Move

Move is your guide to mobilizing your whole organization to take your business forward. Whatever your needed transformation may be: a new initiative, a new market, a new product, your fresh strategy is up against a powerful foe: an organization's tendency to stay very busy and completely engaged what it's already doing. This book shows you how to cut through resistance and get your team engaged and proactively doing the new thing! Author Patty Azzarello draws on over twenty-five years of international business management experience to identify the chronic challenges that keep organizations from decisively executing strategy, and to give you a practical game plan for breaking through. Leaders tend to assume that stalls in execution are inevitable, unchanging parts of the workplace—but things can change. At the heart of every execution problem is the fact that there simply are not enough people doing what the business needs. This guide shows you how to get your entire organization on board—remove the fear, excuses, and hurdles—and uphold the new pursuit against distractions and dissent.

No transformation can succeed without suitable engagement from the whole organization, but building engagement can be difficult, uncomfortable, and tentative. This book shows you how to get it done.

• Get your organization to embrace and personally commit to the new work
• Remove obstacles and passive aggressive attacks that block progress
• Defend new strategic initiatives against short term pressures to revert to "business as usual"
• Sustain momentum and the desire to move forward
• Make sure no one is ever asking, 'Are we still doing this?'

Inertia isn't just a law of the universe, it's a law in the workplace that can be a major obstacle to making things happen. The great thing about inertia is that it cuts two ways: a body at rest remains at rest, but a body in motion remains in motion. People love to finish things. Move shows you how to make successful execution the new norm—starting today.

Introduction: Why Great Strategies and Change Initiatives Fail xi

Part 1 M = The Middle: Where Transformations Either Happen or Get Stuck 1

Chapter 1 The Beginning of the Middle: Why New Strategies Stall After the Exciting Kickoff 3

Chapter 2 Concrete Outcomes: Stop Admiring the Problem and Define Some Specific Actions 9

Chapter 3 Timing and Momentum: Maintaining a Sense of Urgency for a Long Time 25

Chapter 4 Control Points: Metrics That Drive Action on the Right Things 33

Chapter 5 Resource Reality: Your Strategy Is Where You Put Your Resources 47

Chapter 6 Don’t Sign Up for the Impossible 53

Chapter 7 Sponsors and Enemies: Reduce Your Personal Risk 61

Part 2 O = Organization: Are You Leading the Team You Have or the Team You Need? 67

Chapter 8 The Right Team: The Fundamental Ingredient for a Highly Effective Team 69

Chapter 9 Organize for Outcomes: Create the Ideal, Blank-Sheet Org Chart 79

Chapter 10 The People: How to Attract the Right People and Eliminate the Wrong People 91

Chapter 11 Building Capacity: Performance Management and Delegating for Development 109

Chapter 12 Unstructured Conversation: How to Drive Personal Accountability and Belief 119

Chapter 13 Stop Having Status Meetings: Go Faster and Reduce Risk 125

Chapter 14 Virtual and Remote Teams: Optimizing Performance and Results from Afar 133

Chapter 15 Getting People to Actually Care: Engagement and Context 143

Part 3 V = Valor: Facing the Hardest Stuff with Courage and Persistence 149

Chapter 16 Mission Impossible: Dealing with Obstacles, Fear, and Imposter Syndrome 151

Chapter 17 Burn the Ships at the Beach: How to Keep Moving Forward When No One Wants To 161

Chapter 18 Too Busy to Scale: Use Ruthless Priorities to Enable Growth 167

Chapter 19 Detail: The Momentum Killer: Manage Outcomes Instead 175

Chapter 20 Clarity and Conflict: Expose and Master Necessary Conflict—Don’t Avoid It 179

Chapter 21 Decision Stall: Accelerate Effective Decision Making 187

Chapter 22 Tracking and Consequences: How to Identify and Recover from Setbacks 197

Part 4 E = Everyone: You Can Lead a Transformation from the Top, But You Can’t Do a Transformation from the Top 207

Chapter 23 Conversation: Change How You Communicate to Make Your Strategy Stick 209

Chapter 24 Decorate the Change: "Yes, We Are Really Doing This" 219

Chapter 25 Top-Down Communications: Why People Do and Don’t Listen 227

Chapter 26 Listen on Purpose: Finding the Insights That Make You Brilliant 237

Chapter 27 Sharing Information: Communicating Across Organizational Silos 245

Chapter 28 Power and Trust: How to Make People Feel Like Superheroes 253

Acknowledgments 263

Resources 265

About the Author 267

Index 269

PATTY AZZARELLO is the CEO and founder of Azzarello Group, Inc. Sought after for her practical, experienced-based style and approach, she has more than twenty-five years of experience uncovering what makes organizations tick and enabling them to create more value. She is the bestselling author of Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life.

Too many new initiatives lose drive and direction before they finish. At the beginning, when a team first commits to implementing a new strategy, there is great energy and enthusiasm — driven by the allure of the end goal. But then comes the long, dangerous part in "The Middle" where everything needs to get done, obstacles inevitably spring up, and people feel a strong temptation to revert to the old ways. MOVE explains how to keep your team focused, motivated, and resilient enough to push through the unavoidable, chronic challenges that derail most change initiatives.

Some of the most recognizable brands in the world use the MOVE methodology to ensure their change strategies don't stall. Business transformation expert Patty Azzarello explains the four components of a prosperous business transformation, and exactly what it takes to keep everyone moving the new strategy forward, including:

• The key elements in an execution plan that guarantee accountability and momentum
• Empowering tools for transforming the team you have into the team you need
• A powerful new way to think about leading and communicating, to genuinely engage people throughout the implementation

Your company has a lot riding on the strategic changes it needs to make. The MOVE model will help you make sure that everyone stays engaged, maintains momentum, and that your initiatives succeed.

Praise for MOVE

"Any organization that isn't adapting to the trends reshaping business today is going to find itself left behind by more nimble and forward-thinking competitors. You need this book, not to tell you what transformations you need to make, but to ensure the transformations you initiate actually work."
—Rich Sanzi, Vice President of Engineering, Google

"In any kind of transformation, keeping the energy high, and the skepticism low is critical to success—and difficult to do! Patty Azzarello has a unique way of understanding how to drive transformational change because she has done it herself, and guided many leaders and teams through the process. MOVE is a great read for any leader who wants to get and keep their organization invested in implementing a bold new strategy."
—Andy Burtis, SVP, Corporate Marketing & Communications, McKesson

"MOVE is a must read for any organization and leader that needs to make the transition from talking about high level goals to making faster decisions and putting specific, concrete actions into motion. It is the difference between activity and results. The MOVE model will allow you to get your whole organization engaged and focused on delivering the results of your strategic plan."
—Don Joos, CEO, ShoreTel Inc.

"One of the hardest things to make happen when you are driving a transformation is to get people to change their behaviors. In MOVE, Patty Azzarello explains exactly what makes people choose to embrace the new strategy or resist it. Any leader trying to motivate their organization to implement a new strategy needs to read this book."
—Iram Shah, Senior Vice President Customer Transformation, Schneider Electric