The Power of Strategic Commitment: Achieving Extraordinary Results Through Total Alignment and Engagement

To take your company to the next level, you constantly strive for that magical combination of top talent, superior leadership, critical resources, and canny strategy. But those elements—separately or in combination—will never achieve their ultimate value without commitment. Not the throwaway, rah-rah variety that dissipates as easily as it was created; but genuine, lasting engagement on the part of every single person in the organization. It’s real, it’s measurable, and, yes, you can build it.

The Power of Strategic Commitment is the first book to turn the sometimes fuzzy concept of buy-in into a true strategic component of success. The authors demonstrate that by establishing quantifiable components of motivation and engagement, any business—yours—can turn Compliance (essentially doing everything right, but by adhering to rules and consequences) into Commitment—doing everything extraordinarily well, all the time, because of real interest in the success of the project at hand and the continued growth of the organization.

Like most business issues, the level of commitment you can expect from your employees will be determined by what’s projected from the top. The reason many well-designed initiatives end up falling short or failing outright is that employees sense immediately if senior management does or does not have the resources, structures, and sheer guts to follow through on all the grand visions they generated at the last strategic planning session. Too often, as the authors quote, strategic planning is “when you go offsite as a team, agree on a bunch of priorities for the year, then go back to work and do what you were going to do anyway.” This lack of resolve then permeates every level, department, and individual in your workplace.

With The Power of Strategic Commitment, you’ll not only learn how to create and communicate initiatives that have inherent value (Content), you’ll also learn how to show and build belief in the lasting importance of those initiatives to both the organization and each employee (Context). This critical combination in turn results in the ability to:

• Hire and retain only fully engaged talent.

• Involve everyone in creating the future of the organization—and their own future within it.

• Continuously measure and increase buy-in at every level.

• Customize commitment strategies for each employee (it’s easier than it sounds).

• Create a commitment-inspiring rewards system (without breaking the bank).

• Keep everyone’s eyes on the prize—the achievement and surpassing of stated goals.

Jam-packed with practical tools, proven methods, and countless examples from the authors’ considerable experience with hundreds of world-leading clients, The Power of Strategic Commitment gives you the key to the kind of sustained engage­ment that will finally help you realize all those great ideas—and take your organization to the top!

Josh Leibner and Gershon Mader are consultants, speakers, and founding partners of Quantum Performance, Inc., a leading-edge management consulting firm with Global 1,000 clients including Cap­ital One, Cisco, Pru­den­tial Financial, Cushman & Wakefield, Zurich Financial, the United Way, and many others. Josh Leibner lives in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Gershon Mader lives in Toronto, Canada. They can be reached at www.quantumperformanceinc.com.

Alan Weiss, Ph.D., is a consultant, speaker, and author of 32 books. His firm, the well-known Summit Con­sulting Group, has worked with hundreds of major global organizations, including Hewlett-Packard, Merck, and The New York Times. Alan Weiss lives in East Greenwich, Rhode

Josh Leibner (Bridgewater, NJ) and Gershon Mader (Toronto, Canada) are founding partners of Quantum Performance, Inc., a management consulting firm with global clients including Capital One, Cisco Systems, Prudential Financial, Cushman & Wakefield and many others.

Alan Weiss (East Greenwich, RI) is a consultant, speaker, and author whose consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients including Hewlett-Packard, Merck, and hundreds of other top organizations.

INTRODUCTION

Let’s be honest. Most initiatives to improve organizational performance do not deliver. Whether the aim is to become leaner, more productive, customer-intimate, or growth-oriented, the majority of organizational programs fail to accomplish their goals. Most of these efforts don’t cut costs, improve productivity, boost customer satisfaction, or raise revenue to the levels that the organization’s leaders expected or promised to the board and Wall Street. Some initiatives, in fact, fail outright because of lack of ownership and follow-through. All in all, the track record of corporate initiatives is a sorry one—one that only Dilbert creator Scott Adams could take joy in.

Most senior managers understand that no matter how clear and valid their strategy and objectives are, if people are not genuinely on the same page working with each other, rather than against or independent of each other, they will not achieve the success they want. But these same managers don’t know how to generate real commitment and alignment to their strategies. One clear indication is the lack of enthusiasm that most senior managers exhibit for the strategic planning process. As one executive put it, “Strategic planning—that’s when you go offsite as a team, agree on a bunch of priorities for the year, then go back to work and do what you were going to do anyway.”

From our combined consulting experience spanning eighty-plus years, 500 clients, and sixty countries, working with companies of all types and at all levels, we have found that the root cause for most failed or unfulfilled strategies is not any actual shortcomings in the strategies themselves. In fact, we have seen brilliant strategies fail in the worst way—despite being exactly what the company needed at the time, well researched and analyzed, and presented compellingly at all levels.

The Power of Strategic Commitment teaches how true ownership and commitment, and not merely compliance, is achieved throughout an organization, even when the environment is filled with the typical toxic organizational issues of distrust, politics, turfism, butt-covering, blame, and timidity. The book addresses the role, for example, of a “chief commitment officer,” ways to build commitment that cost nothing, and the fallacy of money as a motivator for behavior change. Strategic commitment issues in nonprofits, education, and government, as well as traditional for-profits, are all covered.

Using this book, you’ll be able to identify apathy, resignation, and cynicism, and then transform them into an environment of total alignment and commitment within your organization. The process starts by sharpening your antennae to spot compliance masquerading as commitment, and understanding the six key drivers that ensure organizational commitment, even under the most dire of circumstances. Numerous real-life examples are given from Global 1000 executives who have succeeded using these tools. All of the quotes used in the book come from direct interviews or interactions with clients, or recollections from the individuals cited. Actual names were used when possible, with fictionalized names used in some cases.

This book is a modest insurance policy to guarantee that the $400,000 spent on strategic planning is, indeed, well spent.

Please note: Beginning with In Search of Excellence almost 30 years ago (1982, HarperCollins), people have carped that companies used as examples have often fallen out of favor. That’s because Peters and Waterman at the time, just as we are today, were using contemporary examples of sound processes. But variables often interfere: changed leadership, mergers, poor decisions, poor discipline, etc. We can’t ensure that our examples will stay true to strategic commitment, but we can laud those that were doing so when we wrote this.

—Josh Leibner

Bridgewater, New Jersey

—Gershon Mader

Toronto, Ontario

—Alan Weiss

East Greenwich, Rhode Island

December 2008

Excerpted from THE POWER OF STRATEGIC COMMITMENT. Copyright © 2009 by Josh Leibner and Gershon Mader. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.

All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.