Leadership Roadmap

Introduction

Welcome to the Leadership Roadmap – your guide for arriving at your vision of success.

I created this program to help leaders get from initial vision to successful implementation more quickly and more effectively. As a coach and consultant to hundreds of leaders I found there were three things that consistently got in the way of seeing a vision through to successful implementation. 1. Lack of Alignment 2. Lack of Accountability and 3. Lack of Engagement.

The Leadership Roadmap helps you solve all three issues by addressing them upfront, head on, in the planning process. Just like you wouldn’t remodel a house without a blueprint and you wouldn’t hire a bunch of random folks to go at the remodel however they see fit, you shouldn’t lead your organization without this preparation either.

The Roadmap will give you the step by step guidance to build your own blueprint for success, identify and address the potential obstacles in your way and engage others in the effort with clear accountability and true alignment. Now, while the Leadership Roadmap is simple, the work is not necessarily easy. It will take effort and insight – which is why I founded the Uncommon Collaboratory – where I help change-ready leaders make purposeful shifts in their workplaces, careers and personal lives. While leading can be lonely, you don’t have to do it alone.

Hi I’m Julie Quinne

Hi! I’m Julie, the creator of the Uncommon Method and founder of the Uncommon Collaboratory. Through my years of experience at the executive level and leading HR teams at multiple organizations, I noticed something wrong with the way that most do business: They neglect to connect people to purpose.

If you want organizational growth—including meaningful change, increased innovation, optimized efficiency, and more—you need to connect the unique drivers of people to the overarching purpose of the work. This goes for you as a leader too… because if you aren’t clear on your own purpose and path forward, no one else can motivate you to deal with the relentless tangle of reality.

High-achieving individuals come to me with a desire to get clear and move forward. All of my work is designed to help you do just that. If you started with the Practical Vision Guide you know what I mean about clarity and moving forward. But just because you can dream it, doesn’t mean it’s just going to magically happen. The Leadership Roadmap is the rest of the work required to see your vision through to reality.

Let’s get moving!

How to Get the Most Out of the Program

The Leadership Roadmap is a guide for building alignment and accountability for organizational success. We take an initiative and move from creating a clear and practical vision to mapping out a strategic plan and then we ensure everyone is on the same page, stays committed and maintains engagement.

You can use this guide to envision, plan and implement initiatives and projects both large and small. It can be used to manage up, manage down or be used as a team collaboration guide to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Sample Initiatives

You could take each of your organization’s functional areas or key business activities through the guide to explore “what if” scenarios. As examples, you could take each one of the following goals through the Roadmap to fully investigate the impact of a variety of paths for your organization.

• Determine Overall Organizational Strategy (entering a new market or adjusting growth goals)
• Revamp Organizational Culture (building a diverse and inclusive organization or leveraging a multi-generational workforce)
• Build Human Resources Leadership (aligning HR strategy with organizational vision or prioritizing multiple initiatives)

Get Started

Now it’s your turn! Start with any organizational initiative and work it through the 4 workshops – each with their own dowloadable guide and coaching video – to gain:

• Clarity of vision and organizational alignment
• Success metrics against which progress can be measured
• Visibility into unintended consequences of decisions
• Feasibility check in terms of milestones, deadlines and resources
• Agreement on, commitment to and accountability for success.

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Workshop 1: Practical Vision

Introduction

Fair warning: This isn’t your typical visioning exercise and you won’t end up with just another vision board taunting you from its dusty perch on your bookshelf. Actually, the exercise doesn’t include a vision board at all. It’s a specific and proven fast-track to not only identifying your unique vision but setting a strong foundation to achieving your goals. The Practical Vision Guide is a straightforward and effective first step to making an actual strategy to see your vision through to reality.

Workshop 2: Strategic Plan

Introduction

Again, not your typical strategic plan. (See, this is why I’ve earned the nickname “uncommon”). With this planning process, you won’t end up with just another awesome looking yet completely ineffective plan that everyone buys into but no one knows how to execute. Most of the strategies I’ve seen are really what I refer to as visions – they say what they HOPE will happen and they might say by when, but they don’t actually say HOW what will happen when. And when we don’t have that information, we have conflicts: conflicts in priorities, values, funding, personalities. Yes, a mess, indeed. This Strategic Plan challenges you to actually plan what needs to happen by when so that real (hard) decisions can be made about what matters most or first or not at all. This Strategic Plan is where the rubber starts to meet the road and you start to earn your leadership stripes. It’s good to have a buddy, a mentor or a second pair of eyes on your plan to reality test it. That’s where the Uncommon Collaboratory comes in and you can learn more about that here.

Workshop 3: Uncommon Performance

Introduction

By now I imagine you’re sensing a theme. As I mentioned in the program intro, there are three main reasons, in my experience, that visions fizzle. 1. Lack of Alignment 2. Lack of Accountability and 3. Lack of Engagement. Well we’re going to take on those three troublemakers and we’re going to….wait for it….Set and Communicate Clear Expectations and Agreed Upon Consequences! What did I tell you? Uncommon, right? Even if you’re already a performance management wunderkind we’re going to take our efforts up a notch – we’re going to take them all the way up to the Board and all the way out to the front desk. Are you ready?

Putting It into Action

By this point in the program, you’ve completed a practical vision, a strategic plan for achieving that vision and you’ve mapped out your expectations of performance – how the vision will come to life. Remember, the Leadership Roadmap is a guide for building alignment and accountability for organizational success. We take an initiative and move from creating a clear and practical vision to mapping out a strategic plan and then we ensure everyone is on the same page, stays committed and maintains engagement.

You now have what you need to move your vision from “looks-good-on-paper” to “pop-the-champagne-we-really-doggone-did-it!”

Next Steps

There are two more aspects of the Leadership Roadmap: Personal Motivation and Purpose. You can learn more about each of these below.

Personal Motivation

Personal Motivation is what drives you. Knowing what fuels you and what gets in your way helps you lead at your top most levels. Understanding where to put your energy, when and how is what distinguishes top performers from the rest. If you have already learned What Drives You, you know what I mean. If you haven’t yet uncovered your own motivation factors and learned how you can better manage your motivation, you can do that next here. With this on-demand, self-study program, you’ll discover:

Purpose

Core to my philosophy is that organizations need to do a better job of connecting people to purpose. Doing so ensures greater alignment, accountability and engagement. I also believe that we as individuals would be better served by connecting ourselves more to our own life purpose. In both cases, work and life can get in the way and carry us off and away from our vision of success. That being said, “purpose” is fundamental to our long term success – whether we’re talking about ourselves as individuals, about our roles as managers of teams or as leaders of entire organizations. We delve into purpose as part of our work in the Uncommon Collaboratory. In the Collaboratory, members get access to: