From Strategy to Action: Aligning Teams & Accelerating Growth Through Strategic Planning
Access this expert-led webinar instantly, available anytime on-demand.
Included in All-Access Membership Live Webinar
On-Demand Webinar Available
Customer Satisfaction Guarantee Learn with confidence. If you're not happy, we'll make it right. That's our guarantee.
Most C-level leaders see strategic planning as essential, yet there’s often a gap between that belief and the outcome the process delivers. Teams frequently struggle to collaborate effectively, and alignment on a clear strategy is difficult to achieve. Even when alignment is reached, execution often breaks down, leaving the entire planning effort feeling like a waste of time.
This interactive webinar is designed for CFOs who want to change that. In this session, you’ll assess your current planning efforts, take a candid look at what is not working, and apply the Strategic Ascent System, a proven process that has helped numerous leadership teams step out of silos into real collaboration, align around a clear plan, and execute with discipline. This structured approach brings leaders together, builds alignment, and keeps strategy moving forward through execution.
The format combines instruction, group discussion, and time for solo work.
Your Benefits For Attending:- Clarity on the breakdowns in your current planning process and effective ways to address them
- A proven framework to drive strategy and execution as you enter this next planning season
- A draft of your 3-Year Direction, including strategic goals to bring back to your team
Led by: Gordie Spater, CEO of Katahdin Group, with 20+ years of experience guiding leadership teams through strategy and execution using the Strategic Ascent System.
Level: Intermediate
Format: Live Webcast
Instructional Method: Group: Internet-Based
NASBA Field of Study: Business Management & Organization
Program Prerequisites: None
Advance Preparation: None
-
Gordie Spater
Gordie Spater is a seasoned entrepreneur, facilitator, and the current CEO of Katahdin Group. With nearly two decades of experience leading high-growth organizations, he brings a rare combination of strategic insight, real-world business acumen, and an approachable, grounded presence. His professio [...] -
Roger Keene
A former Strategic Ascent strategic planning client, Roger now serves as a facilitator with Katahdin Group for both the Strategic Ascent system and a peer group of C-level executives. He spent more than two decades on the executive leadership team at Dassault Systèmes Simulia Corp (formerly Abaqus) [...]
CPE Credit
Aurora Training Advantage is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit. Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be submitted to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors through its website: www.nasbaregistry.org.
For more information regarding administrative policies such as complaint and refund, and cancellation please contact our offices at 407-542-4317 or [email protected].
ATATX Credit
Aurora Training Advantage is offering continuing education points designed to recognize dedication to training and excellence in accounting.
Invest in your future with confidence! Our Customer Satisfaction Guarantee eliminates all risk, letting you focus purely on mastering new skills and advancing your career. If you're not completely satisfied, we'll ensure you are. Your satisfaction is not just a promise; it's our guarantee.
Frequently Asked Questions
Strategic planning processes frequently fail to produce meaningful execution for several interconnected reasons. The most common is a gap between the planning event itself and the day-to-day management rhythms of the organization: leaders spend days crafting a strategy document but have no disciplined process for reviewing progress, making real-time adjustments, or maintaining accountability for execution. A second major failure mode is lack of genuine alignment — team members leave the planning session with different understandings of priorities, or siloed functions pursue their own agendas rather than a shared direction. A third is that the plan is too abstract, consisting of broad themes and aspirations without clear, measurable milestones that tell leaders whether they are on track. Leadership teams also often avoid productive conflict during planning, producing a plan that reflects the loudest voices rather than the group's best thinking. Finally, many organizations fail to dedicate adequate time to reviewing and updating the plan as circumstances change, allowing the strategy document to become obsolete within months. Addressing these failure modes requires a structured planning process that produces specific commitments, assigns ownership, integrates strategy review into regular leadership team meetings, and creates enough psychological safety for honest assessment of what is and is not working.
The Strategic Ascent System is a structured framework developed by Katahdin Group designed to help leadership teams move from siloed, uncoordinated planning into genuine strategic alignment and disciplined execution. The system addresses the most common failure modes of strategic planning by guiding leadership teams through a collaborative process of assessing current reality, identifying strategic priorities, building a 3-Year Direction with specific goals, and establishing the quarterly and annual execution rhythms needed to keep strategy moving forward. Unlike traditional annual planning retreats, the Strategic Ascent System emphasizes ongoing leadership team collaboration, regular strategy review meetings, and visible accountability for progress against commitments. The framework helps CFOs and other C-level leaders step outside functional silos to engage with the organization's overall direction, building alignment around shared strategic goals rather than departmental objectives. By combining instruction, group discussion, and individual work within each planning session, the system produces practical outputs — such as draft 3-Year strategic goals — that teams can bring back to their organizations and begin implementing immediately. The emphasis on execution discipline distinguishes the system from purely conceptual planning frameworks and makes it particularly valuable for organizations that have experienced the frustration of well-designed plans that fail in implementation.
The CFO plays a uniquely powerful role in strategic planning because they sit at the intersection of financial reality and organizational strategy, making them essential partners in both shaping the plan and ensuring its feasibility. CFOs can contribute most effectively to strategic planning by bringing rigorous financial modeling to scenario analysis, helping the team understand the capital and resource implications of different strategic choices, and establishing clear financial success metrics for each strategic goal. Beyond financial analysis, modern CFOs are expected to be strategic partners to the CEO, which means actively participating in debates about market positioning, growth priorities, and organizational capability gaps rather than serving only as a financial gatekeeper or plan critic. CFOs who lead strategic planning initiatives need to facilitate genuine leadership team alignment, help surface and resolve conflicting priorities across functions, and build the financial infrastructure to track strategic KPIs alongside operational metrics. The CFO is also uniquely positioned to connect the three-year strategic direction to the annual budget and capital allocation processes, ensuring that resource decisions reflect strategic priorities rather than historical patterns. Developing skills in facilitation, executive communication, and cross-functional leadership allows CFOs to elevate their strategic impact significantly beyond traditional financial management.
Effective 3-Year strategic direction setting provides a leadership team with a clear, shared picture of where the organization will be in three years, what specific outcomes it will have achieved, and why those outcomes matter. Rather than a vague vision statement, a well-developed 3-Year Direction includes specific, measurable strategic goals across key dimensions such as revenue and market position, organizational capability, customer experience, and operational excellence. The planning process that produces this direction should involve the full leadership team in honest assessment of current strengths, weaknesses, and market dynamics, followed by structured dialogue about strategic choices and trade-offs. The resulting goals should be ambitious enough to require genuine strategic change but achievable enough to maintain team confidence and momentum. Each 3-Year goal should have a clear owner, a set of milestone markers that show progress within the three-year window, and a connection to the annual and quarterly planning cycles that govern day-to-day resource allocation. The three-year horizon is particularly valuable because it is far enough out to require genuine strategic thinking beyond operational problem-solving but close enough to feel real and motivating. Teams that develop their 3-Year Direction collaboratively and review progress against it quarterly maintain stronger alignment and make better strategic adjustments than those that revisit strategy only in annual retreats.
Breaking down organizational silos to improve strategic alignment requires both structural changes and cultural shifts that must be reinforced consistently by senior leadership. The most effective structural approaches include establishing cross-functional teams or working groups with shared accountability for specific strategic priorities, implementing regular leadership team meetings where all functions review progress against shared goals rather than only functional metrics, creating shared dashboards that make interdependencies visible, and designing incentive structures that reward collective outcomes rather than purely individual functional performance. Culturally, leaders must model collaborative behavior by acknowledging the contributions of other functions, resolving cross-functional conflicts at the leadership level rather than pushing them down, and creating forums where honest conversation about organizational trade-offs is welcomed rather than avoided. The strategic planning process itself can be a powerful silo-breaking tool when it requires functions to understand each other's challenges and dependencies before committing to shared priorities. Leaders should be particularly vigilant during execution: when pressure increases, functions tend to revert to siloed decision-making and protect their own resources. Maintaining a shared strategic conversation during challenging periods is what distinguishes organizations that execute their strategies from those whose plans remain theoretical.