Who is this for - Mastering Strategy

Who Benefits from Mastering Strategy

Mastering Strategy is designed for intact leadership teams whose members share responsibility for the organization’s direction and performance.

Who’s It For?

Executive and Senior Leadership Teams

Divisional Leadership Teams

Business Unit Leadership Teams

Functional Leadership Teams

Association and Not-for-Profit Leadership Teams

Leadership Teams Managing Growth, Transition or Significant Change

Mastering Strategy is designed for intact leadership teams whose participants share responsibility for the direction, decisions and performance of an organization, division, business unit or function.

Where Mastering Strategy Creates Value

Mastering Strategy is valuable in a range of situations where leadership alignment, strategic focus, and execution discipline matter.

Growth and Scaling

As organizations grow, informal leadership practices often stop working. Mastering Strategy helps leadership teams develop the discipline required to make clearer choices, coordinate across functions, and scale without losing strategic focus.

Strategic Plan Not Translating into Action

The strategy has been defined, but its priorities are not being translated consistently into clear decisions, resource allocation, coordinated action, and measurable progress. Leaders may interpret priorities differently, accountability may be unclear, or attention may drift back to urgent operational issues. Mastering Strategy helps the team strengthen the connection between strategic direction and day-to-day execution.

Too Many Priorities

When everything feels important, leadership teams struggle to focus. Mastering Strategy helps teams clarify what matters most, make explicit trade-offs, and align resources behind the priorities that matter most to the strategy’s success.

Leadership Team Misalignment

Leadership teams can appear aligned in the meeting room, but that alignment is tested when leaders return to their functions and begin making decisions, allocating resources, and communicating priorities.

Mastering Strategy helps teams identify where alignment is breaking down and strengthen the shared discipline needed to lead strategy consistently across the organization.

Leadership Transition

A change in leadership can reset expectations, priorities, decision-making, and team dynamics. Whether there is a new CEO, executive director, division head, or senior leadership team, the organization needs more than a smooth handoff.

Mastering Strategy helps leadership teams use a leadership transition as an opportunity to strengthen strategic alignment, decision-making, and execution discipline.

Major Strategic Change

Major strategic change puts pressure on the whole leadership team. Whether the organization is entering a new market, shifting its business model, integrating operations, restructuring, or responding to external disruption, leaders need to make connected decisions and keep execution aligned as conditions change.

Mastering Strategy helps teams build the shared discipline to interpret change, make trade-offs, align resources, communicate clearly, and sustain execution through uncertainty.

Strategy Restart

A strategy may be sound but still lose momentum. Priorities become less visible, progress slows, and accountability weakens.

Mastering Strategy helps leadership teams understand why execution has stalled and rebuild the discipline needed to regain focus, alignment, and measurable progress.

When Mastering Strategy Is the Right Fit

Your Strategy is Clear, but Execution is Uneven

Leaders Interpret Priorities Differently

Strategic Decisions are Repeatedly Revisited

Functions are Optimizing Locally Rather than Coming Together as one Enterprise

The Organization has too Many Initiatives Competing for Attention

Execution Depends too Heavily on Individual Effort or Informal Workarounds

Leadership Meetings are Dominated by Operational Matters and not Strategic Progress

The Team Wants to Build a More Disciplined Approach to Strategic Leadership

You Want to Reduce Dependence on Outside Consultants by Building Internal Capability

When It May Not Be Right

You are Looking for a Short Motivational Session or One-Time Team-Building Event

You want an Outside Consultant to Develop your Strategy for you

Participants are Attending as Individuals Rather than as a Leadership Team

The Leadership Team is not Ready to Examine how its own Decisions, Behaviours, and Routines Affect Execution

The Team Wants Tools Without Changing how it Works Together

There is no Meaningful Strategic Issue or Leadership Challenge to Apply the Program to

The Goal is General Management Training Rather than Stronger Strategic Leadership Capability

Is Your Leadership Team as Aligned as It Thinks?

Many leadership teams believe they are aligned because they have agreed on a strategic plan. But real alignment is tested after the meeting, when leaders must interpret priorities, make trade-offs, allocate resources, communicate decisions, and sustain execution under pressure.

The Leadership Alignment Diagnostic helps teams identify where strategic alignment may be breaking down.

It explores questions such as:

01Do leaders interpret strategic priorities the same way?

02Are trade-offs clear enough to guide decisions?

03Do meetings reinforce strategic priorities or dilute them?

04Are leadership signals consistent across the organization?

05Are accountabilities clear?

06Are systems, resources, and routines aligned with the strategy?

07Does the team have a regular cadence for reviewing progress and adapting?

The diagnostic can help determine whether Mastering Strategy is the right fit for your leadership team.

Take the Diagnostic

Take the Leadership Alignment Diagnostic

The diagnostic can help determine whether Mastering Strategy is the right fit for your leadership team.

Strategy Alignment Diagnostic

A Short Assessment of How Well Your Leadership Team Thinks, Decides, Acts, and Executes Together

Purpose

Strategy does not succeed because it is well written. It succeeds when the leadership team has the shared discipline to interpret the organization’s situation, make clear choices, align action, and sustain execution over time.

This short diagnostic is designed to help your leadership team assess how well it currently works together as a strategic leadership team.

The purpose is not to evaluate individual leaders. The purpose is to identify where the team is strong, where alignment may be uneven, and where strategic friction may be affecting execution.

How to Complete the Diagnostic

For each statement, rate how true it is of your leadership team today.

Use the following scale:

Rating	Meaning
1	Rarely True
2	Sometimes True
3	Partly True
4	Usually True
5	Consistently True

Be honest. The value of the diagnostic comes from identifying where leadership-team discipline is strong and where it needs to improve.

Think Together

A leadership team must be able to develop a shared understanding of the organization’s situation, strategic context, opportunities, risks, and priorities.

We have a shared understanding of the most important issues facing the organization.

We are clear about the difference between operational matters and strategic matters.

We regularly challenge our assumptions about the factors that could affect our strategy.

We interpret major trends, risks, and opportunities as a leadership team, not just from our individual functional perspectives.

We have a shared understanding of what success would look like if our strategy were working well.

Decide Together

A leadership team must be able to reach agreement on what matters most, what trade-offs are required, and what commitments the team will make

We have a shared understanding of the most important issues facing the organization.

We are clear about the difference between operational matters and strategic matters.

We regularly challenge our assumptions about the factors that could affect our strategy.

We interpret major trends, risks, and opportunities as a leadership team, not just from our individual functional perspectives.

We have a shared understanding of what success would look like if our strategy were working well.

Act Together

A leadership team must ensure that strategic priorities show up in how leaders behave, communicate, allocate resources, and work across functions.

We communicate strategic priorities in a clear and consistent way across the organization.

Our leadership behaviours reinforce the priorities we say are most important.

We work effectively across functions and departments when strategic priorities require shared ownership and effort

We consistently allocate our time, resources, and leadership attention to the priorities we say matter most

We identify and address situations in which our leadership actions are inconsistent with the priorities we say matter most.

Execute Together

A leadership team must sustain focus, accountability, learning, and follow-through so the strategy continues to guide decisions and action after the planning work is done.

On a regular basis, we make time to review strategic progress, not just operational results.

We are clear about who is accountable for leading each strategic priority and ensuring progress is made

We identify and address barriers to execution before they significantly slow progress

When conditions change, we adapt our approach without losing focus on the strategic outcomes we are trying to achieve

We do not allow day-to-day pressures to consume so much of the leadership team’s time and attention that strategy execution gets neglected