The execution of a strategic plan in order to achieve organizational objectives is known as strategy execution. It entails the day-to-day structures, systems, and operational objectives that ensure your team’s success.
Even the best strategic plans might fall flat if they aren’t carried out properly. In reality, 90 percent of firms fail to meet their strategic objectives, owing to a disconnect between strategic planning and execution, according to academics.
“If you’ve been watching the news recently, you’ve definitely seen stories of organizations that had outstanding ideas but failed,” says Harvard Business School Professor Robert Simons, who teaches the online course Strategy Execution. “We uncover a well-formulated but poorly executed company strategy in each case.”
How can you prepare yourself and your team to carry out the strategies you’ve devised? You can apply these five keys to successful strategy execution at your company.
1. Make a firm commitment to a strategic plan
Before moving forward with implementation, make sure that all decision-makers and stakeholders are on board with the strategic plan.
According to research published in the Harvard Business Review, 71 percent of employees at companies with poor execution believe strategic decisions are second-guessed, compared to 45 percent in companies with strong execution.
Prior to beginning implementation, commit to a strategic plan to guarantee that all decision-makers and their teams are on the same page. This develops a shared knowledge of the organization’s overall strategic plan.
2. Match Jobs to the Strategy
Many firms’ plan execution is hampered by the fact that employee roles aren’t developed with strategy in mind.
When personnel are employed before a plan is developed, or when jobs are designed to correspond with a previous corporate strategy, this can happen.
Simons claims that positions are optimized for excellent performance when they align with an organizational goal in his book Strategy Execution. He developed the Job Design Optimization Tool (JDOT), which allows people to evaluate if their company’s jobs are set up for successful strategy implementation.
Control, responsibility, influence, and support are four factors that the JDOT considers while evaluating a job’s design.
In the Harvard Business Review, Simons writes, “Each span can be changed to be narrow, wide, or someplace in between.” “I imagine the changes being made with sliders similar to those found on music amplifiers. You may build a job where a talented worker can successfully execute your company’s strategy if you get the conditions perfect. However, if the settings are incorrect, it will be impossible for any employee to be productive.”
3. Use Clear Communication to Empower Employees
The importance of clear communication in strategy execution cannot be overstated. Given that 95% of employees don’t comprehend or aren’t aware of their company’s strategy, communication is an important skill to hone.
Because strategy execution is dependent on each employee’s daily activities and decisions, it’s critical that everyone knows not only the company’s broader strategic goals, but also how their individual responsibilities help them achieve them.
According to data published in the Harvard Business Review, 61 percent of employees at strong-execution businesses say field and line employees are given the information they need to understand the impact of their work and decisions on the bottom line. Only 28% of employees at businesses with poor execution think this to be true.
Train managers to convey the significance of their team’s daily work, address the company in an all-staff meeting, and develop a culture that celebrates milestones on the road to achieving huge strategic goals to enhance your organization’s performance and empower your people.
4. Evaluate and track results
The implementation of a strategy is dependent on evaluating progress toward objectives on a regular basis. To do so, key performance indicators (KPIs) should be established during the strategic planning stage, and success should be quantified.
A numerical objective allows you and your team to track and monitor performance on a regular basis and determine if any modifications are needed as a result of that progress.
Your company’s strategic goal, for example, could be to boost client retention by 30% by 2022. You can observe data patterns over time by keeping a weekly or monthly record of the change in client retention rate.
If your client retention rate is declining month after month, it may be a sign that your strategic strategy needs to be tweaked because it isn’t producing the results you want. If, on the other hand, your data indicates consistent month-over-month growth, you may use that trend to anticipate if you’ll meet your 30 percent rise objective by 2022.
5. Strike a balance between innovation and control.
While innovation is critical for business growth, don’t let it get in the way of your strategy’s implementation.
Develop a framework to review obstacles, constraints, and opportunities that exist to exploit innovation while maintaining control over your present plan implementation. Who makes the decisions that could shift the focus of your strategy? What are the non-negotiable elements of the strategy? Answering questions like these in advance can help with execution clarity.
Keep in mind that a stagnant organization has little room for expansion. Encourage people to think outside the box, experiment, and take calculated risks in order to achieve strategic goals.
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