RISE for Managers

Elevate Your Firm or Agency

As a leader, strategy and culture are your tools to drive your business. Strategy is the formal logic for the firm’s goals. Through long-term planning, strategy provides clarity and focus for collective action and decision-making.  Culture is much less concrete. Culture expresses firm goals through values and beliefs and guides activity through shared assumptions and group norms. Strategy is what gets done, while culture is how and why it gets done. The two are inextricably linked. 

For leaders like you looking to build high-performing firms, you probably already have thoughtful plans in place for firm strategy and execution. You know where the firm is going and the milestones to get you there. However, that’s only part of the story. Strong strategy-culture alignment is a common denominator among the most successful firms. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” was a phrase originated by Peter Drucker, founder of modern management thinking. And he wasn’t kidding.  

“Better align to improve the bottom line.” 

If your firm's culture is going to improve overall business performance, it must be aligned with your business strategy. In this program, you will evaluate the alignment between your firm’s culture and your firm’s strategic plan across several business functions. We will provide insight and tools to help you identify gaps in the strategy-culture alignment. You will collaborate regularly with a cohort of colleagues and leaders across the industry who will help you check for blind spots and come up with creative solutions.  

Every firm has a different vision for the future. Every firm has a different way they get things done. By the end of this program, you will know to what degree the way work happens at your firm supports its business goals. You will have ideas for how the firm can better align to improve the bottom line quickly, through both savings and revenue generation.  

Before each live class, you will be asked to consider the following for a functional area: 

• Where is your firm now? 
• Where is the firm going? 
• Does the way work is done in your firm, and the reasons for doing it, support this path? 
• How is the way work is done aligned? 
• How is the way work is done misaligned? 

We’ll offer some tools, ideas, and considerations to help you answer these questions.  

You’ll be expected to arrive to the moderated, live class prepared to: 

• Share your analysis. 
• Justify your conclusions. 
• If there is alignment/misalignment, how do you know?  
• If there is misalignment, how can you close the gap(s)? 
• Collaborate with others to check for assumptions and blind spots. 
• Engage in meaningful discussion. 

Your capstone deliverable at the end of this program is Business Plan you can work from to improve your firm’s strategy-culture alignment.  

Inaugural Class Begins March 25, 2022! All times are eastern.

Member Cost: $1195
Non-Member Cost: $1295