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Rhythm 2.0 - Think About Your Long Term Strategy - Core Values & Purpose

By Ryan Walcott

How do you know if you have the right strategy to grow your business AND enjoy the journey along the way?

The enjoying the journey part of that question is where most growth company entrepreneurs and teams trip up.  Yes, the business is growing.  Yes, we’ve sold more product and hired more people.  But, at some point the work stopped being fun.  Or maybe it's on its way there now.  We grapple with why we continue to do this job and often begin to struggle with team members we hired along the way.

Rhythm 2.0 has amazing new features to help you execute your plan and grow your business.  We like to talk about these in terms of three basic categories:  Think, Plan, and Do.

Think is all about establishing a rhythm of strategic thinking in your team to create focus for the future of your business.

The Long Term Strategy area of Rhythm gives you a place to work on where you are going and who you want with you on the bus as the company continues its growth journey.

When we speak of Long Term Strategy, we mean specifically your Core Values, Core Purpose, BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), and your Core Competencies.  We created a whole new Strategic Workbench area in Rhythm for you to hammer out these items with your team to grow your business.  This blog is going to focus on using Rhythm to work with your team to discover and document your Core Values & Core Purpose.

Do you know your company’s reason for being?  This isn’t as simple as making money or giving shareholders value.  Those things are important, but they are not your company’s Core Purpose for being.  Do you know the Core Values of your company?  These are the handful of guiding principles by which your company navigates.  Both your Core Purpose and Core Values should be discovered, documented, and communicated to your entire organization.  They should be incorporated into your hiring and performance review processes to ensure you have the right people on the bus with you in your growth journey.  Rhythm 2.0 gives you a place to work on these with your team through learning and collaboration.  

We’ve added a robust Coaching Resource Center with high quality articles, videos, and tools to guide you through the process of learning and discovery.  We’ve also added collaboration capability within Rhythm to enable your team to continue to work on strategic items outside of planning sessions in order to accelerate your decision making and growth.

Let me illustrate how collaborating with Rhythm 2.0 can accelerate your strategic thinking work.  In a planning session, you work with your coach and your team to determine draft versions of both your Core Purpose and Core Values.  You are excited about this work and can’t wait to communicate this to your staff and incorporate these into your hiring and performance review practices.  Prior to Rhythm collaboration, you would have likely agreed to think on those items until your next session and then finalize the wording used in the drafts at that time.  With that model it takes you 3-6 months to get your Purpose and Values done.  With Rhythm collaboration, you have a place where you can continue your thinking and wording edits to those items between sessions and get the work finished within 3-6 weeks rather than months.  This saves you months or even whole quarters of continued hiring and performance reviews that are not aligned to your Core Purpose and Values.

Here’s an example of how this looks in Rhythm.  Your Core Values & Purpose are saved in the Rhythm software so that your entire team is on the same page as to what we agreed on at the session.

 

R2_Core_Values__Purpose

 

The team continues thinking on these and collaborates with each other between sessions to discuss, debate, and agree on the right wording.

 

Gazelles Systems R2 Core Values Comments Page pic

 

 Your team is also learning through this process and will often reference articles and other resources which they can attach specifically to this work in Rhythm as shown below:

 

Gazelles Systems R2 Attachments pic

 

Your Core Values & Purpose are then saved in the Rhythm software so that your entire team is on the same page as to what you agreed on and what should be communicated to the staff.

Rhythm saves these and other strategy items you work on as part of your 1-Page Strategic Plan so that you can continually maintain focus as you plan and execute to grow your business.

Next time, we will dig into how to use Rhythm 2.0 to collaborate with your team to determine your BHAG.

Helping you grow,

Ryan

 

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Photo Credit: iStock by Getty Images