Jenny Trautman, FounderA critical factor that deters businesses from successfully executing their strategies is their inability to foster a collaborative work culture. They often bring together a team of skilled people to solve a problem but lack an environment that nurtures dialogue and collaboration. This prevents organizations from setting priorities and providing employees with opportunities to grow, a primary reason for employee disengagement and turnover.
“Employees lack clarity around their roles and responsibilities, leading to a lack of commitment and collaboration among different departments. This negatively impacts the strategy execution process and stifles organizations’ ability to innovate and grow,” says Jenny Trautman, founder of Same Page People.
Trautman has worked with executives in top-tier technology, financial services, manufacturing, and media companies to create strategic plans that accelerate innovation and growth. Fusing a unique combination of strengths in structuring teams, processes, and solutions, she builds flexible strategy design processes to bring people from various departments on the same page with a shared view of organizational objectives.
Under her strategic leadership, Same Page People has been creating high-performing, collaborative teams for the past 15 years through highly engaging live and virtual workshops that move clients’ business strategies from concept to completion. This allows them to rapidly work through complicated issues, easily make crucial decisions, and collaborate on solutions that connect major company resources with top business priorities.
The Signature Planning Framework
Same Page People has designed a planning framework that helps unify strategic plans for successful execution. It comprises four elements. The first is ‘design,’ where the client ties their plan to the big picture or the end goal. It drives clients’ teams to agree on outcomes, create a unified way to define success, and decide on a timeline for their achievement. The second element, ‘align,’ is dedicated to developing a roadmap with milestones and the required resources like people, processes, and tools. This enables clients to identify execution gaps and address those before their plan fails. The next one is ‘combine’—the secret sauce to success. It equips organizations to put all their plans in context by revisiting prior commitments and making decisions about existing strategic projects. This helps clarify priorities and mitigate shared risks across functions or departments. The final element is ‘refine,’ where clients monitor team performance based on the achievement of milestones, eliminate any obstacle that might hinder success, and apply their learning to rebalance resources for the next round.
“We help leaders bring a systematic approach to deliver transformational results, instead of going for low-hanging fruits. This includes guiding cross functional teams through tailored facilitated sessions, online or in person, to discuss important issues and make key decisions,” says Trautman.
The sessions are highly interactive, given that Same Page People utilizes visual facilitation to unite teams. Participants generate potential solutions together and agree on important areas, including priorities, plans, and deadlines. More importantly, these interactive sessions are catalysts to strengthening trust and making confident decisions. This activates commitment long after people walk out of the room.
In essence, Same Page People’s signature planning framework and interactive sessions provide an environment for collaboration and triggers for excellent dialogue and engagement. This plays a crucial role in reducing the number of dispersed meetings and quickly driving a business on the transformation path.
At the heart of Same Page People’s approach lies design thinking. The company always encourages organizations to see the world through their customers’ eyes, understand their challenges, and redefine strategies accordingly. Same Page People has been doing this for years now—even before it was a trend. This enables practical and creative problem-solving. In one instance, a multinational artificial intelligence software and service provider wanted to accelerate their sales. Same Page People helped them develop a sales motion strategy based on their customers’ needs that provided a proper understanding of marketing, pre-sales, sales, and delivery processes, from a people, process, and tools perspective. With this understanding, they identified potential sales of $115 million at six clients within 18 months.
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We help leaders bring a systematic approach to deliver transformational results, instead of going for low-hanging fruits
“Design thinking is an integral part of what we do. We practice it with our customers and put them at the center of our work,” says Trautman.
A Methodical and Planned Approach
What enables Same Page People to deliver such comprehensive services and exert the same level of efficiency at every engagement is its ability to architect the right processes based on clients’ vision. The company captures all conversations with visuals that illustrate what clients aim to achieve. It then facilitates cross-departmental collaboration and designs the right plans to lead a project toward success.
Same Page People never treats strategy as a secret but makes it visible and accessible to the entire clients’ team through visual graphics. This is what creates collaboration, shared vision, and trust, leading to better execution.
Same Page People’s experienced consultants play a vital role in the entire process. They help clients stimulate their creativity and engage their dissenters to improve innovative ideas. The team has the capability to understand any point of misalignment after the first client conversation and undertake the necessary steps to address the gaps.
The capable team has enabled Same Page People to lead multiple complex projects toward success. For instance, a global insurance company was planning to improve customer experience by moving their operations to the cloud. Unifying their business and technology teams to create migration plans, however, became a major roadblock as different departments had different goals and measures of success. This made the transition seem incredibly risky. The insurance company needed an innovation planning process that could lead to rich discussions among cross-functional teams and create a shared vision.
Same Page People brought the client’s team together with its signature planning framework and, in just two days, disrupted their timeworn pattern of siloed conversations. Consequently, everyone in the organization became aware of the benefits of cloud migration. This enabled the client to set up a pilot project for moving their business to the cloud.
Same Page People’s ability to engage executive teams quickly into its sessions is the key driver of its success. The company typically designs a plan with executive sponsors a month in advance to make its sessions as effective as possible. This has enabled Same Page people to position itself as a leader in the market and become the go-to partner for many organizations to craft a better strategy execution plan that connects individual employee’s aspirations with larger organizational goals.
