"Are We Doing Enough?" Rethinking Performance Management in Education and Non-Profits

"Is our impact profound enough?" This introspective question, often heard in the corridors of educational institutions and non-profits, demands urgent attention. In a landscape marked by budgetary constraints, declining COVID-19 relief funds, and fierce competition for funding, it's no longer sufficient to keep operations running; we must prove that our efforts yield significant, positive social returns. The spotlight is on leaders across all social sectors - especially K–12 leaders, to be pioneers consistently propelling student outcomes forward. However, continuous improvement is a steep hill to climb, especially without a map.

"Effective performance management is the conduit through which continuous improvement permeates an organization."

My extensive work across various school districts has reinforced this truth. During adversity, strategic plans are indispensable. Yet, strategic plans are only the tip of the iceberg. What's crucial is complementing these plans with a robust Performance Management (PM) system, a linchpin ensuring that departments align seamlessly with strategic priorities and thrive on collaboration and accountability.

"Regardless of your district's phase in strategic planning, contemplating implementation and monitoring progress should be a priority."

Globally successful entities - whether in the for profit, non-profit, or education sectors attribute substantial credit to formalized PM programs. It's an impetus for districts to institutionalize PM. Far from a mere tool, PM is an inclusive, data-driven process. It thrives in a non-intimidating atmosphere where key stakeholders collaboratively analyze information to enhance performance outcomes significantly.

Our strategy for impactful PM implementation is multi-pronged:

• Cultural Assessment: Constant evaluation of the existing organizational culture, recognizing prevalent mindsets, conduct, and decision protocols, sets the change's groundwork.

• Leadership Training: Commit to professional development programs that arm leaders with essential collaborative and data-driven decision-making skills.

• Data Infrastructure: Establish a comprehensive system for data collection and scrutiny, paving the way for informed decisions.

• Ongoing Enhancement: Assess outcomes, identify lessons learned, and create action plans with timelines and accountability for improved improvements.

• Open Communication: Ensure transparent dialogue about collaborative measures, data tools, and analysis while keeping all personnel informed and involved. Monitor action plans and ensure that all staff are comfortable with the tools and processes. Engage all stakeholders, including teachers, parents, students, community partners, etc.

The outcomes of the PM process have been nothing short of remarkable. Sustainable change is gradual; PM is an evolving journey that gradually transforms the culture from reactive to proactive. This shift is anchored on leadership dedication, stakeholder involvement, transparency, and responsibility.

So, let's return to our initial introspection — are we doing enough? If this question causes the slightest uncertainty, it's time to roll up our sleeves and dive deeper. The journey will be demanding, but the promise of a brighter, more impactful future for our students and communities is a potent motivator.

Are you doing enough?

Unlocking Social Impact Through Collaborative Partnerships

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the significance of collaborative partnerships in amplifying social impact cannot be overstated. Modern organizations, now more than ever, are recognizing the immense value that lies in partnering with purpose-driven entities to jointly solve pressing societal challenges.

Take, for instance, Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures (JJIV). As an impact investment arm of the Johnson & Johnson Foundation, JJIV serves as an exemplary model of how large corporations can effectively use their resources to invest in transformative solutions. Specifically, JJIV directs its funds toward "purpose-driven entrepreneurs whose innovations address health workforce and health care challenges in low-income and diverse communities."

Such strategic partnerships and investments not only provide essential capital to social entrepreneurs but also offer them access to a wealth of expertise, networks, and resources that can propel their growth. It's a symbiotic relationship; while social entrepreneurs benefit from the robust infrastructure and mentorship, corporations, in turn, are enriched by the innovation and agility that these entrepreneurial entities bring to the table.

Furthermore, these collaborations exemplify how businesses can extend their impact beyond a singular focus on profits. By nurturing and supporting entrepreneurial solutions that cater to underserved communities, they play a pivotal role in bridging societal disparities and ensuring a more equitable future for all.

In conclusion, the future of meaningful social impact lies in the power of collaborative partnerships. Whether you're an established corporation or a social entrepreneur, joining forces with like-minded entities can significantly scale your efforts and make a lasting difference in the world.

#SocialImpact #CollaborativePartnerships

Unlocking Social Impact Potential Through Strategic Innovation

In today's dynamic economic and social landscape, innovation is the cornerstone of growth. A recent article from Harvard Business Review delves into a new approach to strategic innovation that resonates deeply with my commitment to social impact.

The article challenges conventional thinking, urging organizations to adopt a holistic perspective on innovation. By integrating social impact considerations into our strategies, we can drive economic growth and, at the same time, contribute positively to society. As leaders in the space of social impact, we must underscore the value of innovation that transcends financial gains. By aligning innovation strategies with our socially conscious missions, we pave the way for sustainable change that benefits communities and stakeholders.

By combining business acumen with a commitment to social good, we're poised to lead the charge in driving meaningful change. Strategic innovation can be the impetus for this change. The attached article provides an excellent tool to help drive cross-functional communication and cultural alignment. (A New Approach to Strategic Innovation (hbr.org))

Let's embark on a journey of strategic innovation that amplifies our social impact. As we explore new avenues, integrate fresh perspectives, and prioritize positive change, we contribute to a world where business success and societal well-being go hand in hand.

#StrategicInnovation #SocialImpact

Are Your Ready to Unleash Your Impact? (Reposted)

Individual's attempts to improve impact get stymied by the day-to-day routines and habits that stifle growth and innovation. What can you do to prepare and position yourself for success? Develop your impact capabilities.

Drawing on years of experience, while working with dozens of for-profit and nonprofit organizations, there are a few practical ways that I have used to break habits that impede impact and to develop new capabilities that inspire it.

Here are a few ways to get started in your current organization:

• Know your "why": understand your purpose, your reason for being, and how your mission aligns with the organizational work. Consider including elements of spiritual, personal, and professional components in your mission statement.

• Know your strategy: look beyond the short-term, day-to-day activities. Become familiar with the business model and work to understand how the operations and strategy relate. The ability to articulate the link between strategy, activities, and resources will provide you with information to make sound decisions and recommendations that help organizations reach their goals.

• Know your financials: if you haven't already, you might want to crack open some old accounting textbooks. At a minimum, you need to be able to interpret an income, P&L, or operations statement and use that to understand what is going on in the business.

• Know your relationships: build successful working relationships with other directors, top executives, and other stakeholders. Being effective involves listening carefully and being able to grasp, process, and react positively to opinions you may have not previously considered.

• Know your [organization's] culture: work on your ability to assess and understand the behaviors, norms, and beliefs of your organization. Improve your understanding of cultural dynamics by joining cross-functional, cross-industry, and cross-culture groups.

While developing impact capabilities does take time to build, it is not rocket science. I find that successful leaders know themselves in the context of their organization and use these capabilities to unleash impact.

Recognized As One of the 2020 – Top 100 Visionaries in Education

I am privileged and extremely excited to receive the prestigious Global Forum for Education and Learning (GFEL) “Top 100 Visionaries in Education” award. The award will be presented at the GFEL USA 2020 conference to be held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, June 23-25, 2021 (postponed from December 8–10, 2020 due to COVID-19).

My personal and professional experiences around the role of education in my life have shaped me into someone eager to contribute his energy, skills, and efforts to promote positive social impact. Please allow me to share my journey.

 My Upbringing…

My earliest experiences revolve around growing up in low-income project housing in Central California, in a single-parent family with five siblings. As a latchkey kid (for millennials, that's a child who is often left at home with no supervision), I spent a lot of time hanging out with friends. During my early teen years I was active in multiple sports, but at the age of fifteen I suffered a serious football injury. I gave up sports and had too much idle time. With idle time and no parent around, I often found myself spending late evenings on street corners with the older guys in the neighborhood. Despite being recognized for my abilities and having been transferred to a "gifted" elementary school, money and material things became more important to me than education.

At the age of eighteen, after attending multiple high schools, I graduated and moved out of the house to pursue my independence. I held various part-time jobs and enrolled in the local junior college, where I spent the next three years taking random courses, although few would transfer credits to a four-year university. 

Digging Deeper…

Deep inside I knew I deserved a better life and did not want to see my mother continue to struggle and work so hard. I vowed to live up to my potential and take care of my mother. After a few years at junior college and a couple of work promotions, I decided to move to a broader job market. In Sacramento, California, I finished my undergraduate degree and started a professional career in the corporate and nonprofit strategy divisions of highly recognized firms including PepsiCo and PwC, and also in large urban K–12 school districts.

My top achievements revolve around leveraging my education, drive, and transferable skills across various industry sectors. My first achievement is one from which I draw great personal satisfaction and pride: I was the first in my family to graduate from college and break through a ceiling perceived as unbreakable by my family’s prior generations. Building on this personal achievement, I went on to earn a Master of Business Administration degree from Northwestern University – J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Since then several of my post-baby boom family members have realized this same dream. 

Connecting the Dots…

As I look back over my life, all of the dots (both positive and negative) connect through education. My education changed my life trajectory and put my family and me in a position to positively impact society.

This is why I'm so proud of my recent recognition as one of the GFEL’s “Top 100 Visionaries in Education.” The GFEL is an ideal locus for the confluence of educationists, edtech innovators, thought leaders, and academicians who are adding significant value and promise to the global education sector. The GFEL conference strives to unveil groundbreaking innovations and delve into the depths of knowledge sharing to build the future of imparting education. (https://www.gfel.world/)

My award confirmation has come during the global pandemic when my colleagues and I have worked tirelessly to provide education and other services for the community while dealing with conflicts between politics and science. This timely award validates the most critical work I can do at this moment: I can drive social impact. Inspired by a higher power, I'm blessed to serve my community in an impactful way. The GFEL award recognizes me for achievement in an industry that has had such a significant impact on my life—and that will continue to propel me on my journey!

Measuring Impact Blurs as Economy Changes

Since the Great Recession of 2008, there has been a quiet revolution occurring. The lines between for-profit, nonprofit, and socially conscious organizations are becoming even more blurred.

The attached Forbes article mentions that, “there is a movement dubbed, impact revolution, that advances the vision of doing well, while doing measurable good. I contend that the recent pandemic and the resulting global economic effect, will fuel the engine that keeps the impact revolution running.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sorensonimpact/2018/06/25/the-social-impact-revolution-is-here/

Do you agree?

Bold Leaders Do The Right Things For The Right Reasons

At this unprecedented time, new and seasoned leaders alike are being pressed to make decisions requiring urgency, clarity, and calm, often with limited data and information.

In these instances, intuition and faith serve as essential guideposts, enabling you to do the right thing for the right reason. Choose every day to make one extraordinary decision.

In the short video, speaker Lisa Nichols boldly states, “Don’t ask for permission to be great!” https://youtu.be/oNanJKtU5LE

Are Your Building a Legacy?

Every leader, at some point in their career, will question his/her legacy. Living a life of substance involves a service mentality. Oprah Winfrey shares that “your service, your offering of your whole self is the baseline for how to live a life of substance.”  https://www.goalcast.com/2017/06/12/oprah-winfrey-whats-your-legacy/

What do you stand for? What will be your greatest legacy?  

Are You Ready to Unleash Your Impact?

Individual's attempts to improve impact get stymied by the day-to-day routines and habits that stifle growth and innovation. What can you do to prepare and position yourself for success? Develop your impact capabilities.

Drawing on years of experience, while working with dozens of for-profit and nonprofit organizations, there are a few practical ways that I have used to break habits that impede impact and to develop new capabilities that inspire it.

Here are a few ways to get started in your current organization:

• Know your "why": understand your purpose, your reason for being, and how your mission aligns with the organizational work. Consider including elements of spiritual, personal, and professional components in your mission statement.

• Know your strategy: look beyond the short-term, day-to-day activities. Become familiar with the business model and work to understand how the operations and strategy relate. The ability to articulate the link between strategy, activities, and resources will provide you with information to make sound decisions and recommendations that help organizations reach their goals.

• Know your financials: if you haven't already, you might want to crack open some old accounting textbooks. At a minimum, you need to be able to interpret an income, P&L, or operations statement and use that to understand what is going on in the business.

• Know your relationships: build successful working relationships with other directors, top executives, and other stakeholders. Being effective involves listening carefully and being able to grasp, process, and react positively to opinions you may have not previously considered.

• Know your [organization's] culture: work on your ability to assess and understand the behaviors, norms, and beliefs of your organization. Improve your understanding of cultural dynamics by joining cross-functional, cross-industry, and cross-culture groups.

While developing impact capabilities does take time to build, it is not rocket science. I find that successful leaders know themselves in the context of their organization and use these capabilities to unleash impact.

Do you agree?

Leading Boldly with Purpose

Regardless of what lens you look through, whether it’s healthcare, sports, economics, politics, or the environment, 2019 was a year dominated by change. To be an effective leader in today’s changing world, leaders need to embed purpose into foundational elements of their organizations actively. A 2016 PwC study revealed that only 34% of business leaders believe that purpose is a guidepost for leadership decision-making.

With a new year and a new decade soon before us, Bill George, Harvard Business School Professor and former Medtronic CEO, captures much of what I have discovered. “Purpose defines the unique gifts people bring to leadership challenges, through which they can align others with their purposes to create a positive impact. This is far more important than focusing entirely on achieving success in metrics like money, fame, and power, yet ultimately produces sustained success in those metrics as well.”

Bold leaders who are elevating their businesses in times of change recognize the importance of infusing purpose throughout the organization. Below are a few examples of how bold leaders embed purpose into foundational elements of an organization:

• Moral Courage: Exhibit the ability to distinguish right from wrong, do the right things, have honesty and integrity, seek justice, possess humility, show respect, and serve.

• Goal-Oriented: Create challenging but attainable goals that are set for the organization and its employees.

• Collaborative: Foster collaborative strategic alignment as a critical component for initiating sustainable change that results in improving impact.

• Planning: Enable effective prioritization of outcomes by utilizing “stakeholder developed” theories-of-action that provide the foundation for performance or outcome-based results.

Businesses led by purpose-driven leaders often achieve far more than those pursuing profit alone. Take a closer look at some of those leading the way (https://theplatoproject.com/eight-powerful-purpose-driven-businesses/ )

Do you agree?

Whoever Said Keeping it Simple Doesn't Pay Off?

As this decade draws to a close, socially conscious/responsible organizations are facing a growing set of challenges and opportunities as greater scrutiny from stakeholders begins to gather pace. These organizations, now more than ever, must demonstrate how they impact sustainable value that can be social, environmental, and economical. In other words, how do these organizations measure and sustain impact, over the long-term?

Professional development courses often tout the seemingly simple processes used to measure impact. Specifically, leveraging stakeholders early and often, developing theories of action focused on a few priorities, and implementing performance management discipline to include baseline (current state) metrics and target (future state) metrics.

For the most part, I agree with the touted process recommendations. Although these processes appear straightforward, I want to warn you that there are critical lessons learned that I would like to share with you about developing impact analysis programs: 

• Keep it simple the first time around: If this is your first attempt at defining and measuring impact, it is always best to start with something simple to get the hang of the methodology. Measuring the impact of one project may be easier than measuring the impact of the whole organization.

• The analysis process can be resource-intensive: There are definite costs to implementing an impact measurement process. Usually, these costs are in the form of the time commitment of resources (internal and external). I recommend that you start slowly and build staff capacity by implementing the processes one at a time.

• Engaging the practitioner is essential: Accurate measurement is often challenging, especially when we know that most social outcomes are “caused” by multiple factors. I recommend that your organization work closely with external stakeholders to identify sound metrics and data collection instruments.

Lastly, don’t get discouraged. In most instances, the process is often more valuable than the product. Over time, organizations develop the ability to understand better how well they are achieving their mission and strategy by identifying and measuring their impact.

Do you agree?

What Makes a Great Leader?

A leader today needs both ability to plan strategy and the skills to execute it. The challenge is that our generation of leaders has been taught how to plan not how to implement.

According to a global survey across a variety of industries, only 8% of company leaders were said to excel at both strategy and execution.

The biggest hurdles to overcome to achieve successful strategy implementation are designing the plan, managing performance and outcomes, and using a feedback loop for continuous improvement.

“How is always more important than what.”

— Eckhart Tolle

A formal performance-management (PM) process is one approach for minimizing these strategy-to-execution risks. Here are four (4) building blocks to help your organization plan and execute its strategy:

Mobilizing/Defining the Work

During this stage, it is essential to educate the stakeholders who will be impacted during this process. Explaining the process, the benefits, and expectations up front minimize disruptions and improve buy-in.

Defining Performance Indicators

Define and refine the metrics to ensure they are correctly identified and will have a direct impact on the desired outcomes. Incorporating these data into a structured format (e.g., table, scorecard) will help in presenting the data during feedback sessions with multiple stakeholders.

Prioritizing Performance Indicators

This activity is best done by a small team or task force composed of various perspectives. Specific actions will have more impact than others. Focus on less to achieve more. Take time to prioritize those indicators that will have the most significant impact on the desired outcomes.

Collecting Data

Create a transparent data-collection process that includes frequency, timing, and data source. Depending on the maturity level of the organization, standardized templates and user-friendly tools or systems can be beneficial.

Finally, communication via a feedback loop is critically important. Throughout the PM process, there will be new learnings, and plans may need to be modified, and ongoing communication is critical to keeping all stakeholders abreast of the progress being made.

Getting these four areas right allows leaders to make a big step forward toward closing the gap between strategy and execution.

Learning Leaders Perpetually Manage through Development Stages

One aspect of authentic leadership is the attitude and motivation to continually examine the different stages of organizational development. This perpetual diagnoses enables leaders to effectively create change, embed change or manage change to deliberately scale organizations. In other words, the leader must be a skilled change manager who first learns what the present stage of the organization is, unfreezes it, redefines it, and changes it in a way that catalyzes the capabilities of the organization. Accomplishing this goal is more difficult lower down in the organization but by no means impossible in that divisions or departments can be managed just as can overall organizations.

Different stages of organizational development require different kinds of leadership. Organizations are continually trying to emerge, evolve, expand or excel. The approach and capabilities of an organization are often tied to the level of maturity across these four stages. I have termed this the scalability life cycle. The figure below highlights the scalability life-cycle maturity profiles.

As organizations chart their way through the various life-cycle stages, it is imperative that they recognize the factors that drive change and anticipate the challenges to be addressed to progress to the next stage. Initially, results come quickly, but then they plateau as organizations formalize their processes and management structure. In the latter stages, if an organization implements with discipline by adopting formal measurement systems and performance or outcome metrics that are integrated into managerial processes and day-to-day operations, impact begins to scale.

In summary, leaders at different levels of an organization play a critical role at each developmental stage of an organization, but the role differs as a function of the stage. Much of what leaders do is to perpetually diagnose the organization and figure out how to manage in a way that catalyzes the capabilities of the organization.

How Organizations Balance Both Financial and Social Impact

According to a 2017 Edelman Barometer online survey of 33,000 respondents, 75 percent agree that a company can take specific action that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in the community in which it operates. The attached Harvard Business Review article mentions that, “corporations are being pushed to change—to dial down their single-minded pursuit of financial gain and pay closer attention to their impact on employees, customers, communities, and the environment.”

Over the last twenty-five years, I have had the privilege to work across multiple sectors with some of the industry-leading firms. My employment experiences included consumer packaged goods, Big-5 management consulting, local government and nonprofit sectors. Based on those experiences, I submit that the need for dual-purpose organizations has become even more obvious. As our economic and political context has heightened the need for organizations to improve not only their discipline, but to and do what it takes to “do well” and “do good” at the same time.

Link: https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-dual-purpose-playbook

The Greatest Personal Investments You Can Make in Finding the Purpose That Leads You to Positive Impact

As work environments continue to evolve and develop, leaders need to find ways to connect on a deeper level with their greatest asset - their people. We have all had leaders that make personal investments that enable them to get the most out of each and every employee. People feel compelled to work hard for these leaders and are willing to go the extra mile to ensure that commitments are met.

Personal investments that yield positive impact:

Storytelling: Stories can have a powerful and inspiring effect on individuals and organizations. Purposeful leaders don’t order people to “get motivated”, “get results”, or “be creative”, but they can lead followers to these outcomes through authentic storytelling. When individuals hear compelling stories, three things occur:

• The story is memorable

• The story travels further

• The story inspires action

A leader that knows which stories to tell to get their leadership message across in a meaningful way can be more effective at achieving their strategic goals.

Values: Personal values serve as a perceptual filter that shapes decisions. Consistently addressing tough decisions in the context of values help push you towards intentions involving positive financial or social impact. Values guide you towards your purpose in the following ways:

• Values guide your actions and behaviors

• Values help you create clarity for your life

• Values strengthen your ability to influence

Having clear values helps define who you are and remain intentional while becoming more intuitive over time. Being clear on your values helps you be a more effective, productive, and confident leader.

Vision: Essentially, vision focuses your attention on what matters most to you. It represents who you are and what is most important to you as it guides you towards the future you want to see. A clearly articulated vision is necessary for the following reasons:

• Vision is a clear path on where you are headed

• Vision motivates and inspires you (and others) to press on

• Vision gives you meaning, leading to purpose

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” ~ Carl Jung

A sense of purpose is created throughout life’s journey and encapsulates one’s identity (stories), values, and vision. In Nick Craig’s book titled, “Leading from Purpose: Clarity and the Confidence to Act When It Matters Most,” he references studies that highlight that leaders whom employees felt had clarity of purpose and communicated it inspired their employees to be:

• 70% more satisfied with their jobs

• 56% more engaged

• 100% more likely to stay with their organization

A purposeful leader inspires individuals, teams, and organizations to confidently evaluate high-stakes decisions and to postpone temporary rewards in favor of leaving a sustained, meaningful impact.

Is your purpose leading you to a positive impact?

Are Your Striving to Become an Authentic Leader?

Having the fortune of being exposed to great leadership, I’ve learned over the years that being authentic is the most consistent way to ensure the necessary buy-in required for sustainable impact.

In my line of work, I’m often tasked with developing policies and refining performance metrics. These activities involve a high level of collaboration and consensus from multiple stakeholders.

Below are a few of my valuable learning experiences:

• Tell your story often

• Be present -- don’t focus on the past or the future

• Listen to your intuition and gut feelings

• Commit to developing a deeper level of self-awareness

Additionally, the attached article is very relevant for those striving to become an authentic leader.

https://www.insights.com/media/1107/authentic-leadership.pdf

The Link Between Courage and Impact

Most of the things accomplished by the people we admire and respect, the ones we perceive to be “great,” involved the utilization of courage-related characteristics to impact change. Philosopher Daniel Putman identifies three types of courage:

• Moral Courage: Involves the ability to distinguish right from wrong, do right things, have honesty and integrity, seek justice, possess humility, show respect, and serve.

• Psychological Courage: Involves a strength in facing one’s destructive habits by effectively dealing with challenges that we all struggle with to include forms of stress, fear of failure, sadness, and dysfunctional or unhealthy relationships.

• Physical Courage: Involves selfless acts in the face of risk to one’s own physical well-being and the disposition to exhibit confidence in the face of physical danger.

“Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.” - Harry S. Truman.

Do you agree?

Read more at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/margiewarrell/2014/03/25/culture-of-courage/#3228ca3d6466

The True Value of Any Business Leader and Manager is Impact

At the end of the day, leadership and management is about getting things done and delivering value for all stakeholders. It’s not an easy job. It’s tough. And it requires a fierce commitment to high-performance and continuous improvement. For the best possible impact, I champion an approach that is both practical on performance management and compassionate with people.

Drawing on decades of for-profit and nonprofit experiences and secondary research, four focus areas are required to execute a strategic plan in any organization. Purchase "Audacious Social Impact" to learn how through key principles, frameworks, examples, and tools that strive to advance meaningful value based on performance or outcomes measured through achievement.

Quote to Inspire Greatness in You

Pre-order your copy of “AUDACIOUS SOCIAL IMPACT” (out in a few days!) and learn the four principles necessary to implement a strategy in any organization looking to scale impact.

Amazon.com

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It’s A New Year: Reset and Recalibrate - Success Never Results from a Silver Bullet!

For individuals and organizations, the beginning of the year is a great time to reset and recalibrate goals. For those involved with socially conscious endeavors, we all know that change doesn’t happen overnight. Audacious impact is incredibly challenging. Over time, there are growing concerns involving environmental stability, poverty, public education, job automation, globalization and other societal issues. Yet history shows us that audacious social impact can succeed. Unfortunately, success never results from a silver bullet -- it takes collaboration, prioritization, performance monitoring and talent management, among other things.

• Collaboration: Although most organizations have vision and mission statements, few use them to effectively link strategy, operations and people processes to drive performance or outcome-based results. In the absence of a collaborative strategy, organizations often misallocate their limited financial and people resources. Collaborative strategic alignment is a critical component for initiating sustainable change that results in improving social impact.

• Prioritization: Organizations that fail in effective planning and prioritization of outcomes often fall short of their long-term goals. Without a robust and inclusive prioritization process, organizations struggle with getting multiple stakeholders to support the implementation of its goals, projects and programs, respectfully. Prioritization and “stakeholder developed” theories-of-action provide the foundation for performance or outcome-based results.

• Performance (data-driven) monitoring: Data driven decision making through Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) is a foundational path to a results-driven organization. Organizations that differentiate themselves have an integrated feedback loop that links long-term goals to short-term performance indicators. Likewise, socially conscious organizations that manage and monitor performance improve accountability and visibility into implementation effectiveness.

• Talent Management: Human capital accounts for a large percentage of operating expenses. Without talent alignment, fiefdoms and silos dilute accountability and impede an organization’s ability to implement a strategy. Talent management, with cascaded performance objectives, aligns and improves individual’s accountability to the organization and to each other.

With intention, small steps and discipline, individuals and organizations can begin to form sustaining habits. Understanding and acting on these elements can help reset and recalibrate to achieve the audacious impact you seek.

Agree?