Business Strategy: From Uphill to Downhill Journey

You’ve crafted (or soon will) an excellent business strategy to make 2025 your best year in business. And the strategy is SOUND.

Like they say in 12 Step Programs… It’ll work if you work it.

Trouble is, like we discussed in last week’s blog entry, there’s profound exhaustion right now in teams from sea to shining sea. And exhaustion undermines both performance and creativity.

In that blog entry we mentioned how easy it is for leaders to inadvertently work against the way our team’s brains are wired and trigger resistance, burn-out, and us vs. them thinking without our even knowing it.

So it pays big time to have a brain-aligning strategy to complement your business strategy.

You’re planning to really dig in and put your shoulder into your 2025 strategy. Before you do, I’m going to suggest you pause for a moment because I don’t want you spinning your wheels.

I’ve seen too much good effort put into too little traction, so we’re giving you part of our proprietary approach to awakening your unstoppable team before you lose any more momentum.

This is so good — some of our very best stuff — that I almost can’t believe we’re giving it away. You’re welcome!

Awaken & Align™ Your Team to Business Strategy

If you want the secret power-ingredient for this strategy that’ll impassion your team, make them dig in, and permanently reduce turnover, skip to the FIFTH step. (If you do, make sure to come back here to fill in the gaps. This works best with a comprehensive approach. You’ll make a difference if you skip step 5. It’ll just be a smaller one.)

The Awaken & Align™ Framework Roadmap

The Foundation: Three brain-science principles to help you Awaken your unstoppable team and align their passions

1) Purpose Works:

People are motivated to make a difference in something that matters. It’s not enough to have a mission. You’ve got to have a mission that can move, touch, and inspire people. And you’ve got to keep it alive in their hearts and minds. (Here’s a link to a recent blog article where we outline 7 characteristics of a mission that moves people.)

Hardship Helps:

You and your team have been going through hardship — that’s the human condition. Research has shown again and again that people can be bonded by hardship. As the leader of an org, you’ve got a fine line to walk between acknowledging the hardship and expressing compassion on the one hand and challenging people to rise to the occasion on the other. And you’ve got to support them to rise! Fall off the support, and people will resent you. “Us vs. them” will rear its ugly head, and people will leave. Fall off the challenge component of leadership, and you’ll earn yourself a team that’s whining and bemoaning their ill fate instead of building pride by overcoming adversity.

Tribalism Is:

We’re wired for tribalism. You can complain about the tendencies in your company for factions to form. Cliques and resentments build between departments. The front lines start to foment Us vs. Them thinking. You can choose to think there’s something wrong with them, or you can see the truth. Tribalism is. Look at our politics and our sports fans. Our brains have a tribe-shaped opening, and our worlds adjust to fill that opening. Better than regretting that fact, use it to your advantage and create rituals in your organization that capitalize on the truth of this part of our makeup. Use brain science to galvanize your team.

Think back to the early days of COVID. How did your team respond early on?

For many of our clients — and other companies around the country and the world — the early days of covid were galvanizing. There was a common struggle. A common adversary. Leaders and colleagues heaped compassion on one another.

Then… Entropy came in, and we started working against human nature again, and burnout and conflict returned.

Your Awaken & Align™ Strategy Day

Please note: What follows is a one-size-fits-all approach. Depending on what you’re starting with, this framework will need adaptations to meet your actual conditions.

A team-health diagnostic is recommended beforehand, so you know where you’re starting from. If you’d like, we can help with that.

If you’re confident that your team health is strong (even if there’s room to improve), then, even without adaptations, this framework will deliver excellent results.

Let’s dig in.

Morning Session: War Stories

Get your leadership team together — preferably offsite. Come having already eaten, or eat together before beginning and allow yourselves to focus on sustenance and the pleasures of food and coffee before diffing in on people strategy.

FIRST – Stories (30 mins)

When you do start, set your food aside, then begin by telling stories of triumph. Whether you’ve hit your 2024 goals or not, you’ve accomplished a great deal. Look at how far you’ve come this year. Look at the terrible places you could have gone if not for your watchful eyes and hard work as individuals and as a team.

Tell some war stories from your year. Indulge a bit in the gore, and end each story with its victories. All stories have victories, if you look with the right mind.

Identify people in your company and outside it to whom you feel grateful, and determine to thank them with handwritten notes.

SECOND – Triage (30 mins)

Identify your walking wounded and make some triage decisions. Are there people on your team who are: a) weakened and exhausted b) traumatized c) showing signs that they may not be up to the job d) all of the above?

Decide as a team what to do about supporting each of those people. Does Charlie need time off? Does Cheryl need an additional person on her team — temporarily or permanently? Would Alex be more effective in a different position, in your company, or outside it?

Whatever decisions you make here, ID and triage the likely knock-on effects on other people of your decisions. Your team is interrelated and interdependent. Every action has reverberations.

Next identify other people challenges: Each leader write a list of their top five complaints. These are the things they’ve grumbled about to each other, to their spouses, to their teddy-bears in the dead of night. These challenges may have made your leaders ball up their fists and grit their teeth.

And identify any complaints you’ve heard from customers and vendors about your people and performance..

Y’all may have been frustrated about:

Accountability
Performance and capacity
Retention and recruiting
Conflict
Poor communication…

This list shows you where resistance is building — the human factors creating the uphill battle for your business strategy.

So let’s look at the things that’ll help to both level the hill (even reverse its slope) and fuel your team’s motivation to tackle the mission — hill or no hill.

THIRD – Mission (2 hrs)

Assess your mission. Does it move, touch, and inspire you as leaders? Is it worth getting out of bed for, even when you’re tired and your bedroom floor is cold? Does it have the seven characteristics of a mission that galvanizes? Does it need a revision?

(If it needs a revision, consider adding a revision of the mission to your Q1 strategic plan.)

Hold your 2025 strategic plan up against your mission. Are they aligned — truly, deeply, completely aligned? How does your 2025 strategic plan have to shift in order to be fully congruent with your mission? Any incongruence will contribute to (perhaps invisible) cracks and fissures in the fabric of your team.

(If you’re resisting shifting the strategic plan, even if it’s incongruent, that’s common. Ruthless adherence to mission is a highly valuable discipline — not an easy one. In some rare cases, if it seems impossible to resolve the distance between mission and strategy, it may be time to shift the mission. Missions do change and evolve — occasionally.)

Want support tailoring your Awaken & Align day to your specific circumstances? Let’s talk

FOURTH – Passion (1 HR)

“Engagement” from employees is a lame metric — it’s table stakes. We want impassioned people driving our company mission. For a paycheck, you can buy engagement. Passion is not for sale. It takes a worthy purpose to become impassioned.

To help create an impassioned team member, they’ve got to connect their own values to company mission. This drives a sense that their work is fulfilling the purpose for which they’re here on the planet.

That — and what follows — may be a little too touchy-feely for some. Like it or not, the truth is, even the most stoic among us is more emotionally driven than we think we are.

Consider… is it really too touchy feely if it transforms your results?

This kind of strategic people-alignment is part of what we did with the Kanon Electric team. Here’s what CEO, Jim Dorrough had to say:

“When we found Yes works we were in a tail spin. More than half of our field staff [had] quit and the mood around the office was grim. 6 months later we are having some of our best sales months ever and doing this with less staff. The mood around the office is night and day better and we are communicating in ways we never did before. I am so glad I found [The Yes Works] and will continue to use their services.”

So, if you want a transformation in your results, maybe a little touchy-feelyness is good…

Passion Connection Exercise:

Each exec, list out 5 people — real or fictional, dead or alive — whom you deeply admire.

For each of those people identify what it is that you admire about a) the values they embody, and b) the contribution they make.

You might consider huge figures that wow you — Einstein, Marie Curie, MLK Jr.

You can also consider the barista who always seems to deliver unparalleled service (rain or shine) when you go in for your daily latte. As you list out their evident values and contributions, notice what the list teaches you about what moves you. Through this process, you’re stoking the fires of your own intrinsic motivation.

Next, every leader on your team, look over your company mission once again. How does it align with what moves and inspires you? You’re bringing a lit match over to the kindling that’s your work.

Notice how the values you’ve identified are embodied by the work you’re doing together as a team and how you are doing it. Bring your fires together.

The entire leadership team should now share around what you’ve discovered in doing this exercise. The patterns that emerge may well surprise you, and…

Bring your fires together creating a bonfire.

And… Each leader should plan to take time with each of their teams to do this exercise as well.

You may just have a conflagration on your hands.

You want your team to be rolling downhill without your having to push… Then you need them intrinsically motivated!

This exercise reveals the natural gravity that can pull your team — and your mission — forward.

Afternoon Session: Turning Insights Into Action

FIFTH – Adversary * the secret ingredient * (30 mins)

If you’re like a lot of the leaders I’m talking to, you’ve got the misfortune of having some us vs. them sentiment running through your team. Maybe one department is harboring resentment for another (this is common, for instance, between ops and sales). Maybe folks on the front lines are talking dirt about “them” in senior leadership.

And maybe their direct supervisors are reinforcing that adversarial posture.

Senior leadership, in my experience often exacerbates the problem (as I myself used to) by harboring resentment that “THEY” are creating this adversarial division. I was blind to the irony. Are you?

Our brains are hard wired for this kind of tribalism and arraying ourselves against an adversary, come what may. Just look at the fervor of sports fans, and at the political divisions in our country.

It doesn’t serve to fight the us vs. them tendency. It’s universal. Take this time in your afternoon to find or create an adversary onto which you can begin to map people’s wiring for impassioned opposition.

It needn’t be an actual company or person. Your adversary could be a fictional company. Or, it could be a fact (it’s hard to find good help). Or…

You could array yourselves against a strange fictional creature that embodies what you stand against (remember Domino’s Pizza in the ’90s? “Avoid the Noid!”).

SIXTH – Cement Your Work (2 hrs)

Outline regular rituals you can conduct as a leadership team, and others that can be conducted among the whole team.

I can hear you now… “Are you kidding? Ain’t nobody got time for this non-business kind of time-wasting nonsense.”

Here’s the thing… Motivation, engagement — nay, passion — alignment, trust, loyalty… All these characteristics you have been jonesing for… They are not matters of logic, reason, and linear thinking. They’re unconscious, emotional, and neurochemical.

Ignore the preconscious and primitive reward centers at your peril.

Creating and practicing rituals specific to your team/company/tribe (part of a leader’s job?) will trigger multiple neurochemical rewards:

Dopamine (recognition)
Oxytocin (social bonding)
Serotonin (status/appreciation)

And that chemistry will in turn create bonding, cohesion, loyalty, and passion.

After a while, you’ll find you’ll never again say, “They’re just in it for the paycheck.”

Some of the rituals you decide on will be informal and quick (think hand-shake). Some will be more formal and scheduled (think Thanksgiving dinner).

Here are a few examples of rituals you may wish to include:

Funerals for shut down projects or divisions to allow people to eulogize their dead work
Recognitions for contributions made (some of our clients hand out challenge coins when people go above and beyond)
Celebrations of Dragons Slain
Stories of mission gains to reconnect your team to the contribution you exist to make to the world
Gratitude Conclaves — where the only agenda is for team members to express their specific appreciation for one another

Can you smell the neurotransmitters in the air? That’s the smell of Awakening your Unstoppable Team!

SEVENTH – Future Casting for Momentum (1 hr)

It’s time to reflect to generate momentum. This final phase of your Awaken and Align Strategy Day is like winding up a watch. You’ll store energy in the spring to drive the action forward for the year ahead.

You’ve done some amazing work:

Honored your war stories
Embraced your walking wounded
Aligned mission with strategy
Ignited personal passions
United against a galvanizing adversary, and…
Created motivating rituals

Finish by looking again at 2025 this time, with your new-calibrated minds.

What’s possible when you’ve engineered a strategy to ensure that your team’s natural wiring works for you instead of against you? When their intrinsic motivation aligns with your strategic direction? When unavoidable tribal instincts fuel collaboration instead of division?

Revisit your business strategy. Talk about where you feel optimistic. Face the challenges, and investigate how today’s work will arm you to address those challenges.

Then, if you find anything that no longer feels congruent with who you are as a company/tribe/team, and identify a time to adjust it in the next couple of weeks.

As a result, you’ll notice how excited, motivated, and impassioned you feel to get going.

Momentum?

You’re likely at this point — at the end of this long day — to feel exhausted. This was a lot of work.

Becaue of the connecting work you’ve done together, you’re also likely to feel a bit like thoroughbreds behind the gates at the Kentucky Derby, chomping at the bit, anticipating the gates flying open and letting you at it — the track ahead!

Looking Ahead

Your Awaken and Align Strategy Day is done. Good work, y’all!

You’re about to dig in on your goals for the year. You’ll be heads down, nose to the grindstone. Don’t forget to pick your head up every so often to see what all you’re accomplishing, and to recognize the ROI on this investment.

First Week Signals:

The energy in the room shifts — people lean in instead of resisting.
Cross-department finger-pointing gives way to curiosity and collaboration.
People take initiative instead of waiting to be told.
The hallway chatter changes tone.

First Month Momentum:

Your rituals stop feeling cheesy, and become nourishing.
People start expressing appreciation for one another.
Incremental progress increases energy and momentum.
Strategy conversations pop up organically at all levels.
Innovation comes from unexpected places.
The “us vs them” conversations are few and far between as those sentiments are dismantled and redirected.

Course Corrections:

Even NASA — after they put tons of mathing behind their trajectories — has to adjust trajectory. Watch individuals carefully for signs of dissatisfaction. Some need a moment of coaching. Others may be discovering that your evolving tribe doesn’t fit for them (and vis-versa). That’s ok. The others are galvanizing and becoming more and more connected, loyal, and poach resistant.

If old exhaustion patterns resurface check your support-to-challenge ratio. Investigate the need for rest. And, consider whether this person’s strengths are being well employed in their work.

Later, if passion seems to flicker, lean into mission and adversary communications.

Bringing It Home:

Have you experienced in years past that strategy execution has felt like an uphill slog? Then, imagine instead your strategy flowing with natural momentum. Resistance transforming into creative energy. Exhaustion giving way to sustainable drive. Purpose fueling performance.

If you want that — and if this Awaken and Align Strategy Day sounds promising to you (and you’ve gotten over your “touchy-feely” objection…

Then you’ve got two possible paths ahead of you:

DIY: Use this framework as your guide. Download our detailed checklist [LINK]. Schedule your own quarterly check-ins. Monitor those success markers. Adjust course as needed.
GET A GUIDE: Let us facilitate your session. We’ll handle those delicate conversations. Bring our proven tools and techniques. Help you avoid common pitfalls. (Only 3 spots available before year-end.)

Either way, don’t let another year of pushing uphill sap your momentum.

Want a free, no pitch push to get you going? Let’s talk.

Blog P.S. (The leaders who’ve worked with us report faster strategy execution, higher team engagement, decreased turnover, stronger financial results — and a renewed sense of purpose themselves. You saw what Jim Dorrough said above.

Book a call: before the year-end spots fill up.

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The Yes Blog