The military precision organization

Based on your responses, your organization is a military precision organizational type.

Organizations with strong execution “DNA” tend to share similar characteristics. By fostering these traits, you can improve your organizational performance. Here are a few key improvement areas customized for you:

Quickly translating key strategic and operational decisions into action
Relaying competitive information quickly and effectively to headquarters
Making good on commitments to others
Maintaining disciplined efforts where you can win
Ensuring consistent messages from top leaders
Successfully adapting to market changes
Creating clarity around roles and responsibilities
Correlating career advancement and compensation with performance
Promoting a distinctive culture that creates a competitive advantage
Encouraging leaders to "walk the talk"
Sending consistent messages to the market
Giving employees metrics to evaluate business impact
Having the right number of organization layers
Giving field employees insight into the bottom-line impact of daily choices
Consistently rewarding innovation
Pursuing and rewarding collaboration across organizational lines
Prioritizing capabilities when evaluating opportunities
Maintaining good information flow across the organization
Acting decisively
Limiting overlapping roles
Establishing influence based on reputation, credibility and relationships
Motivating people with values and pride

The military precision organization: “Flying in formation”

Often driven by a small, involved senior team, it succeeds through superior execution and the efficiency of its operating model.

Often driven by a small, hands-on senior management team, this type of organization hums like a well-oiled machine. Everyone knows his or her role and implements it diligently, creating the overall effect of fluid and consistent execution. The military precision organization is hierarchical and operates under a highly controlled management model. It can conceive and execute brilliant strategies — often repeatedly — because it has drilled the organization and run it through every scenario in the manual. This is a highly efficient organization that leverages its scale masterfully in executing large volumes of transactions.

In a military precision organization, when a colleague makes a commitment, people can count on it. Senior people “walk the talk” and deliver consistent messages. military precision organizations are generally more task oriented and organizational influence depends mostly on title and role.

While it provides for a certain level of autonomy in the field, the military precision organization’s biggest ongoing challenge is preparing for growth beyond the tenure of its current leadership. Talented people need to be groomed, not just drilled, to release their full potential and there must be provisions for smooth succession within the organization’s management ranks. Moreover, feedback loops need to be institutionalized to ensure that top commanders understand — in real-time — what’s happening on the front lines. Military precision organizations can be vulnerable to sudden shifts in the external market environment as they do not typically deal well with significant and unexpected change.

The coherence index specifically measures the coherence or consistency of your organization's strategy. Most military precision organizations will score moderately high in this area. Coherent companies have a clear set of capabilities that are in line with their strategy and that they use over and over again in their portfolio. Please visit the coherence profiler to learn more about the strengths of coherence.

Related tools

Organization effectiveness simulator

Have you ever wondered how your organization rates in terms of getting things done? Test drive your theories real-time by using our Organization Effectiveness Simulator.

find out more >