Activating purpose to realise strategy

“Leading building products company seeks inclusive offsite experience to connect leaders to Purpose, Vision and Strategy”

One of Australia and New Zealand’s leading building products companies approached us to design and facilitate an experience-led offsite for their top 70 business leaders. With a newly developed Strategy and brand new Purpose in place, the organisation needed commitment from their people at all levels to enable sustainable and strategically aligned growth. They also needed to embed the company's Purpose throughout the leadership team to create collective energy and engagement for the aspirations of the business. 

With only seven days between initial briefing and execution, our aim was to develop an impactful experience that was inclusive of both virtual and in-person attendees. 

To deliver meaningful and sustainable growth aligned to the new Purpose and Strategy, we planned an offsite that would include:

• Thoughtful experience design, including activities that fostered interaction, co-creation, collaboration and customer-centric thinking.

• ELT preparatory sessions to drive alignment and create clarity on the critical role each leader played in making this a reality for their people.

• Development of detailed facilitation guides to ensure the delivery of key messaging.

• Development of supporting creative collateral to bring activities to life, ensuring a consistent and inclusive experience for those in the room and dialling in via video conference.

We broke the day into three distinct sections covering the key focus areas we identified:

Align and commit to Purpose

Our first session was all about transforming the organisation’s new Purpose from ‘words on a page’ into something meaningful that could inform decisions, inspire action and connect people emotionally to the Strategy. Using a creative, ‘storytelling’ lens, our goal was to build a compelling narrative around the Purpose that could keep the business anchored to its Strategy for years to come.

Co-create a Vision to support Purpose

While the organisation now had a new Purpose and Strategy, they still didn’t have a Vision statement that could connect what they stood for as an organisation, to what they wanted to accomplish. After outlining the successful building blocks of a good Vision, we split leaders into groups to devise and define territories from which the future Vision would be developed. By providing leaders with agency to contribute to what that the Vision needed to be, we gave them a practical focus and a burning platform to drive change across the organisation.     

Define the cultural behaviours required to support the organisation's aspirations

In order to realise the full potential of the organisations new Purpose and Strategy, we needed to clearly articulate the cultural conditions required to deliver on their aspirations. Building on the organisation’s strong existing cultural foundations, our aim was to reset expectations around what types of behaviours were required to deliver a culture of high performance – while holding leaders to account for delivery of their culture.

Feedback is at the core of how we grow as a business – so naturally, we asked the 70 leaders to complete a survey at the end to better understand the effectiveness of the session and determine if the outcomes had been achieved.

• 95% of the participants responded positively to the statements “I feel connected to the purpose”, “I feel energised about the organisation’s future” and “I am clear on how my leadership actions impact the culture”. 

• 100% of participants had a positive overall experience of the day. 

Here’s what some of the participants had to say:

“Excellent, disarming, humble yet confident facilitation.”

“Fantastic day. I feel energised and pumped about our future! Great job team.”

“Participating virtually, I was concerned how engaged I could be. The session was inclusive and interactive. The day exceeded my expectations.”

We’ve seen the power of drawing that connection from Purpose to Vision (aligned to Strategy) first hand in much of our client work, and giving leaders an active role in telling that story is an excellent way to bring them onboard. To that end, we found even greater value in involving the CEO and Executive team in the development of the day. By doing so, we ensured they all showed up invested in the outcomes and energised to create a meaningful day.

Speaking of meaningful days, it can’t be understated just how valuable it is to set aside the time to properly invest in and commit to change. The added breathing space helped leaders make strong connections, provided room to explore what’s possible and enabled the creation of a co-designed process built with confidence and pride. 

Finally, it is entirely possible to create an inclusive offsite environment that blends both video conference and in person participants. The trick is to consciously design the experience with the required outcomes and equal weighting of both groups in mind.

For support in planning your next leadership offsite or to discuss the link between Purpose, Vision and Strategy and how they can collectively become the driving force within your business, get in touch with our team to arrange your first discovery session.