Theory of Accelerance

Greater Organizational Success Through Collaboration: Contributing Individual ‘Mission Critical’ Best Skills to the Vested Plan

Theory of Accelerance (TOA):  The concept was originally created as a tool for ingraining C-Level Global’s RENAISSANCE Methodology within an organization’s people and processes. It is now employed in all types of organizations in many countries. Originally it was targeted exclusively for use in business development teams, regardless of product or service, and was successful in producing billions of dollars in revenues. Its application spans multiple industries now because of how it focuses on people and processes. Its success has led to usage in manufacturing and distribution environments in addition to business development team settings. Service teams are applying TOA to their interactions to maximize efficiency and customer service, too. It is immensely valuable to create scalable business models through people and processes. TOA’s creator, David Rose, lectures, speaks and trains leadership on designing and implementing customized operational procedures so both organizational morale and productivity improve along with profits.

TOA helps design and drive change from the top of the organization to the frontline, using customer experience to identify the right changes that result in marked improvement in two mission critical objectives; first, identifying and meeting more buyers, and second, presenting, following up, and closing more deals utilizing best practices so the customer experience is stellar at every step throughout the process. (These are also two driving points of RENAISSANCE.)

TOA Definitions: Theory to collaboratively arrange people to vest together for a common, measurable and visible goal in which each person contributes a specific benefit or benefits to the team outcome.

• TOA strives to maximize people’s success by having them work together on the tasks and objectives each person handles best and orchestrating their psychological state, physical surroundings and virtual environment to create collaborative buy-in for mutually beneficial rewards. The creation of a collaborative culture is a critical first step.

• TOA arranges people ergonomically so they focus on a collaborative and measurable plan where each contributes specific talents to achieve common vested goals that are highly visible for all stakeholders to see. Results are visible, measurable, identifiable and teams are made to be accountable. The sense of group accountability will drive performance and synergies.

• TOA orchestrates teams ergonomically and with buy-in, so the people and processes focus on each individual’s best ‘mission critical’ skills to achieve a common team goal. Then individual success and achievement is married to the team’s successes in a tangible, vested way.

• TOA works with organizational leadership to identify the key ‘mission critical’ best skills that are necessary to achieve a measurable plan/goal. This produces an environment which allows individuals to focus exclusively on what they do best to help the team win together. It aligns individual, team and organizational goals in a tangible, visible, measurable way. All levels of the organization now pull in the same direction.

• TOA creates a process and structure to motivate, change and organize people to work together more efficiently to achieve highly visible and measurable team goals. It allows all parties to focus on what each individually does best and leverages all available resources to maximize results.

When people focus exclusively on what they do best as part of a team, then the entire team becomes more powerful. If people on the team have to do too much and cannot focus on what they do best, then the people produce less, morale suffers and profit goes down. Synergies are lost.  Individuals look to distance themselves from the team and the process. Many leaders believe they do not have this problem in their organizations, but if they analyze people’s day-to-day activities many imbalances in time, interest and expertise come to light. TOA identifies imbalances and re-engineers activities and processes in ways that enhance productivity and morale.  Results are achieved and profits are enhanced.  

TOA Explained:  Begin by identifying each person’s measurable best mission critical skills for the team goal. Then structure the people & processes so they work together as a team in ergonomically set-up environments (virtually and physically). Create a focus on total team success metrics in which all team members are vested. This is much like how soccer, hockey, baseball, football and most sports teams operate. General managers, coaches and players all have specific roles designed to help achieve the organizational win.  When the team…, the organization, wins, they all share in the accomplishment.

Mission Critical Skills Defined: These are people’s measurably proven best skills for mandatory business activities that correlate directly to established goals and objectives. This is a far less obvious action than it seems on the surface. Specifically, this means that there are a lot of important things involved in people’s daily roles, but there are just a few that matter most to the key elements of success. If we were to focus on business development, for example, generating messaging and contacting buyers in a manner that gets their time and attention is mission critical. So is presenting effectively; following up and closing sales is mission critical. Yet, not everyone on the team has adequate mission critical skills to “do it all”. Therefore, structuring people to work together to achieve a series of mission critical activities that lead to profit growth is absolutely necessary. Some people are best at setting meetings with buyers while others are best at attending initial meetings with buyers, and others are best at attending follow up meetings with buyers to win deals. Placing team members in the best positions to achieve individual, team and organizational success is part of TOA’s alignment process. Similarly, the incentives must be re-aligned to match the synergistic nature of the TOA approach.

TOA Usage with Sales Teams:  On a sales team there is often a lot of turnover, which leads to costly recruiting, training, managing, other overhead increases and especially detriments such as the opportunity costs of sales lost as handoffs either don’t occur or are delayed, and sales slip through the cracks. Taking a closer look at why this turnover occurs in business development teams around the world reveals some common causes of the problem; individual capacity is limited, sales expertise is lacking, and the ability to effectively and accurately track the process is broken.

Sales people typically have quotas such as “all ten salespeople must have ten-X sold each year to achieve one hundred-X revenue annually,” yet expecting each person to sell ten-X is unrealistic. That is like asking every player on a basketball team to do the same things and score the same number of points to win. If your team is fortunate to have a LeBron James and you still expect everyone on the team to produce at the same level, then get ready to lose. Your LeBron will be incented to underachieve while others will be set up for failure. The same principle applies in business. Applying TOA to business development teams provides a structure where the team can be reengineered so that the people focus on what they do best to help win. TOA orchestrates the team so that they all work together.  For example, setting up your best salespeople with more qualified buyers will result in greater sales and substantial profit growth. Look at this even closer; stop expecting everyone on the team to be capable of finding, contacting, confirming, meeting, presenting, following up and closing sales. Some people are better at specific parts of the process, and fewer people can be star players when it comes to face time with buyers. Allow the star players to get help from the team so they do not have to do it all with limited capacity. In essence, TOA creates a framework and a process where the entire team can contribute to a winning solution.

Conclusion:  TOA goes directly to the root of the problem, identifying and correcting people’s performance, so improvements are implemented and they are allowed to become a part of the solution. By allowing the people responsible for results to be a part of developing the plan, then resistance to change and the bottlenecks standing in the way are immensely diminished. Follow that up by identifying people’s best skills and contributions for the plan and letting them focus on these skills exclusively. The team performance accelerates together. Sharing rewards with the team for reaching milestones and goals while working to achieve the plan bonds the people together. This sets the team up to harness healthy competitiveness from visible scoreboards (metrics on individual and team goals) so that they strive to make each other better, champion and mentor one another. Ultimately they all work together to continually strive to create the most successful and innovative team together. The power of TOA increases substantially when applying TOA to scalable growth plans. This refreshing approach to accelerating team performance and growing companies is so valuable because of how malleable it is for building profitable business models around the globe and with people in virtually any industry and from all walks of life.