BACKGROUND
A well-established, medium-sized trucking company with over 2,000 drivers had grown consistently over the past 20 years by establishing long-term relationships based on custom solutions for their customers. Budgets reflected their client intimacy go-to-market strategy; the CEO himself maintained well-established, long-term relationships with their largest customers. This strategy and market reputation always got them the last look in competitive bids with existing customers and new prospects.
When Line-of-SightSM was called, the CEO acknowledged that they had progressively lost that competitive edge in the last four years; they stopped being the partner of choice for their current customers, and equally concerning, they were not even getting invited to the table for new requests for proposals. The top line was flattening and increasing distrust in the leadership was pushing drivers to leave the organization in record numbers; their reputation as one of the best places to work in the industry was eroding, increasingly replaced by the perception of being a place that was hard on their employees. The CEO engaged with Line-of-SightSM to do an initial organizational health scan on the company.


THE SOLUTION
The analytics showed strengths in organizational structure and good visibility into the performance KPI’s used to run the company. The root causes of the company’s troubles were traced to vulnerabilities surrounding the company’s strategic intent, human capital, and leadership. In other words, the company had lost its former focus and the tight execution discipline that undergirded their relationship-based differentiation. Using the data, focus was placed on these critical areas and action plans were put into place for improvement over the next 6-12 months.
To address the strategic intent vulnerability, the executive team went back to having quarterly offsite planning sessions, a ritual that had served them well in their growth years but had been progressively abandoned. In their first session, they dusted off and updated the companies’ vision, mission and strategic intent and developed a crystal-clear message as to “why people buy from us vs. the competition.” Armed with this focused message, the CEO held a series of Townhall meetings with all employees to deliver this simple, yet powerful message. The message was continually reinforced through the company’s formal communication channels and all company meeting agendas started with a reminder of “why people buy from us vs. the competition.” They added a well-known psychometric assessment to help gain insights on their drivers in order to improve retention and developed a formal leadership training program for all frontline managers and above.


THE RESULTS
With these specific action plans in place, visibility into progress was measured on a monthly basis to stay on track, adjust and fine-tune as part of the process.
Over the next 18 months, the company saw a 27% improvement in driver turnover and topline revenue, previously taxed by unfocused execution, grew by 9%.
Leadership credibility improved by 39%; their new leadership development programs produced more high-potentials than anticipated; as a result, most open management positions were filled from within, which in turn reinforced the team’s alignment and cohesion around their differentiation strategy and execution.


Original Data:
Organizational Health Scan: 61%
Strategic Understanding: 31%
Human Capital: 28%
Activities & Structure: 39%

Data at 18 Months:
Organizational Health Scan: 86%
Strategic Understanding: 89%
Human Capital: 75%
Activities & Structure: 78%


EXECUTION IN DATA
Line-of-SightSM measures the Health Index of an organization in 5 critical execution capabilities:
Strategic Understanding, Leadership, Balanced Metrics, Activities & Structure, and Human Capital. Measurements are taken at all levels of the organization to deliver objective, bias-free analytics.
A score of 75% and above in each of these areas indicates strong execution capabilities
A score between 50% and 75% indicates vulnerabilities, i.e. strategy is not executed as expected by the leadership team.
A score inferior to 50% indicates a serious gap that threatens the integrity of the organization’s market positioning and strategy.
The overall Organizational Health Scan is a composite snapshot of the organization’s execution prowess. Organizational health is a leadership mindset that applies data and discipline to build execution excellence.



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