There is no template.
The Addington Method IS the path
Follow the way there.
High Clarity // Focusing Your Organization
High Clarity powerfully sharpens the focus of the organization and staff, revealing crystal-clear targets carefully and thoughtfully defined. It is deeply connected to scalability and your ability to grow your business or non-profit enterprise.
The gift of clarity is the greatest gift any leader can provide their organization. Leaders are, by definition, clarifiers. Ambiguity creates confusion and conflict. High impact clarity defines what is most important and provides the underpinning for organizational clarity and alignment.
Organizational clarity is the discipline of defining those things that are most important to your defined goals. Culture, mission and vision, brand positioning, strategy, tactical, central focus—non-negotiable guiding principles and the critical areas demanding alignment. There is no organizational alignment or true accountability without clarity.
Where lack of clarity exists, people define their own fill-in-the-blanks clarity. This often results in competing versions of clarity within the same organization. Lack of clarity inevitably creates competing agendas, directions, chaos and unfulfilled outcomes.
High Clarity defines systems, definitions, purpose, culture, and expectations. It eliminates competing agendas, ways of doing things, and different cultures within various departments and teams.
Your staff longs for clarity… really. They yearn to be a contributing part of something worthwhile. High Clarity provides that causal direction and blueprint for their individual and combined work. What needs to be clarified? Everything that matters!
High Clarity allows for scalable systems which create ways of doing things that grow — not “one off’s.” Your efforts grow when you have a system and way of doing consistent things, more consistently. There is no scalability without clarity and clear processes.
The Method can help you achieve unprecedented clarity, starting with the macro and working inward. Building systems and defining critical processes and definitions build a common culture around common practices. These are keys to a common and aligned culture.
Average organizations do average things with average accountability and results. Great organizations do a few focused things in a deeply focused way with an uncompromising level of accountability. The difference between average and great is the level of clarity, resolve and discipline.
Healthy Culture // Scripting Your Future
It is all about Healthy Culture: values, beliefs, commitments, behaviors, attitudes, practices, and more, blending to create that organization’s singular environment.
Every organization has a secret formula — think Coke, Cinnabon, Intel — that, when tapped into, sets it apart through a crafted environment where its brand, mission, team, and customers’ flourish. No, this is not about a brilliant strategy, great people, or a wonderful product – although all these are important.
Peter Drucker knew what he was talking about when he famously declared that “Culture eats everything else for lunch.”
Culture is never neutral. It either contributes to a healthy organization or infects it with frustration, mistrust, and inhibited results. There is no neutral ground.
Through a proprietary and proven methodology of Culture Audits, we can identify clear areas of your culture that are broken, dysfunctional, beautiful, and effective. Culture Audits involve a 45-minute conversation with many staff in an open-ended question format where common themes emerge.
This process, along with substantial leadership conversations, allows you to map your current culture accurately. This includes dysfunctional systems and/or people whose behaviors ripple through the organization, as well as teams and individuals who are the champions of the kind of culture you desire.
This is the beginning of the opportunity to create a new script for your culture that can capture the minds and hearts of leaders, staff, and constituents. Through a guided process, you can write that script and create a culture that serves your mission rather than simply living with an accidental culture and behaviors that don’t contribute to health, accountability, and return on mission.
In crafting a specific culture, you can set your organization apart from the pack. This is some of the hardest work you will do. We have the experience and tools to help you craft a healthy, compelling culture. In every organization, there is either a virtuous circle of healthy culture or an unvirtuous circle of dysfunctional and harmful culture. We will help you eliminate the latter and create the former. It is your script, but we will guide the process.
Contrarian Thinking // For Non-Traditional Results
Conventional Wisdom is conventional, but it is often not wisdom. As it has been said, “what got you to HERE got you to here. It will not get you to THERE.” Conventional answers to organizational issues often focus on more staff and larger budgets. But what if you could accomplish more with less, effectively leveraging your opportunity by thinking differently?
Name almost any organization that has seen significant results, and you will find an organization that thinks differently. They practice contrarian thinking. They look for and find ways to accomplish more with less and break through insurmountable barriers with unconventional solutions.
"If you want to understand why some companies lack innovative ideas, think about the man who can't find his car keys. His friend asks him why he's looking for the keys under the lamppost when he dropped them over on the lawn. 'Because there's more light over here,' the man explains.
"For too many companies, that describes their search for new ideas, and it pretty much guarantees they won't go anywhere fast. While a company can marginally improve what it's already good at, it misses out on the breakthroughs - those eureka moments when a new concept pops up, as if from nowhere, and changes a company's fortunes forever.
"Those ideas, however, don't really come from nowhere. Instead they are typically at the edge of a company's radar screen and sometimes a bit beyond.....In other words, they have to look away from the lamppost." (In Search of Innovation, John Bessant, Katherin Moslein,and Bettina von Stamm, The Wall Street Journal, Monday, June 22, 2009, R4.
Embracing contrarian thinking for non-traditional results is hard work, but it is the magic sauce of innovative organizations that want to go to the next level. Don’t settle for the ordinary. Don’t do more of what you are currently doing. Think differently, act differently, and find better ways to accomplish your goals.
People Passion // It All Adds Up To Success
Every organization says that people are their greatest asset. Many organizations do not live up to that statement. The number one indicator of the health of any organization and its culture is how they treat people. There are no exceptions.
In most cases where organizations get into trouble, it has to do with how people are treated or impacted by unhealthy practices and culture. We often overestimate our true commitment to people and underestimate the true value of our people.
Staff will forgive many missteps by management and leadership if they know they matter to leadership and are trusted with respect as colleagues.
Respect and appreciation are the two core desires of staff at every level. Respect means that I will treat you with dignity, engage you in conversation, ask for your opinion, listen carefully to your views, and take your concerns seriously. It is treating you the way I desire to be treated. Appreciation means that I will take the time to thank you for your contribution and communicate how important that contribution is.
The common denominator of both respect and appreciation is time. It is time with people and carving out time to listen, interact, and dialogue. This can be seen as a distraction in the busy life of a leader, but it is at the heart and soul of what it means to lead. We lead people before anything else. We lead people to accomplish a mission together. As leaders, we are one of those who just happen to be in the front, leading others. Leaders too busy to invest time in their people are not leading. Nor are they conveying respect or appreciation.
Through The Addington Method, we help you evaluate your staff to discover their unique gifts, their unique personality, their unique story, and their unique perspective.
This is all about valuing your staff not only in words but in real-time. Healthy organizations recognize that they have certain responsibilities toward their staff. We call this The Leadership Contract. It is the unspoken and unwritten but tacit understanding between staff and their supervisors regarding expectations. Even though it is unwritten, it is very real, violations of that contract are felt by staff. The Leadership Contract spells out 12 tangible ways that we value our staff.
We will help you and any who supervise live by The Leadership Contract to ensure that your most important resource, your staff, are treated with dignity and respect, are in the right seat, and contributing their best to the organization.
High Accountability & Intentionality // It’s Not a Trick
The reason that accidental living is so prevalent in the workplace is that we have too little clarity, which leads to a lack of alignment and multiple agendas. In addition, many leaders have not developed the skills of intentional living and discipline in their work schedules. It is far easier to go with the flow than to prioritize the important over the urgent.
In all organizations, getting things done is paramount. Everyone is busy, but some are far more productive than others. Why? Because they live and work intentionally rather than accidentally. This starts with leaders and extends to all supervisors and then to staff.
Healthy organizations are built on a mission, with clarity around that mission and discipline in execution. The three key roles of any leader are to provide great clarity as to what the organization is about, ensure alignment around that clarity, and see results consistent with the clarity. These are core elements of The Addington Method.
This is not about making to-do lists, although those can be helpful. It is about driving pieces of your missional agenda that drive your mission forward. 90-day wins are long enough to do something significant, and if everyone do four of these per year in a coordinated fashion, the outcome is amazing.
In a healthy organization, there is no place to hide. Everyone delivers, from the top leader to the bottom of the organizational chart. There are typically organization-wide initiatives and then team initiatives (which often support the larger organizational initiatives). It is a culture of disciplined action and focused work. In this kind of disciplined culture, there is no place to hide.
The Addington Method will help you develop an organization-wide commitment to execution – getting the right things done every day, every week, every quarter, and every year. This is a game-changer for any organization. It also helps staff think creatively about how they do what they do and feeds innovative and contrarian thinking.
Metrics That Matter // Everything that Matters Must be Measured
People pay attention to what is measured, so it is critical to measure those things that you are passionate about. This is possible because you have done the hard work of clarity, defining your culture, setting expectations for staff and their relationship with supervisors as well as ensuring forward progress with 90-day wins.
We operate on the premise that everything that matters can be and must be measured. It is the only way to ensure that what is important to you is being paid attention to. With the best intentions, many organizations lose sight of critical areas that matter because they don’t measure them. It is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing.
Those measurements comprise your dashboard, updated regularly with a monthly or quarterly review. You determine what you measure and how you measure it. We will coach you in the process. The more you measure, the more you know, and if you are measuring the right things, you will gain deeper insight into your business or non-profit, and that insight will often provide new ideas and strategies to pursue.
Determining what to measure and how to measure is a process of determining what is ultimately important to your growth and realizing the interconnected nature of the systems that make up your processes. For instance, while the number of customers may be important, so is their satisfaction with the service you provide and the pricing and delivery of those services to ensure necessary margins. None of these by themselves give you the full picture. Each is a vital element in the work you do.
The more elements of what you do that are measured, the more insight you gain about your work and opportunities to strengthen your processes and outcomes. Measurement becomes not only a scorecard but a vital analytical tool to become better. Even the decision as to what you measure becomes a conversation about the outcomes you desire. You may even determine that you are measuring the wrong things - a vital insight to make.
Most organizations measure some things. The best organizations learn how to measure everything important. As you practice this discipline, you will refine what and how you measure and, in the process, get better at what you do and gain deeper insight into your work.
Sustainable Systems // Breaking through the Glass Ceiling - from Surviving to Thriving
The growth of any organization and its impact are tied to its commitment to building the right systems. Good infrastructure is paramount to success if the business is to survive and especially if the goal is to scale. Intentional and continual development of every system within the organizational structure is vital to healthy growth.
The Addington Method places a high priority on the development of systems that are fully sustainable into the foreseeable future.
Sustainable systems are viable over the long term for 2 reasons: (1) because they are scalable so businesses can grow without overwhelming people or processes and (2) because they make sense and actually support thriving organizational activity instead of stifling it. Unreasonable rules and needless bureaucracy will kill all of the healthiest things about a business, creativity, collaboration, synergy, and so on. But, good infrastructure supports all of the healthiest things about a business. Creating, improving, and maintaining systems like this is key to survival. In fact, scalable systems can even absorb new growth through their efficient design at minimal cost. On the contrary, it is the lack of such systems that creates breakdowns of all sorts as business grows.
Triple Bottom Line // Never Settle for Less
Thomas Dodds, the owner of Slash Blue, a managed services company accurately says that businesses have a triple bottom line: People, Purpose, and Profits. Whether you are a for-profit or not-for-profit enterprise, you have a significant purpose in what you are seeking to accomplish — that purpose adds value to people and society.
Most people would say, “I want my work to contribute to a better society, help solve problems, provide needed services and leave the world a better place than I found.” The top organizations find ways to weave this level of commitment into all they do — providing incentives and context for everyone’s best contribution to a significant cause.
We believe this mentality of making a real difference in the world is a critical factor in all healthy enterprises. How do we harness our goods and services for a greater good while ensuring a healthy return on investment or mission? This is no rhetorical exercise. It directly impacts the energy and motivation of individuals wanting to contribute.
Contributing to viable causes includes working in a healthy organization where joy is experienced in one’s work, synergistic relationships where each person contributes to the whole, profits reward team members, and the overarching opportunity — in some small way—to create a better society.
We only work with organizations sharing a like-minded purpose — contributing something of enduring value to our world. When we neglect this element, we become poorer as an organization. When we emphasize and live it, we become richer because work contributing to a cause greater than ourselves is a great motivator. To simply focus on the business is to leave something of great value on the table.
