About Alice Heiman – visiting strategy leader:  Alice is the founder and President of Alice Heiman Inc. and is a sales strategist, author, speaker and trainer.  Business websites: www.aliceheiman.com or www.smartsalestips.com

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Elsa Ozuna-Richards, Account Executive, is our speaker for this segment of the Strategy Huddle. Elsa brings her expertise in strategy and health care to present examples of how to use Continuous Quality Improvement with strategic planning to motivate your team to keep improving.

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Erica Olsen, COO and Co-Founder of M3 Planning, is our expert speaker for this topic. She explains why/how organizations want keep their teams engaged in the strategic management process.

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The need for change is often inherent in a strategic plan, and this can shift the power dynamics in any organization as it represents a re-prioritization of resources and activity.  With this acknowledged, it is a clear role of leadership, and leadership alone, that must embrace the process, implementation and execution of new strategic actions.  Leadership is tasked with viewing strategy execution as their job. Having a keen understanding of the process of change is vital.

Comprehensive communication about the effectiveness of the purpose of a strategic plan is often a big initial hurdle.  Often strategic goals are viewed as an extra expense that raises costs.  To gain acceptance of new directions based on strategic thinking, the actions of any given plan need to be viewed as solutions to challenges or problems that exist or are likely to exist in the near future.  Cost-benefit analysis and cause and effect comparisons to prod strategic action are also effective ways to bring people on board.

Once key leaders see that the strategic plan is not only additive but also vital to future viability, their position should shift if they have the organization’s best interest in mind.  At this point, building alignment for cross-functionality and even organizational structure shifts can be viewed as solid maneuvers that are based on necessity and not a whim.

At an everyday level, leaders must embrace the strategic change in their approach to work.  For example, if a strategic plan calls for less standardization to create an environment for the development of innovations, then leaders must abide by that playbook.  On the other end of the spectrum, if increased efficiencies are part of a strategic goal, then leaders would have to also abide by and enforce increased standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Overall, this process is not easy. Don’t assume robust, passionate discussions are a rejection of the developments you seek.  Instead, try to inject the values that your organization keeps into the process.  These values should help you anchor the discussions against the tides of tangents and emotions, while keeping the dialogue progressive with the organization’s success and longevity in mind.

Strategy Check:  Are your leaders onboard to fundamentally embrace the strategic plan?

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Let’s start by reiterating the key difference between communities and teams, according to the article’s authors (Richard McDermott and Douglas Archibald) are: 1) The incorporation of the long-view. 2) Require peer collaboration and collective responsibility. 3) Intentional network expansion. 4) Stewardship of unique knowledge that can be pooled for group use.

Related, we see value in creating some time to have your team communicate something about their work experience background or even social background that might apply to your organization’s challenges today. Engage with other leaders in your company to talk about perspective of a similar big solution they engineered, or the learning of the last failure in a related realm. If your competitive position allows for it, source external sources within your profession that might provide some common insight. (Ie. Separate city engineers sharing information.)

The point is to extrapolate and pool the intellect you have access to, and even expand your collaboration reach into new networks wherever possible. Steer your network to serve the larger good. Then, get your organization’s leadership to formally recognize its existence and value, while being sure to create a protocol in which leadership enjoys updates from your community’s findings. This is how the great insights can formally make their way back into organizational processes, perhaps even creating better quality decisions than most individual experts acting alone can make.

Finally, a few preconditions to make sure your community’s mass collaboration is the best it can be: 1) Diversify: Make sure you source a varied group of folks, that of different age, race, education track. 2) Decentralize: People with general and specific knowledge can contribute. 3) Effective Aggregation: Create shared manners in which information is gathered and how it feeds into the “collective mind”. 4) Ensure Independence: Take the stress out of this shared situation, and eliminate the pressure to confirm. Not only should you ensure independence, you should use your community as a way to celebrate it through sharing!

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Revelations by management made in the article make you wonder if execution strategies found a way into any of the strategic plans at hand. Some include: the need for monthly instead of quarterly reviews; the need to review a strategic plan to see if it is “as relevant as it was three-years ago”; and a “switch from distant calendars and rigid forecasts of the past.”

The only thing that should be rigid in a strategic plan is an organizational commitment to properly execute it. This includes monthly executive reviews that are fed by weekly staff updates. If problems in the action elements of the plan arise, this prompts corrective adjustment each month.

If something within a plan can’t be executed, the plan needs to be adjusted… and it can’t take three years to have this happen. Regular, cyclical communications from the staff to the managers to the executives are essential. Routine assessments for internal and external feed into this process as well. These can’t be implemented when crisis calls, these need to find their place during the writing of the plan itself.

In this way execution is tied into planning, much like a journey is guided by a compass. Make no mistake; this is a time investment, and one that requires an organizational structure with its influences in check. In fact the “Inability to manage change effectively or to overcome internal resistance to change” is cited as the #1 Obstacle to Strategy Execution in Warton Business School professor Lawrence Hrebiniak’s Making Strategy Work (2005).

Proper strategy execution keeps a plan adaptive. Contrary to what the WSJ article states, being adaptive is not a new approach. It’s just a necessary one that seems to get overlooked or underestimated once strategic plans find final approvals, yet no good plan is so final that it is fireproof to changes inherent around us all.

STRATEGY CHECK:  Is your strategy execution process lined up that will keep your plan current and aligned for your organization?

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