team. And now they cascade it back into their teams and their regions through the videos and through their local town halls. So there's lots of different ways to address this and attack it depending on your complexity. I would just encourage you to not let complexity or scale be a reason to not do it. Let that be a reason to reach out to your guide and let them help you work through a solution that will get you to the intent behind creating unity and harmony and collaboration through sharing this vision repeatedly over and over again. Ultimately, it's about accomplishing the objective, not getting wrapped up in the weeds around what some of the complexities are that may keep us from getting there. Sam.