Strategic Discipline Blog

The primary reason I added Metronomic’s and Shannon Susko’s 3HAG Way to my coaching tools was to help my customers improve their strategy.

Most leaders don’t have a good understanding of what strategy is. Many find it a challenge to confidently articulate their strategy.

Research shows 50% of executives don’t think they have a winning strategy.

In Metronomics, the  Strategy System’s purpose is to take a complex strategy and create a clear, simple, and understandable strategy the whole team can explain and use to make decisions.

The Strategy System progression ensures the leadership team collaborates to create the most differentiated, confident strategy for your business.

This level of cohesiveness of the team is important to create the most impactful strategy.

The more trust within the team, the more the team has a healthy conflictive discussion to decide on the strategy for your business.

The key difference in how a strategy is created through the Metronomics Repeatable Playbook is the prescriptive step-by-step method allowing the whole team to build up your strategy together, validating it every step of the way, to create and maintain confidence.

The foundation of the Strategy system and the glue that holds the Metronomics Repeatable Playbook together is the 3HAG. This is the stepping stone, the evolution vehicle, that connects the strategic execution plan to your cohesive and culturally strong team.

When you gut out where you will be in three years’ time, you will never stop validating it to make sure it’s right and accurate. This drives your team to stay immensely focused on the strategy to achieve the goals. When you align the soft-edge systems with this, the balance provides a consistent way to win every year.

Shannon’s second book, 3HAG Way, provides a step-by-step, prescriptive method of how to create your 3HAG in greater detail.

Carl Saunders Former CEO of Vorum

I was a “stuck” CEO when I found myself literally begging for Shannon’s help to implement Metronomics in my company. For years at Vorum, we had maintained the status quo but failed to achieve the substantial growth I was looking for.

After our two-day kick-off and starting regular coaching sessions with Shannon, there were some massive shifts I noticed right out of the gate.

The first was goal setting. I am a person who delivers on my commitments. Being specific about what we would achieve in years two and three of this system made me incredibly uncomfortable. What if we didn’t hit it? What if we didn’t do what we said we were going to do?

The incredible thing is we did do what we said we would. We achieved the first goal we set and not because we were able to map out discretely exactly what we were going to do to get there but because we had people on the team who were committed to getting there. Come hell or high water we’d figure it out. That was when I realized that when you have A-Players on your team, they’ll do everything they possibly can to get you where you say you are going. And if you don’t have the right people in the right people in the right seats, those issues outrank strategy every time.

As we progressed in our journey, the concept of setting goals via 3HAGs and achieving them became even more paramount throughout our organization. In fact, hitting a 3HAG of $10 million in revenue resulted in one of the ultimate rewards—taking the entire company to Hawaii!

The fiscal benefits of hitting this goal were obvious, but I could never have anticipated the cultural implications. It lit a fire under our company and unlocked our thinking in unprecedented ways. Everything clicked after that, and our growth took off. We added more A-players to our team and became even more specific with our goals and forecasting.

We dug further into our strategy by identifying who our core customers were and more clearly articulated how we were meeting their needs. We even made headway on creating a brand promise, which is something none of our competitors would ever dream of doing.

Each quarter, we would just keep pounding on our strategy, which got more compelling as our cohesiveness enhanced and our team came together with aligned thinking about the market and how to differentiate ourselves.

While Metronomics helped launch Vorum on a high-growth trajectory, it also was instrumental in achieving another strategic priority with great success: my CEO exit and the sale of our company. With this system in place, my transition out was accomplished in six months, rather than two years. Because I was no longer involved in the execution of the company. Our use of the Open Playing Field Software (Metronomics Software) was also essential for showing predictable historical performance, which helped immensely for the company’s valuation.

These days, I am privileged to help others on their growth journeys as a Metronomics coach, and I can tell you based on my experience and those of my clients, it is one of the best strategic moves you can make.

What other way is there? Without a system like Metronomics, you’ll continue to bump along as you have been. If your company isn’t growing, your best people aren’t growing or getting new opportunities, and they won’t stay. At some point, you need a strategy for growth. And there’s no better method for growth than the Metronomics system.

Your hard-edge systems—the Strategic System, the Execution System, and Cash System—inside the house, are easy to focus on because they deal with hard results and depend upon goal attainment.

Need help developing your Strategy System?

Contact us to help you create an amazing work environment to fuel your growth!

To discover at what level your team is functioning. Take The M Game Growth Check (scoreapp.com).

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems today to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

Execution is the next Hard-Edge System. It’s based on the principles from Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up and Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. Meetings, Metrics, and Priorities drive effective execution. Next blog we explore the Execution System.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact on the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $500M+) businesses Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – The “M” Game – Hard Systems: Execution System