Strategy Design is Only the Beginning
Designing a clear and compelling company strategy is only the first step. To truly meet strategic targets, your plans must be understood, committed to and implemented by your employees. Unfortunately, there is often a measurable gap between strategy design and implementation in too many organizations.
Closing the Gap between Strategy Design and Implementation
What about the 10% of leaders who manage to effectively execute their strategies? Further study shows that there are some common practices that successful leaders follow to better close the gap between strategy design and implementation.
Is your strategy clear enough?
Is your culture healthy enough to ask for higher performance?
If “how work gets done” does not fully align with the “work that needs to get done” to move the business forward, there will be problems.
Just imagine an engineering-driven culture getting in the way of strategies to move into new customer-driven markets. Or a sales-driven culture (i.e. Wells Fargo) sabotaging a strategy to increase customer loyalty.
Strategy implementation is a day-by-day effort and actively engaging employees in your strategy is different than communicating your strategy to employees.
High performing leaders ensure that people know what is expected of them, consistently do what they say they will do, and create teams that can depend upon each other. They also hold frequent meetings to track progress toward goals and share lessons learned.
The Bottom Line
You must be as committed to strategy execution as you are to strategy design. Actively involve key stakeholders in both strategy design and strategy delivery if you want to be one of the leaders who consistently hit their targets.
To learn more about closing the gap between strategy design and implementation, download Do You Have the Right Culture to Drive Your Growth Strategy Forward?
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