AddingZEROS
Bridging the Gap between Employee and Executive Engagement

Almost every organization today undertakes employee engagement initiatives to help their people align with larger organizational goals and assist them to be more productive. However, in this effort, most businesses forget that leaders are the ones who should encourage or facilitate such positive change first. That’s why organizations that fail to engage their leadership team witness lower employee engagement and, subsequently, decreased productivity and financial results.

This is where AddingZEROS steps in.

As an executive development firm, AddingZEROS helps executives and management teams grow personally and enhance their on-the-job effectiveness as well as their leadership capability. With these new skills, executives can easily eliminate several organizational issues and drive more productivity.

In an interaction with Manage HR magazine, Monte Wyatt, the CEO and Co-Founder at AddingZEROS, sheds light on how effective executive engagement and organizational discipline can help businesses develop and bring positive change for both the company and its employees.

Why do you think organizations find it challenging to incorporate discipline when it comes to organizational development?

Today, businesses all across the world are struggling with engagement, alignment, and implementation of organizational discipline. In order to create greater engagement throughout an organization, it starts with the executive team. Organizational discipline doesn’t only depend on an individual. It involves actions that teams agree to partake as a collaborative venture, such as communication, setting clear priorities, and implementation strategies.

AddingZEROS defines a ‘great business’ as one that is sustainable, predictable, stable, consistent, and has an emotional connection. To attain these qualities a company must incorporate organizational discipline within its structure. With this objective, AddingZEROS facilitates a process that instills 5 Disciplines comprising of Strategy, Business Development, People, Execution, and Mission. These disciplines must relate to and intertwine with every business aspect in an organization.

Can you please elaborate more on the five organizational disciplines?

First, the Strategy Discipline defines how an organization will win and where it is heading in both the short and long term. Next, Business Development involves sales, marketing, and customer service. Thirdly is the People Discipline, which develops team members to be the best in their current and future roles. The fourth discipline is Execution, which creates consistent processes, management, and financial controls. Last but not least, is the Mission Discipline. It defines who the organization is and why they do what they do.

AddingZEROS begins every client relationship with a comprehensive assessment of the executive team. First, we provide questionnaires to the leaders to assess how well they perform in the 5 Disciplines as well as in their management and leadership capabilities as an organization. The insights we receive from their answers enable us to set performance-based benchmarks. From there, we start a process we call Strategic Thinking and Execution Planning. Which is different from strategic planning.

Typically, strategic planning involves a process of sending executives off to a retreat for a couple of days, where they discuss long term vision and strategic moves, then come back to the hustle of daily fires and maybe implement some of their ideas. In contrast, strategic thinking is about realizing where the company’s business is headed and what path they need to adopt to attain their objectives effectively. Then, we plan for implementation and execution.
We believe in an ongoing process that drives deeper thinking with focused follow through. The sessions guide the executives to think strategically, make thoughtful decisions, and propel implementation throughout the organization. We also hold accountability and executive development conversations twice a month and conduct quarterly planning sessions to review progress and plan the next 90 days. As a result, strategic thinking is our process that clarifies the way executives approach leadership and management of their organization.

What differentiates and steers you ahead as a company?

No matter whether companies are battling challenging economies, competitive markets, or the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, all of them need to actively strengthen their leadership and management now more than ever. However, the world has a misconception that considers leadership and management as the same behaviors. There is a thin and fragile line that distinguishes the two. Leadership is all about influencing with passion and focus, whereas management creates competent and productive teams. As a result, when executive teams focus on enhancing both of these behaviors, they get remarkable results.

We have developed a comprehensive executive development experience that focuses on this critical difference. It helps executives incorporate proper leadership and management techniques throughout their organization. This expertise and process makes us not only unique but very impactful in every organization we interact with.

Please highlight a case study where AddingZEROS helped a client attain success.

A $200 million revenue company was facing a challenging situation when they realized that their executive team was not aligned with the same goals or priorities. The team members had individualistic ideas that resulted in poor planning, lack of communication and lack luster execution. The CEO reached out to us asking how we could assist. During our Strategic Thinking Execution Planning process, we defined the core values, core competencies and created a common goal that all departments could support and have ownership of. These items became known as the cultural framework for the company. We then helped determine how to fully implement the cultural framework into their daily lives. They now hire, train their employees, give feedback, and even let people go based on these values and expectations. With clearly defined business goals, both long and short term, everyone in the company is aligned with accountable priorities and 90-day action plans. This focus created greater energy and commitment in the team because they knew where they wanted to go and what they aimed to achieve. Our recommendations, insights, and process ultimately helped the client grow their revenues, skyrocket their profits and their margin percentage.

What do you envision for AddingZEROS in the next 12 to 18 months?

We currently have 30 facilitators working in nine countries. We plan to expand the number both in terms of geography and facilitators. Our primary objective is to positively impact executives and help them enhance their leadership and management skillsets while improving employee retention and engagement. We have a 2030 goal to impact a million executives globally. When that happens, we will have better alignment, greater engagement, and impressive employee emotional connection within so many organizations. I’m very excited to see what the future has in its store for AddingZEROS.