Listeners will learn:

• How to effectively review your progress and track your key performance indicators
• Establish an execution schedule with correct frequency, tools and reports to support the process
• Set up business rules to help your team easily follow the process
• How to run great monthly strategy review meetings

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Fulfilling the communication details needed to effectively execute strategy is much easier said than done. Now, add to this all the varying ways organizations are structured and ways people obtain information. Let’s take stakeholders of a school or city as an example: at the executive level you have elected officials and highly specialized executives that have a certain set of stakeholder needs—and these needs occur in tandem with those for management, teachers, students and citizens.

In the private sector another type of segmentation might exist in a corporation with functional areas that operate in technically specific environments. Maybe there are shareholders and board members as well. Whether profit-driven or public service-oriented, these examples present a common challenge: How do you effectively share and execute strategy with this kind of audience span? Answer these following questions to develop your communication need framework:

1. Who should see your plan, how often, and at what level of detail? Do you have a regular or routine way of communicating strategy to these audiences?
2. What technology can you use to lessen the burden of clerical and administrative effort in information distribution?
3. Are you using channels that your intended audience is familiar with, or will your organization’s staff need to facilitate this learning curve?
4. Do you want to control access to your plan?

If you need a communication medium that has the ability to communicate goal relationship and progress, consider the incorporation of a dashboard that will help generate real-time details to keep your strategy a living, breathing plan.

Interested in what we recommend? See The Dash, it might just be the enhancement needed to attain wide stakeholder alignment to those big organizational objectives that are guiding your strategic initiatives. For customers of MyStrategicPlan, an example of our approach to Dashboard functionality is available for a 30-day free trial.

STRATEGY CHECK: Just how do you communicate your strategy to your network?

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The topics of focus from the June 23, 2010 Strategy Huddle were:

1. Strategy Stat: What Matters Most to Strategy Execution
2. Topic/Question: Creating Useful Measures for Execution
3. Topic/Question: Case Study: Creating Strategic Alignment in a Loosely Organized Company
4. Topic/Question: Case Study: How to Change your Business Model

Business Model Canvas

Download Presentation Here

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• Does Your Business Model Need Change? (12 mins) Does your business model need change? Use the consulting exercise...

1. Strategy Stat: What Matters Most to Strategy Execution
2. Topic/Question: Creating Useful Measures for Execution
3. Topic/Question: Case Study: Creating Strategic Alignment in a Loosely Organized Company
4. Topic/Question: Case Study: How to Change your Business Model

Business Model Canvas

Download Presentation Here Complete Webinar:

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• Creating Useful Measures for Execution (10 mins) What does success look like? With these quick tips you’ll...
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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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Starting at the team member level, key staff should update the weekly actions they are responsible for.  Department leaders should then organize a monthly meeting with all key staff to review department-owned goals and performance metrics. This is also the time to brainstorm, discuss and take action on tactical or operational issues that might be clogging progress.

At the department level, a collective meeting each month is required for the senior management team to report on department-owned goals and performance measurements, with an emphasis on what your organization’s key performance indicators are telling you.  This is where goal status and realized performance have an opportunity to be analyzed and learned from. As a result, recognition for achievements and cooperation can be deemed appropriate or the need for corrective actions can come to light.  

Then gather your entire leadership team for an intensive review of the top, pre-defined strategic issues quarterly. These two questions will help you determine the context of the issue:  1) Is the issue a technical problem in implementing the operational structure?  (i.e. Are the reports not working out? Is the scheduling not conducive to department workflows?)   2) Are there problems with incentive alignment or the culture? (And if so, how can you best address the expectations for change to be managed?)

For any of these meetings, be it at the team member review or the senior management session, you should standardize the preparation needed and the report structure. For many organizations, this represents a significant time drain if not appropriately planned.  Nip this in the bud and come up with a format that clearly communicates goal/action, and performance measurement.  Focus on the tasks at hand, clearly and effectively, and you’ll find yourself moving toward the broad improvement themes contained within your Strategic Plan.

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The facilitations are over, the goals created and the reporting schedule established.  Even with all these elements in place, you would be wise to further specify what it will take for successful cross-functional execution. Creating this alignment is a key necessity for executing a strategic plan between business units that have shared goals or objectives.

By the very nature of being strategic, plan objectives and goals are largely interlaced between business units.  It is important to identify what kind of coordination needs to exist in order to achieve assigned actions and ultimately the common goal.    It is also important to recognize the level of training or education that may be needed in order to best perform throughout the requirement.  Finally, understanding the strategic Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) will help ensure your work progresses across departmental lines.  Let’s expand these thoughts.

What Does the Goal Require?

Determine if the task actions are pooled in one department, sequential across departments, or if department coordination by a series of reciprocal adjustments is necessary.  For example, pooled tasking simply requires the adherence to SOPs set by the organization.  For sequential tasks, it becomes more important to manage transactions and lateral transitions of work.  Finally reciprocal adjustments require a high level of coordination and information sharing… as the name implies all members of this goal network are affected by and can affect the tasks of another.[1]

Do the Actions Require Additional Training or Education?

Identified by either the business unit or the organization at large, this is an overlooked element… and contributes to a fear of failure and feelings of inadequacy that management would oft not like to highlight.   Those big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs) [2]  need reality checks, and one proper means of keeping these projects in line is supplying training and education where needed.  Otherwise you run the risk of having staff avoid acceptance of any new responsibilities and accountability becomes a doomed burden.

What SOPs Must Be Followed?

Define the expectations surrounding the decisions and actions that require coordination or affect the actions of another department or unit.   Bring this in step with identified implementation management processes to stay healthy.  Ignoring or marginalizing your organizational structure demands will eventually take your strategic plan into a Code Blue situation.

In closing, remember to focus on what the goal demands of your organization and methodically determine how to rise to the challenge.  There are many different organizational structures out there.  Part of your strategic job is to open doorways between the silos you may encounter…. and then keep them open throughout the execution of the plan.

[1] Types of Interdependence, Table 5.1:  Lawrence Hrebiniak, Making Strategy Work, Warton School Publishing, 2005.

[2] James Collins and Jerry Porras, Building Your Company’s Vision, 1996

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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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Editor’s Note: Our last strategy check included this quote, which generated so much positive feedback, we decided to dedicate a whole newsletter to it.

Processes when performed correctly create a rhythmic routine, and for very large organizations having everyone march to the same beat is a real accomplishment… except when the very road you walk on goes from a cobblestone path to a jet-way tarmac.

In a recent talk, the Boy Scouts of America’s VP of Operations Gary Butler highlighted how easy it is to mistake action for outcomes and in doing so he illustrated Churchill’s point in a real word example. For over 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America has been perfecting the processes that deliver programs and services to youth worldwide. An overall unintended outcome, however, has been a decline in membership levels. “We did not connect processes to the results, in fact, we valued process over results.” Butler states.

Intensive reviews by this stalwart organization have initiated a fundamental shift in the way BSA sets its strategic direction and processes to solve the issues that have been eroding its membership base. They have created key performance measurements to be monitored in the pursuit of membership retention and growth now fall within six key departments: Marketing, Governance, Programs and Services, Financing, Talent Management (Volunteers), and Administrative Services. Sourcing data reports from these areas, new processes have been designed to be simple to duplicate and repeat, but most importantly flexible to react to each Councils’ real opportunities or threats – and emphasizing what instead of the how.

Old Emphasis – “The How” Fully-engaged Boards Strategic Implementation Fiscally-Sound Councils

New Emphasis – “The What” Fully-Trained Boards Creating a Strategic Plan Fundraising Campaigns

Soon real-time information on the market (inputs) and performance measures (outputs) will be integrated into the “New” BSA strategic management tools. All functional areas and geographic locations will be able to drive their results, from the national to troop level. All the while, the overall goal stays embedded and crystal clear: Grow Membership and Impact Youth’s Lives.

As such, make the mission of the Boy Scouts of America, “To prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law” viable for the next 100 years.

Not to be underestimated, this organizational change is an uphill battle, requiring well-entrenched mindsets to be shifted and re-focused. As the BSA is one of our client’s, we’ll be bringing you periodic updates as this massive change begins to transform an American icon.

STRATEGY CHECK: Take a peek at your 2010 strategy to ensure the outcomes you are seeking are clear and focused on intentional, purposeful results.

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It’s like the scene from the bad dreams you had as a kid; the ones where you show up to take your final exam and don’t remember a thing. You’re at a business function explaining what your company does and someone asks what your strategy is, and you have no answer. You should have one. You want to have one. But nothing comes to mind. While choosing a strategy isn’t impossible, it is a word that’s often misunderstood.

What is strategy?

Your strategic plan will contain many things, including your mission, vision, principles, objectives and tactics, but none of them are your strategy. Your strategy, simply, is the way in which you plan on matching what you do best with the customers you plan to reach.

Your strategy should:

• Establish unique value proposition compared to your competitors
• Be executed through operations that provide different and tailored value to customers
• Identify clear tradeoffs and clarifies what not to do
• Focus on activities that fit together and reinforce each other
• Drive continual improvement within the organization and moves it toward its vision

What isn’t your Strategy?

Knowing what strategy is can also be explained by looking at what strategy is not. Dr. Michael Porter, the leading strategy guru and professor at Harvard, had this to say at the 2006 World Business Forum in Chicago. Strategy is not

• Best practice improvement
• Execution
• Aspirations
• A vision
• Learning
• Agility
• Flexibility
• Innovation
• The Internet (or any technology)
• Downsizing
• Restructuring
• Mergers/Consolidation
• Alliances/Partnering
• Outsourcing

So Which is Yours? A Broad View:

In the 1980 classic Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analysing Industries and Competitors, Michael Porter simplifies the scheme by reducing it down to the three best strategies. They are cost leadership, differentiation, and market segmentation (or focus).

Cost Leadership Strategy

Organizations that choose this route aim to produce a product or service that matches a given level of quality, at a lower cost than their competitors. They then either sell their product or service at a normative cost in order to maximize revenue or they sell at a lower cost in order to gain market share. The key to this strategy is efficiency.

If your organization’s strengths include operational excellence, or efficient distribution channels, or any other attribute that allows for cost savings in production, this strategy is an option.

The risk with this strategy is that eventually other companies will also be able to produce at a lower cost, due to the efficiencies brought about by advances in technology.

Differentiation Strategy

Businesses that choose this strategy have a unique quality to their product that customers see as better or at least different from the other options available in that market. This uniqueness gives the producer the chance to sell at a premium price.

If your organization’s core competencies grant you greater skill or creativity in production, and your sales and marketing effectively communicate the advantages of your product or service over your competitors, this may be a good choice.

Focus Strategy

This strategy is also called a segmentation strategy because it involves carving your market in order to focus on a smaller group in which you can implement either a cost leadership or differentiation strategy. One benefit of using a focus strategy is that businesses can build loyalty in their given segment.

While businesses that choose to focus on one smaller segment of an industry may not have the leverage with suppliers that other organizations may, they generally have more intimate knowledge of their target customers and are able to tailor their products or services to them, and therefore charge greater prices or enjoy greater loyalty.

What to do

While your over-arching statements like mission, vision and principles give your long-term direction, there still needs to be something that lives in between those statements and the decisions you make to bring them into fruition. Choosing a strategy means that your company and the employees within have a solid answer for not only where you’re going, but how you’ll get there. With an obvious strategy, you have the structure needed to decide between different objectives and tactics that make up your action plan, and lead your organization to victory.

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