What is Strategy Execution?
With 67% of the companies not meeting their strategic goals, it’s likely that there’s a
bump (or bumps!) in the road that organizations are unable to avoid or jump over. What’s
the reason behind it?
Let’s explain this with a typical scenario at a company. At the beginning of the year, the
creative heads are brimming with ideas. To put those ideas to paper, the leadership team
meets at a retreat in a fancy destination where they sit together to create a strategy.
The strategy goes into a document, and the leaders decide to share its contents with their
staff in the next feeling. At the meeting, the executives and the CEO enthusiastically share
their plans for the company and what they aim to achieve.
After the meeting, the employees go back to their jobs, and with every passing day, the
strategy becomes less of a framework to follow and more of a document on the CEO’s
desk.
When your company’s day-to-day actions don’t align with the strategy, that’s when you
know things are going downhill. Here are some common challenges organizations face
during strategy steering and management.
Improper Goal Setting
As discussed earlier, meeting strategic goals isn’t one person’s job. The resources for it
have to be harnessed from different departments in the company. That’s because the
goals are often quite complex and need multi-level assistance for implementation.
Recommendation: Form a methodology to set goals for every department and person in the company. The OKRs - or the objectives and key results - method is becoming popular, but you can always stick to SMART goals as they surely work.
Make sure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
Each employee should be responsible for fulfilling their goals, while the managers should
ensure that the objectives are being met.
Poor Alignment
Even after setting goals, many companies fail to create a proper prioritization channel in
the workplace. Part of the reason is that people are so used to doing non-strategic work
that they find it hard to align their daily job with a strategy.
Recommendation: To ensure proper and effective alignment in the workplace, the discipline must come from the top of the hierarchy and travel to the bottom.
Every individual in the company, irrespective of the seniority of their position, should
prioritize strategic objectives over non-strategic ones.
Lack of Tracking Progress
If your organization is using spreadsheets in this decade to track goals, you need to step
up your game. On the one hand, these methods are not entirely transparent. On the other,
they limit the real-time tracking of strategy execution.
Recommendation: Get your company on strategy execution platforms, including
AchieveIt, My Single Point, Tanics, etc. In doing so, you’ll experience higher efficiency in
the organization as the strategy execution is monitored and tracked in real-time.