Are You Executing Your Strategy With "Both Hands"?
“We have a strategy, I just don’t know how to bring it to action and get my people to get on board!” This is the common refrain of so many of the leaders we work with. How can we look at this old problem from a new lens?
As long as organizations have existed, they have always sought to tackle this question. In our last blog post, we talked about the two main challenges associated with driving change / strategy forward: 1) scaling the change so that everybody in the organization that needs to change, does, and 2) sustainability – actually making sure that the change is not seen as a “flavor of the month” that can be eliminated with the slightest organizational resistance. In this piece, we will talk about how we evolve the art and science of strategy execution to address these issues.
At the heart of this issue is the following hypothesis: that most organizations have been fighting this battle with one hand behind their back. From experience, we know that it takes “lifting with both hands” to execute strategy effectively:
While some of the academic literature on this topic has touched on the need to integrate a more people / human centric approach to strategy execution, very few organizations have been able to crack the code on how to simultaneously use both.
So what do we mean by these “two hands”?
On hand one – there is a well-documented set of processes that must be aligned with, and support strategy:
The strategy governance process – there is certainly no shortage of strategy management models that exist to help organizations clarify their strategies, break them into discrete components, and establish measurement and initiative alignment mechanisms. Popular among these are the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Objectives and Key Results (OKR). Whatever you choose, it is important to be crystal clear on the components of each and their intent / how you are using them.
The financial management process – If an organization has a budget, and a strategy, and they are not linked, then it only has one real strategy: the budget! What gets funded gets done and all organizations need to ensure there is a good linkage between the financial budgeting and forecasting process and strategy. This is where thought leadership and best practices on such concepts as having a Strategic Expenditure (StratEx) portfolio can help guide an organization to allocate resources towards the strategic objectives and initiatives it has chosen.
The risk management process – where the strategy management process is focused on the future – how to realize the vision – the risk management process is focused on what could derail progress towards achieving that specific strategy. Inherent in any strategy are certain risks that the organization is willing to take on, and a robust risk management process linked to strategy is essential. Exploring such concepts as the identification of Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) is an important part of this work.
On hand two – we must consider: how do we effectively connect the strategy to the human beings within the organization who are responsible for executing it.
In our experience, this comes down to the successful combination of three elements:
Let’s go just a bit deeper into these three areas:
Knowledge – everyone in the organization needs to understand the strategy, and how it either relates, or doesn’t, to their role. This is where tools such as strategic communications planning comes in. If I am in a steel manufacturing organization, and our strategy is to expand into titanium production, I had better understand if that impacts my role and how.
Buy-in – In addition to just understanding the strategy, I must also believe that it is the right path for the organization and that there’s something in it for me personally. Without this, all the knowledge in the world is useless. This is the role of solid change management best practices and requires conducting an audit of whether the culture of the organization is supportive of the strategy. As Peter Drucker is quoted as saying: “strategy eats culture for breakfast”! For example, if I’m in this steel manufacturing organization, and we’re moving into titanium, but I don’t care about that path, I’m unlikely to put much effort into the change personally.
Capabilities – unless I possess the skillsets and tools necessary to execute my role in the strategy, all the knowledge and buy-in won’t mean much. I need to understand what skillsets I need to build, and how. This is where we must connect our strategy to areas such as the individual performance management cycle and workforce planning in order to make these connections clearer. In our example, if I’ve been overseeing steel production for 10 years, I had better start learning the building blocks of titanium!
Great, now we know that we need to “use both hands” and effectively connect our strategy to both key processes and the people in our organization to execute. That’s a good start, but if your organization is of any scale, you’re going to need something to manage the complexity of these connections. This is where technology comes in to play a supporting role.
While there are many good technologies out there for helping with all the above processes, one emerging tool possesses particular promise. In the challenge of achieving sustainability and scale with a strategy or change effort, there needs to be a fine and complex set of interactions between individuals in order to connect the strategy to processes and people. While the coordination of these has typically been the job of people (e.g., in the form of an Office of Strategy Management), we would argue that much of the role of offices such as these is rote, robotic, and ripe for technology to enable. Imagine a world in which a chatbot could take care of these repetitive tasks such as nagging people for updates on strategy / measures / initiatives, helping people link their goals to strategy, facilitating the performance management process. Imagine the room this would free up for individuals across the organization to unleash their human creativity where it really counts – places like visioning, opportunity analysis, communication. There is much development in this space (and we’ve led the way with our Adaptive technology), and we’re excited to see where this field goes in the future.
We hope that this article has allowed you to look at your strategy execution efforts in a new light, and helped you to reflect on whether you are “fighting with one hand behind your back”. As you consider your path forward, consider the following questions:
Process
Have we sufficiently developed our strategy governance and reporting processes?
Are our financial planning and budgeting processes linked to our strategy?
Do we have good risk management practices that tie clearly to our strategy?
People
Do our people understand the strategy and their role in it?
Do they care about the strategy and understand what’s in it for them?
Do they have the tools and capabilities necessary to execute?
Technology
Are we over-burdening the organization with strategy management / reporting processes that could be better supported by technology?
Have we explored the use of bots to automate some of our manual processes?
With questions like these, you can start your path to sustainable strategy execution. To learn more, drop us a line today at contactus@geigsen.com.