Refocusing the Organization 

 

Organizations today are trying to play a new game on a new field with old rules.  Virtually all who lead say their current business models are misaligned with emergent realities, unforseen challenges and changing priorities. Two-thirds say "extensive changes" are required. Yet they also confess they don’t know how to go about fixing what’s no longer delivering sustainable competitive advantage.

Largely because they are not attuned to the derailers,  today’s leaders are severely constrained by bad strategies that few employees understand and most can’t implement. The evidence is overwhelming: most cultures lag reality and drag down performance, up to 80% of major change initiatives fail, managers are largely risk averse and bad role models, and those who do manage confuse being busy with being effective.

In an age of exponentially accelerting change,  thework of leaders at all levels is to determine the path forward, to continually refocus the organization to achieve clarity of purpose, to make things better and deliver results that matter. Understanding how to use unpredictable, disruptive change as the vehicle for becoming more agile, efficient, innovative and growth oriented is the one capability every senior manager must possess.

If you don’t have the knowledge, tools and insights needed  to encourage your workforce to become more productive, accountable and engaged, outside experts can’t help you. They’ll gladly take your money but, in the end, your company will become just another sad statistic. Your services will become a "commodity" and your survival will depend on price alone. In our hyper-competitive world, an inability to refocus and energize your intellectual capital is the recipe for irrelevance and failure. The proof is a matter of public record.

The price of failed change is considerably more than just lost dollars and lower quality – it’s lost credibility and an ingrained immunity to further attempts to improve your workplace. Successful leaders know how to get people to work smarter, use time more productively, make better decisions and emulate critical corporate values. They can strategically guide and personally inspire people to do the right things in the right way at the right time. And these are all learnable skills. 

This fast-paced, highly interactive, residential learning experience  is designed with your needs in mind. Join a select group of senior-level executives who share similar challenges and learn how to:

  • Better understand the reasons why you need to refocus (if you don't already)
  • Diagnose the current health of your organization and where you rank against others
  • Master a simple but powerful mantra of change to achieve organizational clarity and focus
  • Make managers and supervisors effective agents for changing mind sets in the middle
  • Identify the critical drivers and dynamics of disruption in the innovation economy
  • Forecast, monetize and manage the cost/speed dynamics of your refocusing initiatives
  • Overcome the inordinate but unnecessary costs of a "tuned out and turned off" workforce
  • Isolate and define organizational "cancers" and learn to treat them with workable solutions
  • Gain buy-in by dealing intelligently with resistance, excuses, apathy and push back
  • Nurture, harness, leverage and harvest your intellectual, human and structural capital
  • Reduce workplace stress and debilitating conflicts in practical, timely and proven ways
  • Dissect and build organizational trust – the fuel that drives innovative, agile organizations
  • Develop compelling strategic plans that people can actually understand and execute
  • Reinvent a new business model aimed at relevance, growth and continuing profitability
  • Customize and apply simple tools that enable people to accept and act on your values
  • Become more efficient in meetings, reducing e-mails and minimizing interruptions
  • Transfer "ownership of the process" through self-directed, self-managed teams
  • Motivate today’s workers and turn "being busy" into results that make a difference
  • Foster a culture shift from entitlement to accountability and innovation via practical techniques
  • Deliver a compelling case for organizational changes in politicized environments

Who will benefit:

  • Managers who aspire to be real leaders;
  • Executives who are simply fed up with worker inefficiency, apathy, resistance and entitlement;
  • Leaders who want and need to make better strategic decisions about the future of their organization; or
  • Anyone who wants to design a future of choice and discover the means and skills to achieve it.

The program (session topics include): 

  • The need to refocus: new realities, priorities and truths
  • Becoming a change architect: Skill sets, insights and tools
  • Drivers, dictates and demands of the innovation economy
  • Nurturing, harnessing and leveraging your intellectual capital
  • Culture building: Trust, accountability, alignment and decision making
  • Creating business strategies and models people understand and can execute
  • Radically improving organizational productivity, efficiency and effectiveness
  • Fostering, managing and sustaining an achievable culture of innovation
  • The recipe for gene replacement: From diagnosis to selling to execution

This program is offered  on July 11-14, 2010, at White Oaks Resort & Spa, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and in Vancouver, B.C., on  November 8-10, 2010.

For more information or to register  for this offering in Ontario, contact Robert Gagnon at the Institute of Chartered Accountants at: 800-387-0735, ext. 326 or at rgagnon@icao.on.ca. In Vancouver, contact Ms. Stella Lam-Leung at 604-631-2570 or at lam-leung@ica.bc.ca. This program is open to non-members of the Institute. For other course dates and registration information, see Dates and Places.