One of the greatest challenges to an organization is in implementing its strategic plan. After weeks or months of engagement, consultations, facilitated strategy meetings and C-Suite rumination, strategy is born. Like anything new, strategic plans require care and feeding to move it from ideation to action and finally results.
To accomplish this, organizations often create elaborate strategy implementation plans, horizontal information flows, organizational and process alignment, communication plans, performance measures and accountability. While these elements are the hallmarks of a good strategy implementation plan, many organizations fail to implement strategy effectively.
Here are four ways to keep your organization focused on the end game.
1. Create A Strong Value System
Strategy requires strong executive support to implement. The C-Suite provides the strategy leadership to feed and direct the organization. Once demonstrated and communicated, leadership guides the organization and its people to use their creativity and innovation to implement strategy. Doing so requires a strong value system within the organization. Core values should tell people whose interest to put first when faced with difficult decisions. Without this, organizations will lack the necessary fortitude to implement strategy effectively.
When organizations clearly define their core values, there is a culture of storytelling that develops, organizational folklore if you will. These stories help establish the values of the organization, because they illustrate the details of the difficult decisions that were made and how they aligned to the organization's belief system. Values are necessary in strategy implementation as strategic initiatives are change projects that sometimes require difficult decisions to be made to align the organization to the strategy.
When a value system is embedded into the organization it acts as a guard rail. Guard rails provide the boundaries by which people can make wise decisions on behalf of the organization. Just as we teach our children values and expect them to use them to make wise decisions, we can do the same with organizations. The creation of strong consistent values and leadership demonstration of those values helps the organization understand expectations and helps people become confident in their decision-making.
Without a strong value system, that is encouraging and builds trust and commitment within the organization, strategy implementation becomes ad-hoc and ineffective. The changes required for implementation are met with passive and sometime active resistance as people keep their heads down and dare not lift it up for fear of making a mistake.
Value systems free people from fear of reprisal and gives them the ability to use their discretion in the implementation of strategies. Without this, strategy implementation will not receive the support it needs to persevere through the myriad of challenges it will face.
2. Manage Organizational Inertia
There are forces within organizations that are built up over time and automatically resist change when it occurs. They are the late adopters and have considerable power in derailing management attempts to implement strategy.
Hoping to wait out the next great management idea, people passively resist efforts to implement new strategies, believing they know what is best for the organization. And, their knowledge of the organization and its needs often surpass the knowledge of leadership.
If you have ever watched "Undercover Boss" you will know that despite the brightest minds coming together to manage an organization, it is those people that live the organizations' rules day to day that know what really needs to change to make the organization more competitive, or simply, more cost effective.
Strategy implementation requires a concerted effort to overcome organizational inertia. An effective way to engage people is to ensure they are part of the strategic planning development process. A hallmark of an effective strategic planning process includes consultation with all levels of the organization, customers and external stakeholders.
Creating buy-in with the people who are closest to the customer early on in the strategic planning process recognizes that the planning process must begin with the end in mind. That is, those people that are going to implement the strategy. If people understand the organizations' strategies and are involved in their definition, they will develop a comfort level with the change needed to implement the strategy.
Organizational inertia, the simple act of passive defiance, can stop your strategy implementation dead in its track. Organizations need to be ready to combat the forces that will stall out the changes required to successfully implement strategy. One tool to assist in strategy implementation is creating early buy-in which creates the change conditions necessary for smoother strategy implementation at the customer level in organizations.
3. Establish Accountability For Strategic Initiatives
Effective strategy implementation requires accountability. Linking implementation to consequences, such as monetary rewards or consistent measurement ensures there is the right amount of focus being provided to implementing strategic initiatives.
Assigning responsibility and accountability can be challenging, since many strategic initiatives will cut across functions and business divisions. Strategy implementation requires continued commitment from corporate leadership to carry out the changes in the organization that will match the strategy.
Ideally, one person should be responsible for the implementation of the organizations' strategies. However, where there are a number of strategic initiatives that cut across functions or strategic themes, more than one responsible executive will be required to be accountable. This can be accomplished by establishing a corporate strategy implementation team, led by a high level executive responsible for strategy in the organization. Consisting of executive managers (those at the intersection of strategy and operations), and accountable to the corporate leadership team, the implementation team can address the complexity of implementing initiatives that cut across functions and strategic themes.
As strategy implementation requires several strategy initiatives, combining the initiatives into a strategy implementation portfolio is necessary. Using a portfolio management approach, the implementation team can sequence initiative implementation, determine resourcing requirements, craft communication plans and budgets. When implementation team members are drawn from across the organization, issues of cross functionality and strategic theme overlap can be addressed. This team is also responsible to align strategy and operations across the functions and the organization.
As portfolio management requires regularized project reporting, the implementation team is able to address information management to the corporate leadership team.
Strategy implementation requires concerted effort. Assigning this responsibility to a corporate strategy implementation team ensures accountability is distributed throughout the organization and promotes cross divisional communication and understanding. This assists in alleviating the organizational bias towards operational silos.
4. Measure And Monitor Your Progress
To understand how far you have come, you need to measure your progress. Implementing strategy requires constant measurement. Its about understanding what adjustments have been made, challenges faced, and how the organization has managed organizational inertia. Measuring progress will help the organization in determining where it has succeeded and where further action is required. Measures can indicate which strategies gained momentum quickly and easily and help organizations understand the elements of that success so that it can be repeated with other projects.
Monitoring progress ensures the organization pays attention to the right projects at the right time. Through the portfolio management approach suggested to achieve accountability, measurement becomes paramount to determining the progress of all the initiatives. The use of project reports, dashboards and project analysis, provides information on the health of the initiative portfolio.
Aside from monitoring the progress of specific projects, monitoring the progress of the implementation plan gives the organization perspective on its progress towards the end game, including adjustments made to the strategies through implementation of the plan.
Monitoring also provides a benchmark for the leadership team to see how much progress is being made towards their vision for the organization. Measurements also provide the leadership team with an understanding of the challenges and opportunities the organization is facing when moving the organizations toward the strategic outcomes it has identified.
Summary
Without a strong commitment from the entire organization to plan, act and do the actions necessary to move in the direction of corporate strategy, overall strategy implementation will be ad hoc at best. These four keys provide the basis upon which organizations can create trust, communication channels and accountability to increase strategy implementation success.
Tagged: Strategy, Strategy Execution, Action, Portfolios, Projects, Strategic initiatives