How to realign strategy and capabilities in times of crisis
Assess the behavioral fit of your leadership team
Adapting your business strategy is important, but execution is what determines success or failure. That begins with assessing senior team/strategy fit. Which executives are behaviorally suited to the task at hand? Who may struggle to perform while trying to execute the revised strategic priorities?
You may be tempted to assess the team based on gut intuition. But there’s a better way to assess fit. Behavioral data can be quite helpful in understanding what activities, roles, and responsibilities individuals are naturally suited for. Using tools like the PI Behavioral Assessment™, you can identify an individual’s behavioral drives and needs—an objective way to determine how natural of a fit they are for a given role.
The activity below shows an example of assessing your team and solving for behavioral gaps.
Once you’ve identified leadership gaps, take swift action to address them. The size and scope of the leadership changes you make will vary on the size of your strategic effort. It could be as simple as pulling one executive off of a certain initiative and swapping them with another. Or, you may need to make more sweeping changes.
If it becomes clear you don’t have the right people on the current leadership team, look within. Even if you’ve implemented a hiring freeze, you can identify and promote high-performers who are up to the task. Ask yourself who you could lean on for the next six months to a year.
Stretching your leaders
In a crisis situation, you may not have the time to internally promote. So it becomes increasingly important for senior leaders to be self-aware. In doing so, they can learn to stretch their unique behavioral strengths to fit the current need.
You can also try putting some norms and processes into place to help reinforce these new strategies. The bar to the right will show some example process based on your current strategy.