Principle Three: Make Strategy Everyone’s Everyday Job

Does this sound familiar? A company crafts a strategy. They develop a thorough presentation to communicate the strategy and motivate the team. They call a team meeting and present the strategy. Employees are excited about the new direction seeing a better future ahead. Then the excitement fades, old habits reemerge, and six months later the only thing that has changed is the marketing collateral extolling the virtues of capabilities never realized. Sales sell the same way, recruiting remains reactive, and management wonders where all the inspiration went.

In order for your employee to adapt to the company strategy you must focus on three key areas. First, communication is not a onetime event. You must develop an ongoing communication plan that communicates the strategy in a variety of different ways over time. Second, performance goals must be aligned with the strategy, and reviewed regularly on an individual and a team basis. Third, your team’s compensation must be aligned with the strategy in order to drive the right behavior. Addressing those three areas takes a lot of time and planning, but will increase long-term buy in substantially.

Principle Four: Make Strategy a Continual Process

This principle focuses on how the management model needs to adapt to effectively fund, measure, and review the strategy. Every company has its own management systems. Whether it’s how we budget resources or measure operational performance. However, a strategy focused organization, enhances these systems to ensure they support the long term goals of the organization.

Executives that are serious about their strategy must allocate budget resources to fund specific initiatives that support it. Next, they must measure the effectiveness of those initiatives and conduct meetings to discuss their effectiveness. These meetings must be separate from meetings that focus on operational performance.

Finally, executives must challenge the assumptions of the strategy, and adapt as necessary. It is important to remember that a strategy is a hypothesis, an educated guess. As the strategy is rolled out you may learn that some of your assumptions were wrong. For example, it may be that you overestimated the value to the client or the capabilities of your organization. Regardless of what it may be, a strategy properly managed adapts to address unforeseen obstacles.

Next Week: Mobilize Change Through Executive Leadership