Executive Alignment Diagnostic
About three minutes, and we'll tell you where to start.
Mark what's true about how your business runs. You'll get a read on how much of its value runs by design, and one next step chosen from your answers.
There's no score at the end of it. You mark the patterns that are true in your business, answer three short questions, and the last screen names where we'd start you and why. If the honest read is that nothing needs changing this year, it says so.
For CEOs, presidents, COOs, and senior leadership teams. About 3 minutes.
The Signals
What it looks like when the effort stops adding up.
It doesn't announce itself. The team is capable, the work is getting done, and the results keep landing a little short of what the effort should have bought.
01
Priorities sound clear at the top, then show up differently in every team.
02
Important decisions get made, then reopened weeks later.
03
Accountability holds when the right leader is in the room. It slips when that leader isn't.
04
The team stays busy, and the numbers that should be compounding aren't.
Most leadership teams can name two or three of these on sight. Fewer can say which one is doing the most damage.
Who It's For
Where you sit on this has nothing to do with how big you are.
Built for CEOs, presidents, COOs and senior leadership teams. Every business runs on one of three rungs, and the rung is about how the value gets made, not about revenue.
Runs on you
The value lives in a few people at the top. Their judgment, their relationships, their saves. The business is worth a great deal to them and much less without them.
Runs on effort
There's a real team and they work hard. Value still comes from pushing, and it doesn't compound, and it doesn't hold when the pushing stops.
Runs by design
The business creates value because it was built to. You know where the value comes from, and it keeps coming whether or not you're in the room.
A $150 million business can run almost entirely on one person. A $6 million business can run almost entirely by design. Size doesn't decide where you land. How you make your value does.
The fastest way to find your rung. If you dropped off the map for a while, no calls and no email, how long before the business started to wobble? A few days, and the value runs on you. A couple of weeks before it got messy, and it runs on effort. A quarter, and it would still be creating value without you? That's by design.
That's question two, and most people know their honest answer before they finish reading it. Read it as a value question. If the business stops creating value the moment you stop, the value is you, and that's the thing worth changing. If you sit on the leadership team rather than in the owner's chair, run the same question on the piece you're responsible for. The rung works the same way.
What You Get Back
It ends with one recommendation.
There's no score, and there's no menu of programs to weigh up. You get one named next step, chosen from what you told us, and one option below it in case the first isn't your moment.
- 01
Where you stand. Which rung your business is running on, and how much of the value depends on particular people being in particular rooms.
- 02
What you flagged, and what it costs. The patterns you marked, read back with the cost each one carries.
- 03
Which constraint is doing the damage. Whether it's how the leadership team aligns, how work gets owned and followed through, or how clearly anyone can say what customers actually pay for.
- 04
Where we'd start you. One named next step, and why it fits you. If the honest read is that this isn't the year to change how the business runs, that's what it says.
Nobody gets turned away at the end of this. If the biggest step isn't your moment, we'll say so and name the smaller one.
What's at Stake
A year of real effort can end with the business roughly where it started.
Hard work is rarely the missing piece. What's missing is what the hard work adds up to, and nobody can point at the week it went wrong.
It moves the other way too. In one manufacturing business, tightening how the leadership team aligned, owned the work and followed through took the company from $3 million in annual revenue to a $14.4 million revenue run rate in fifteen months.
Reported by the business. Not a guarantee.
Whether the same pattern sits inside your business is what the diagnostic is for.
The Operator
Built by an operator, not a coach
Lee Benson took Able Aerospace from a standing start to more than $100 million in annual revenue and a mid-nine-figure exit, sold to Textron, across a twenty-year run. The patterns in this diagnostic are the ones he ran into himself, and the ones he sees now in the CEOs and leadership teams he works with. He also wrote Your Most Important Number with Ram Charan.
The Diagnostic
Mark what's true.
Eight patterns and three short questions. About 3 minutes, and we'll tell you where to start.
