Wonder what makes some organizations succeed at strategy execution when others fail?
The importance of strategy execution is clear, but why is it so hard? Because few organizations have all the right elements in place to sustain strategic activities over the long term. Based on the ideas presented by Balanced Scorecard creators Robert Kaplan and David Norton in “The Strategy-Focused Organization,” the following five elements are key to strategy execution:
Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements in the sections below.
The purpose of the following activities is to help sustain your strategy focus over a period of years; implementing them will significantly improve your performance when it comes to strategy execution.
Some organizations don’t have a documented strategy; others rely on a small group of individuals to measure and manage the strategy on an ongoing basis. Both scenarios set the stage for failure. When the leadership team isn’t involved in the process of creating the strategy and/or tracking performance on it over time, strategy becomes less important. As a result, leadership is less likely to make the necessary decisions or allocate the appropriate resources to get the job done.
Management support is essential for strategy execution. Commitment starts at the top; the tone they set will trickle down through all levels of the organization. Plus, their active engagement and advocacy will help keep things moving in the right direction. You’ll know your leadership is bought in if:
Strategic plans range in length; we’ve seen some that are five pages and others that are 50. But no matter how long your plan is, you’ll need an abridged version—just one page—that sums up your strategy in a nutshell.
Strategy execution best practices dictate that everyone in the organization should be able to describe the strategy in three minutes or less. So whether you create an informal elevator pitch to describe it or a more formal strategy map, it’s crucial that you find a simple way to communicate your big-picture plan to both executives and employees. If all you have is a 20-page document, no one will truly understand it or be able to interact with it. A short, uncomplicated description—preferably a visual representation—is the best way to keep your strategy front and center, and your people on the same page.
The key to strategy execution is to have everyone rowing the boat in the same direction, not creating currents that are at odds with each other. If individual departments are allowed to create—and pursue—their own priorities, you run the risk of getting sidetracked from your organizational goals, and squandering your resources for little return.
All departments should be doing things that support the overall strategy. If your consolidated strategic plan has five key themes or 10 key goals, get all departments to align their activities around these goals. To help define departmental activities, ask:
As a leadership team, you can also look at organization goals that have little support from departments and determine the best path to get these goals accomplished. Do you need more support or are these the right goals?
Organizational goals are achieved through the efforts of individuals, but employees often have a difficult time connecting their everyday activities with the larger strategy. Successful execution depends on their work—and their understanding that what they may perceive as seemingly small tasks are in fact the building blocks of strategy execution (as long as the previous element is in place!).
You can help employees make those connections by:
You can’t just write a great strategy, put it on the shelf, and check in five years later to see if you’ve achieved it. To stay focused and be assured of making incremental progress, there’s a lot of work to be done:
Create a meeting schedule and accompanying reporting calendar.
Progress evaluations and strategy reviews are necessary to stay on the right track; you’ll also need a reporting process in place to support those meetings. High-performing organizations meet monthly, quarterly, and yearly. (You can read more about planning and conducting effective strategy meetings here.) Departments should have a similar cadence, with meetings taking place a week earlier than enterprise-level meetings. This timing ensures that executive-level meetings have up-to-date departmental information to discuss.
For these meetings to be successful, you need:
Link projects to strategy.
Every project your organization wants to accomplish needs a purpose. Without clear alignment between your organizational strategy and your piles of projects, you and your employees are simply wasting time. The project management office must work collaboratively with the strategy management office to determine which projects qualify as strategic (and how they connect to your organizational objectives), and which are non-strategic (but necessary).
Because organizational objectives change over time, it’s wise to review your projects periodically to assess if you’re still doing the right things. Strategy refreshes offer a good opportunity to evaluate the appropriateness of current projects, and generate new projects—all of which will help you get where you want to go.
Link budgets to strategy.
Projects require resources, which is why your budget and your strategy need to go hand in hand. Say you design a major strategic change in your organization, and during your annual budget process you increase some areas by 1% and decrease others by 2%. If your budget isn’t linked with the strategy, you won’t have the ability to enact your strategic changes. Unfortunately, this is often the case.
Some organizations create a StratEx (strategic expenditure) budget, but others fully integrate their budget into the strategy management process. In local governments, we see priority-based budgets, zero-based budgets, etc. Whatever your approach, budgets should occasionally be reevaluated for effectiveness.
Link your communications to strategy.
Make your strategy as visible as possible. The same way you see consistent branding in advertising (think Coke’s “Taste the Feeling”), brand the strategy internally. Do you have three themes? Brand them in three colors and make posters for a vibrant visual association. Create internal case studies about individuals who go above and beyond in contributing to the strategy or living the values. And acknowledge failures as well—if you tried something and it didn’t work, talk about it. (One company I know of had a funeral for part of its strategy before moving on to the next idea. Another one had a birthday cake for the annual review of its strategy.)
Finally, talk about the strategy frequently. If people don’t hear about it regularly, they’re more likely to forget about it. To keep strategy top of mind (and keep employees motivated), share monthly and quarterly progress with the entire organization. Offer results at a summary level—for instance, performance on the top five measures using green/yellow/red statuses; identifying parts of the business that are growing or shrinking; initiatives that are being paused, etc.
Create a governance process.
You want your strategy to be flexible, but you don’t want everyone making changes to measures and targets throughout the year—that makes it more difficult to keep track of a target and the responsible parties. To achieve the kind of flexibility you want, create a management reporting guide that outlines the calendar, ownership and responsibility, and a process for making changes to the strategy. Such a process keeps things consistent for reporting purposes, and helps keep your eye on the final goal.
Feeling overwhelmed by strategy execution? You wouldn’t be the first. (Some of these popular strategy books might help put things in perspective, too.) This is complex, which is the whole reason we wrote this article. But there are a lot of ways to make the process more manageable; in fact, I’ve dedicated my career to it. At ClearPoint, we’re now helping thousands of people to execute their strategies successfully with strategic planning software. Check out some of our most recent strategy execution examples and success stories.
Our 20+ years of experience with strategy execution and performance management is the reason why ClearPoint is so effective. We know all the strategy execution best practices inside and out, and our software provides an organized framework for you to transform your strategy ideas into action. Plus, we’re all-too familiar with how much time it takes to manage and report, so we’ve automated some of the most time-consuming components for you. ClearPoint helps tackle a number of key activities discussed above, no matter what strategy execution framework you’re using, including:
There is one thing software can’t do—it won’t make decisions for you! But it does make management reporting simple and efficient so you can focus on having better discussions and making better decisions. If you have any questions about our software—or about how you can improve your strategy execution efforts—please reach out.
Ted is a Founder and Managing Partner of ClearPoint Strategy and leads the sales and marketing teams.