Todd Smith
Principal
2020 has been tumultuous, unlike anything many of us have ever experienced. As we shift to living and working in a new reality, organizations have been left upended. Leaders face abundant, urgent questions about how to care for their organization and their people, and how to plan for an uncertain future.
At CFAR, we have been grappling with the same challenges—both within our organization and through our work with clients. As we listened to leaders voice their concerns and watched numerous organizations focus on the notion of resiliency, we quickly came to realize that resiliency, while a critical starting point, alone is not enough. Simply weathering the storm in hopes that things will “return to normal” is an unlikely notion that will leave organizations ill prepared to drive toward a better future. It was from this belief that CORE was developed.
Experience tells us that successful organizations have strong leadership and clear strategic visions that address not only competitive dynamics in the marketplace but also alignment across four key areas that are vital to success: culture, organization, resilience, and engagement.
Why are these four pillars so critical to your organization?
— Culture: “How we do things around here,” the set of rules and assumptions for getting work done. When explicitly understood and actively cultivated, culture will serve as the catalyst for organizational growth and adaptation.
— Organization: How your business innovates, makes decisions, scales, and implements will help you align culture and strategy to successfully execute.
— Resilience: How you remain strong as you meet today’s challenges and lay the groundwork for ongoing strategy renewal and innovation will pay significant dividends well into the future.
— Engagement: How you connect with your employees, families, shareholders, board members, customers, and partners, who are all struggling to find a foothold in uncertain times. Your ability to provide stability, focus, and shared purpose will help each person see the key role they play in the success of your organization.
As we built out this new focused approach to addressing the CORE of a business, we recognized that it needed to be concise—our clients need focus and they need it quickly. It needed to be structured—time is valuable to leadership teams and we need to take as little of it as possible in this period of reinvention. And it needed to be actionable—articulating strategy and vision is not enough; clients must be able to execute.
With these criteria in mind, CFAR took many of our existing methodologies and tools to build out a new approach—the CORE consultation. In this approach, we partner with you to create a milestone-driven roadmap that aligns priorities, actions, people, and performance.
It includes three components:
— Diagnostic assessment, building on challenges to tackle and opportunities to leverage
— Three working sessions to develop your organization’s roadmap, with work in between
— A plan to implement your roadmap, allocating your time and energy where it matters most
We aim to complete this engagement with you in a six-week period, knowing that the details will differ depending on your situation.
We can’t wait to learn more with you alongside your journey at this unprecedented time, through this new way of collaborating. We encourage you to reach out and discuss our approach more fully, or to recommend us to a colleague whose organization might benefit from such an approach. We remain committed to making a difference where we are able—and companies need leadership through these challenging times more than ever before.