Leadership Alignment Workshop · Led by Mike Wittenstein

Working sessions that end with your leadership team pointed in one direction, each leader able to say it in their own words.

That’s the Storyminers Leadership Alignment Workshop: one, two or three half-day sessions over one to two weeks, depending on what the decision needs. The sessions start with each leader writing down, privately, where the company is going, plus one sentence on why, before anyone speaks. Then everyone sees the spread.

In almost every leadership team, the answers disagree. That disagreement, visible in sixty seconds, is the problem this workshop closes.

You leave with a working prototype of where the company is going: one picture your leaders built, tested out loud, and can show their own teams.

Prep before the sessions, homework after. Mike in the room every time. Typically from $25,000 for the whole leadership team, quoted before you commit. What the price covers is shaped to your goals, your time, and your priorities; travel at cost.

The symptom

Everyone agreed in the meeting. Then the meeting ended.

Your leadership team nods, and afterward pulls in different directions. Not because anyone is resisting. Because they’re building from different pictures of the future: the same words, meaning different things in each head.

So the direction gets re-explained one conversation at a time, and every big decision waits for you. A year of AI spending makes it visible: three teams solving the same problem three ways, pilots nobody can bring themselves to kill, tools bought to answer a question the company never agreed on.

Why this happens

Agreeing with a plan isn’t the same as owning it.

People can agree with a strategy all day and still not carry it. What they help shape is different: that’s what they move forward with, make progress with, and introduce to their own teams. Alignment doesn’t come from convincing people to adopt a finished idea. It comes from building the future with the people who will lead it.

In the room

Half-day working sessions with the leaders who run execution.

A wall-sized graphic recording titled The Future of Customer Experience, with Mike Wittenstein and two participants beside it at the end of a working session

Mike leads them personally. No canned agenda: each session is built from what your team said in the last one. And expect lots of practice. This isn’t sit-and-watch. You’ll apply and stress-test your own work and each other’s, out loud, until it holds. The trick is moving from what you want to say to what others need to hear.

Before session one, we get to know the business the way you’d want a new senior hire to: with our own eyes and with our AI. You send what already exists: the strategy and business plan, the decks, the market research and consulting reports, the product and service line-up, and the list of projects under way, AI projects included. We read all of it, run it and your competitors through AI with our own questions, and read up on everyone who’ll be in the room. Where the paper can’t tell us what the company believes, we go and look: a sales call, a ride in a truck, a shift in the warehouse, a conversation or two with people the org chart doesn’t rank. The AI projects get one extra pass, because overlapping projects are the easiest sign of a misaligned team to spot, and they come into the sessions with us: some get combined, some re-timed, something missing gets added. The point isn’t to collect everything. It’s that the questions, contradictions, and opportunities surface in the meeting, not after it.

In the room, a sketch artist draws what people describe, live, so ten private versions of the idea become one shared picture, and fixing a disagreement means a redraw, not a rebuild. Every session starts by re-reading what’s already decided, out loud; saying it again is how it sticks. Between sessions, everything said gets filed where it will be used, and the next session is designed against what happened. You can watch all of this inside a real engagement on the Approach page.

One rule is in the contract: you attend every session. We learned that the hard way, and a direction rarely survives a decision-maker who wasn’t there for its making.

When the direction is ready, there’s an option most teams take: a safe place to find out how your lines land before you go public with them, first with the people inclined to like the idea, then with the people who will find every soft spot (we call them the Friendlies and the Skeptics). The words hold up outside before anyone’s reputation rides on them.

Led by Mike Wittenstein. We’ve been doing this for 30 years, for companies with $20 million to $2 billion in annual revenue. The AI reading is the newest part of the work; the rest goes back 30 years.

What you leave with

One direction, in each leader’s own words.

Not a slogan everyone recites. A direction each leader has tested against their part of the business and can carry without a script: no two people say it identically, and nobody gets it wrong.

You also leave with three written things: the one-page answer to what the business is for, which the team argued over and kept (we call it the Reason for Being); the rules for how decisions get made when you’re not in the room (the Principles); and a third you choose: the first draft of the direction, written as a story specific enough to argue with (a Future Story), or the list of who owes what to whom, role by role (a Promise Map).

How you’ll know it held

Decisions get made where they belong.

Trade-offs get made in the open instead of around it. Escalations drop. The strategy stops being yours alone: each leader can speak it, defend it under pressure, and adjust it in the field without losing the thread. Momentum stops being something you personally supply.

“If your team needs you in every room, the strategy isn’t clear enough.”— Mike Wittenstein
What it did for one company

Alternative Apparel thought its customer was whoever paid the check.

Alternative Apparel designed and made blank t-shirts: soft, well-made, sold in bulk to department stores and to the printers who decorate them. When we started working together in 2005, they wanted to grow the wholesale and retail lines at once, and everyone agreed on who the customer was: the buyer with the purchase order.

The Reason for Being we built together in working sessions like these said otherwise. The real customer was the person who wears the shirt, and the product wasn’t a garment so much as a blank canvas for self-expression.

Nothing about the shirts changed. The company around them did. Focused on the wearer, they opened direct-to-consumer sales online, then stores of their own, and had something new to offer the department-store buyers they already had, because nobody understood the wearer better than they did. Sales rose 50% after implementation. Source ↗

“Mike helped our company turn the corner. His work kickstarted a period of high top line and bottom line growth which we are still experiencing today.”— Evan Toporek, CEO, Alternative Apparel Source ↗

More recently, in 2014–2016: Maier America, the U.S. arm of a fourth-generation German manufacturer, did the same work. The team wrote down what the company was actually for, sketched more than fifteen new services they could sell behind it, and a multinational team came away able to say the same thing in their own words, in more than one language. The full story is on the Client Stories page.

Want it quoted for your team? One to three sessions, typically from $25,000 for the whole leadership team, quoted before you commit.

Pick a time with Mike
The limit

The sessions end with a shared direction. Living by it is work only your leaders can do.

What happens after the sessions belongs to the leaders who made the direction; that’s the point of making it together. When you want a hand kept on it through the decisions that follow, that’s Strategic Advisory.

Is this you

This is the right fit if…

  • Your leadership team nods in the meeting but doesn’t move in the same direction afterward, and you’re tired of re-aligning them one-on-one.
  • You’re past vision-setting and need the people who’ll lead execution to own the direction, not just agree with it.
  • The direction has to survive distance and translation: across functions, regions, or business units.

When a working session is the wrong move.

Not a fit if you can’t be in the room yourself, or if the people who’ll carry execution aren’t on the invite list.

A working session needs an outcome somebody can actually reach by the end of it. Hope without planning is a strategy I have watched fail before the first session starts. If you’re not yet sure what the right outcome is, that’s the first thing we settle. And if we can’t come to terms on one worth reaching, we don’t start something that won’t work — sometimes what turns up instead is a different piece of work altogether.

Questions

Before you book: the questions a CEO usually asks after reading this page.

My team already agrees on the strategy. Why do we need this?

If they really do, you don’t, and here is a one-minute way to know. Ask each leader, separately, to write down where the company is going, then compare the answers. If they match, skip the sessions. In almost every leadership team I have sat with over 30 years, they don’t match: each leader has been leading with an individual version of the strategy, working hard on it, and many front-liners sensed the difference. The sessions close the spread before it starts.

Is this a strategy offsite?

No. An offsite produces a deck. These sessions produce a direction each leader can say to their teams in their own words, plus three written pieces that support it: a Reason for Being that declares what the business is for; Principles that define how decisions get made when you’re not there; and, your choice, a Future Story that shares the strategy in story form so everyone understands it and, hopefully, wants to make it real, or a Promise Map that shows who owes what to whom, role by role. You will notice the difference in how many fewer decisions will still require you.

What happens after the sessions?

Your leaders run the company by the direction they wrote, and the three written pieces go to work: the one page gets quoted, the rules get used, the story gets told or the map gets followed at the next level down. That part is work only your leaders can do, which is why they write the direction with me instead of hearing it from you. If you want a hand kept on it through the big decisions that follow, that’s Strategic Advisory, with me as your standing monthly advisor; the sessions are complete without it.

How is $25,000 worth it?

Set it against one company’s result. Alternative Apparel, a t-shirt maker, was sure its customer was the buyer with the purchase order. In working sessions with me, its leaders wrote the one-page answer to what the business was for, and it said the customer was the person wearing the shirt. The company reorganized around the wearer, and sales rose 50% after implementation. Nobody can say how much of that was the page; the CEO said the work kickstarted the growth. (Source)

The next step

Book a free hour with Mike — no pitch.

A working conversation about the future you’re trying to create — and what’s keeping it from moving. Around here it’s called a Chemistry Check: a fit test that runs in both directions.

No prep. No deck. No pitch.

Pick a time with Mike

Just want to talk? Email mike@storyminers.com or call or text +1 404.229.5809. Mike reads every note himself and replies within a day.

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