"I'd rather have a first-rate execution and a second-rate strategy, anytime, than a brilliant idea and mediocre management."
- Jamie Dimon, CEO, J.P. Morgan
For CEOs and company leaders, developing a three, five, or even ten-year strategy is not the end of the story; it’s just the beginning. Unfortunately, turning strategy into reality has been a challenge for many. While estimates of execution success rates range widely by source, the broad consensus is that the vast majority of strategic initiatives fail to realize their goal.
So how DO organizations bridge the strategy-execution gap?
It’s difficult, but you CAN increase your organization’s success rate with the following 5 steps:
As Dwight Eisenhower advised, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." What he was saying is that the conversations that occur during strategic planning are crucial for building consensus, resolving conflict, and being able to adapt to externalities. That is why it is crucial to assemble a cross-functional core team that will be responsible for developing and overseeing strategy execution. It’s easy for a CEO and an external consulting team to develop a corporate strategy. However, the enthusiasm, ownership, and understanding required for successful execution will be missed absent a truly cross-functional team leading the charge from the outset.
What gets measured is what gets done. When everyone’s in charge, no one is in charge. When planning how the strategy will be executed, these maxims should be your top two guiding principles. It’s easy to say that in the next three years, the company’s strategy is to grow revenue aggressively and begin global expansion. It’s far more taxing (and beneficial) to define performance metrics and initiatives and then assign ownership for each to executors. Planning to operationalize the strategy is critical in whether it is executed.
You’ve assigned ownership, and you’ve given direction. Now it’s time to give your metric and initiative owners support and accountability for fulfilling their charge. Too often, strategic initiatives take a back seat to flavor-of-the-day challenges and bureaucratic headaches. Don’t let this happen in your organization. Support your executors by giving them the authority and autonomy to do what you’ve asked and give them the time they need by removing less critical tasks.
You completed your five-year strategy, and you announced it at the last company meeting. It’s a start. Now, use every chance you get - emails, meetings, town halls, informal chats - to talk about actions, decisions, and goals in the context of your strategy. Create impactful visualizations like strategy maps. Give managers the tools they need to articulate the strategy and what it means for their department and provide feedback systems to ensure that the strategy is understood. This ongoing reinforcement will embed strategic focus throughout the organization, maintain alignment, and reinforce the strategy execution mindset. Making a strategy for everyone’s business keeps the organization focused on what you are trying to accomplish together.
Close the loop with your leadership team and the organization at the end of each quarter with a regular strategic management meeting that includes the core team, as well as your executors. Discuss progress, changes in the external environment, opportunities for improvements, successes, and how to address underperforming metrics and initiatives. Set and share new objectives and initiatives. Finally, communicate key outcomes from these meetings to the organization, and share goals for the next quarter.
These five essential steps, when deployed to engage and enable in your organization, will help you win the challenge of balancing vision and reality.
Maintaining continuity between strategic planning and tactical execution may seem overwhelming, but it is a key enabler for achieving company goals. Use the form below to request a casual discussion with Aspirant's Organizational Effectiveness experts about implementing the structure and processes to keep everyone rowing in the same direction.