CULTURE BY DESIGN

It is almost universally accepted that organizational culture plays a major role in the success of companies. The tie between culture and performance is clear and has been validated. Yet many organizations still struggle knowing where to begin and how to take action to gain the culture they need and want.

To know where you need to go with your culture, you need to know where you are starting. We work with the Denison Culture survey, a state-of-the-art culture assessment that benchmarks your culture against a large and constantly updated database of organizations seeking to leverage their culture.

With good data and insight in hand, we can help explore the options and initiatives that will build safety, trust, and authenticity throughout your organization.

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LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Great leaders develop themselves and others, stepping back from day-to-day responsibilities to gain a broader perspective on their leadership capacity. Using innovative tools and professional one-on-one coaching, we help you and your leaders develop leadership presence that reflects the culture and values of your organization. Improving the communication, decision-making, and strategic execution skills necessary to deliver success in today’s challenging markets.

The goal is personal and professional transformation that contributes to your company’s success while developing your bench strength.

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Strategic Thinking

We help strategy teams articulate and reveal the way they are thinking about their business and the industry.  We use simplified templates, like those used by Vern Harnish in Scaling Up, and frameworks like the LENS^© model developed at the UW Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking to facilitate “no holds barred” conversations that lead to competitive breakthroughs.

A strategic thinker’s mindset values innovation and bold risk-taking in crafting a winning vision — but also values the ability to switch gears and move from divergent, expansive, and out-of-box thinking to convergent, decisive, and focused actions that assure effective implementation.  We bring the processes and skills to help you succeed in strategy.

STRATEGIC EXECUTION

Great strategies will fall short if they are too complex to implement or if your teams and leaders don’t have what they need to see the strategy through. Excellence in execution is made possible through clarity on what you will execute in combination with empowerment and the skills to implement.

High-performance organizations have teams that know the playbook, know how success is being measured and are committed to doing their part. They know the targets being set for them are challenging, but attainable—because they helped to refine and improve them. They know that their insights and learning matter because their leadership is listening to them and their ideas about how to fulfill the strategy are finding their way into quarterly objectives.

New Legends Now approaches Strategic Execution with a specific toolkit and a commitment to helping you and your teams build good skills and new habits.  We believe execution is where culture, strategy, and leadership come together in the most compelling and important way—for the sustainable success of your business.

SIMPLIFIED STRATEGIC PLANNING

Experts estimate that as many as 90% of strategic plans fail, but what does it take to be in the other 10%? We have simple tools, proven processes, and deep expertise to help your team set a clear strategy, prioritize its initiatives and drive accountability for results. We will help you develop a streamlined strategy that will align with your culture, leverage your strengths and assure you are ready for execution.

LEADERSHIP 360s

How comfortable would you feel driving your car without rear or side view mirrors? How long before an accident likely occurs because you can’t see the blind spots?

Welcome to the concept of a Leadership 360 assessment! By gathering feedback from those around you in your organization, a Leadership 360 provides rear and side view glimpses into your own blind spots, those development areas that, when strengthened, better equip you to get the most out of yourself and everyone around you. We not only help collect feedback for your Leadership 360, but we also analyze it and co-author with you an actionable professional development plan to improve your overall effectiveness as a leader.

STRATEGIC EXECUTION – A METHOD AND TOOLKIT

A great strategy is simple and agile, ensuring everyone understands their contribution. The real key to an excellent strategy though is getting it developed and working.

New Legends excels at supporting your strategic execution. Years of experience in project, program, and organizational management have provided us a unique and powerful toolkit to deploy to your teams. The tools support learning and using skills that range from rapidly creating shared work plans, building trust with stakeholders, and maintaining highly accountable teams. We help you create and empower five-star execution teams.

And maybe most importantly, our commitment to assuring what we do is sustainable within your organization means that we leave you with a common language and common tools. An approach that will support the next round of strategy and bring new employees into the culture and strategy of your company faster than you thought possible.

DIVERSITY FOR INNOVATION

Discussion about the lack of diversity within workplaces and the role that unconscious bias plays in that challenge has been trending for a while. While we agree that unconscious bias is real and is always at work, at New Legends we focus on the motivation to change as the antidote to this enduring challenge.

Diversity—of opinions, backgrounds, style, and thinking—is the key to breakthroughs, better engagement of all minds and stronger collaboration and commitment to results.  Finding the path to a diverse and accepting workforce is not simple. Engaging people in conversations and dialogues about where we are and where we want to go without blame or judgment is the key.

New Legends has an approach to surfacing these issues and having authentic conversations to help teams develop strategies, create a common language and toolkit that builds diversity into the fabric of the culture.

EXECUTIVE COACHING

According to Forbes, having an executive coach has gone from stigma to status symbol. More importantly, we know it greatly enhances your chances of success. All of the world’s most successful athletes, politicians, and business professionals have coaches. We work with executives in our client organizations to help them untap their own potential, discover hidden resources and talents, and dig deep to do the difficult job of being a LEGENDARY leader.

MERGERS + ACQUISITIONS

Mergers and acquisitions represent a lot of change, opportunity, and risk.  The success rate of most M&A activity is low.  We find that those who are intentional about understanding the culture gap between the organizations and following a strategic plan for the merger have a much higher rate of success than those that don’t.  Our job is to help you understand the differences between your organizations, create a strategic plan for the merger, develop goals and measures to manage to, and guide the implementation.

SUCCESSION PLANNING

We are surprised, especially in working with scaling companies, that succession planning is delayed while other initiatives are pursued. Entirely too often organizations are not prepared when change at the leadership level happens. Every organization, no matter what phase of the life cycle, needs to create a plan for identifying, developing and placing the next generation of leaders to ensure ongoing, sustainable success.  We help organizations create culturally aligned succession plans.

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

The challenge of having a prepared and engaged workforce has never been greater.  Many organizations are faced with the double dilemma of large numbers of senior workers with vast knowledge and expertise leaving at the same time that they are seeking to adjust their practices to engage and retain millennials.

Whatever the current buzz about millennials, they are the new workforce. These highly motivated and creative employees want to be challenged. They want to solve problems. They want to use their deep understanding and natural inclination to use technology to make the work they do easier, more logical, and more intuitive.

We’ve developed a specific toolkit and learning program to help bring these two critical elements of your workforce together—to solve problems, exchange knowledge and address your bench strength and succession planning challenges.

SYSTEMS THINKING

There are four levers you can pull to gain the organizational shift that you are seeking– people, processes, systems, and tools.  By far the most impactful, and hardest to understand is systems.

Systems thinking is a sensitivity to the circular nature of the world we live in; an awareness that there are powerful dynamics and consequences operating at all times.

Systems thinking is also a powerful diagnostic. The ability to create a casual loop diagram with a team and explore the different effects and outputs from the system can reveal the root cause and better focus your efforts and resources while gaining a new level of alignment and commitment with your team.

New Legends brings expertise and insight to your system challenges and helps you learn to navigate and embrace systems thinking and the tools that support it.