1. Celebrate Progress
Make progress and achievements visible to strengthen motivation, momentum, determination and resilience. It is the ultimate productivity hack!
Performing under pressure and the Six Muscles
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Cutbacks, change and restructuring — your people have taken everything that’s been thrown at them. Moreover, you are confident they will continue to perform this quarter and the next.
At the same time, you know the future will stretch your organization further than ever before. It is likely to require new capabilities, new ways of working or new operating models. Perhaps even new mindsets and behaviors.
How much of a stretch will be required?
Your leaders must drive today's performance, while delivering on your organization's most ambitious strategy. All despite real resource and other constraints — organizational, regulatory, etc.
Ambitious strategies naturally stretch confidence in execution. However, some signs of strain may already be starting to show. Even if it's not yet impacting on results, it could undermine confidence or ambition for the future.
Are any signs of strain starting to show?
Delivering Today's Performance & Tomorrow's Strategy
What are the challenges ahead?
Ambitious strategies inevitably present challenges - where are they showing up for your leaders and their teams? Click to select
Identifying the challenges is easy - solving them is not! Sometimes, even discussing them can be difficult. That is where we help.
Making it happen.
What do your leaders need to succeed?
Build the strength, resilience and skill to deliver today and stretch tomorrow by developing these six muscles.
The Six Muscles
What muscles does your team need to flex?
Start with five minutes on your phone. Repeat the reflection across your team to build a shared picture over time.
2. Big Things First
Take a quick pulse of your team's ambition, confidence and the time and attention being given to key strategic priorities. Uncover gaps and fast-track insight and alignment on what matters most.
Addresses these challenges:
3. Balanced Scorecard
Take a quick pulse of performance, potential, pressure, vitality and collaboration. Identify hidden risks to the sustainability of performance and opportunities to strengthen it.
Addresses these challenges:
4. Dynamic Alignment
Take a quick pulse of clarity and alignment regarding priorities, results and purpose. Surface where alignment is strong, where noise or distractions are getting in the way, and how to realign as circumstances change.
5. Ways of Working
Quickly check whether the right people are in the right roles, doing the right work. Identify what's slowing the team down and opportunities to improve speed, agility and capacity to get things done — while saving time, money and stress.
Addresses these challenges:
6. Ways of Interacting
Take a quick pulse of the behaviours shaping how your team interacts internally, engages stakeholders and responds to change. Identify opportunities to strengthen trust, constructive challenge, curiosity, humility and agility — bringing out the best in people and enabling the team to thrive.
Addresses these challenges:
A few practical answers
Frequently asked questions
Who is this for?
For senior leaders and their executive teams charged with delivering mission-critical business targets, strategies or initiatives while continuing to deliver today’s performance.
Do you recognize the challenges below? And which changes are you and your team preparing to deliver?
Are you asking already stretched teams to do more with less?
Growing demands on scarce resources create strain. Competing priorities, misalignment and frustrating ways of working can add to that strain, consuming time and energy needed for the strategy.
Practising the six muscles helps teams address the factors they can influence: how they prioritize, align, work and interact. That includes making trade-offs, stopping lower-value work and identifying where additional resources are needed.
The aim is to reduce unnecessary strain and build capacity to deliver what matters most.
Why these six muscles?
These six muscles draw on years of research and practical work with leaders and teams delivering ambitious strategies, projects and initiatives. They were selected for their practical relevance and the benefits seen when teams put them to use.
The ideas will feel familiar: put the Big Things First, recognize progress, keep alignment dynamic, and pay attention to how you work and interact. The opportunity lies in practising them consistently.
This is also about building on strengths—recognizing what is already working and helping the team make more of it.
You can begin putting the muscles to work in as little as five minutes on your phone. Use that reflection to identify an adjustment, put it into practice and review what changes.
What can change after a Pitstop?
A Pitstop helps teams develop greater clarity, alignment, energy and momentum around their most important priorities.
Teams identify practical adjustments to reduce six things that consume time and energy:
- Noise
- Friction
- Drag from cumbersome processes and procedures
- Frustration
- Waste, including duplicated effort and work that adds little value
- Ambiguity around priorities, roles, results and decisions
Acting on those adjustments can free up headspace for thinking, bandwidth for collaboration and capacity for execution. Sustaining the benefits requires continued practice and follow-through.
What do you mean by headspace, bandwidth and capacity?
- Headspace: room to think strategically, look ahead and reflect on what is working and what needs to change.
- Bandwidth: time and attention for alignment, cross-functional collaboration, engagement and co-creation.
- Capacity: the ability to execute priorities, innovate and develop new ways of working.
The muscles help teams identify what is consuming these resources and how to direct more of them towards value-added work.
What evidence can I explore?
Explore the client stories to see the challenges teams faced and the changes they reported.
- From restructuring pressure to renewed direction: +16 percentage points in alignment.
- From functional silos to a united team: +17 percentage points in team health.
- Eight systems, one platform: how delivery confidence rose by 24 percentage points.
- A launch leader estimated nine months saved through better ways of working.
- Rebuilding confidence in an AI strategy: +24 points in ambition and +14 points in confidence in execution.
Does stretching to deliver strategy always mean taking on more?
Stretching to deliver strategy requires clarity and alignment around priorities, results and purpose. A central part of that is making difficult choices: prioritizing value-added work, making trade-offs and saying no.
It can mean simplifying, stopping work or concentrating resources on fewer priorities. It also means balancing the rigour of planning with agility in execution as circumstances change.
Developing these capabilities helps teams focus their effort on the work that matters most.