Making strategy more than a glossy document.
Here's the bottom line on strategic planning. It is very time consuming and often has little impact on most people in the organization. How do you change that? An effective strategy means that most people in your organization understand the strategy and know their role in making that strategy happen.
To test the effectiveness of your own strategy, ask ten people (from various levels and places in your organization) the following questions: 1. In your opinion, what is the single most important thing we are trying accomplish in this organization? 2. Again in your opinion, what are the two or three most important things we need to do to accomplish this thing (above)? 3. What is your role in this? What is the most important thing you can do to help this organization meet it's objectives?
If you ask ten people, I can almost guarantee that the answers you get will vary widely. If they do, that is a problem. The most effective way to run a business is to run it in a way so that everyone knows what they should be doing to make that business successful. Easy to understand. Hard to do. Here are my thoughts on how to do it.
The first thing you need is a good leadership team. Yes, this is the first thing. Team comes before strategy. (see Good to Great by Jim Collins --Get the right people on the bus). Your team does not need to be perfect. They need to be effective. Click here for more on leadership team effectiveness. They need to be capable. They need to be respected.
The second thing you need is a clear, direct, "elegantly simple" strategy. You get this strategy by working with your leadership team. It takes time and a lot of work. Many strategy documents I've seen are too long. A really useful strategy document should be one page. That one page should contain your over-riding goal (what you are trying to accomplish as an organization) and your strategies to get there (the things you need to do to accomplish the goal). For Southwest Airlines the over-riding goal is "the speed of a plane at the price of a car -- whenever you need it." The strategies that Southwest focuses on to meet this goal are: friendly service, speed and frequent point-to-point departures. I imagine it took a lot of work to get this strategy -- the simplicity of it is elegant, inspiring and memorable. The work that went into developing the strategy can be tracked in the teams' meeting notes. It should not form part of the strategy document.
The third and final thing you need is to engage the organization. Why? You can't meet your strategy if you don't talk about it and help people understand what they need to do to help accomplish that strategy. This is not a presentation. This is a discussion. This discussion happens all over the organization. The discussion happens with each leadership team. It happens with each employee group. The discussion involves telling some "stories". The stories come from the senior leadership team. The stories are about how and why the strategy was chosen. The stories are effective if people feel like they were there during the development of the strategy. The discussion also involves asking some questions. Questions like, "Given what you now know about your strategy, what do you need to do in your daily work to help accomplish that strategy?"The "elegantly simple strategy document should be the corner stone of the discussion. Put the document into people's hands (literally) while they are discussing it. Help them own it. This may sound time consuming. It is. It can't be delegated and it can't be done by someone other than the leadership team.
If you and your team do it right, most people in your organization will be able to tell you what the organization is trying to accomplish and what their role is in that. That is effective strategy.
Sandra Oliver - February 13, 2008
Filed under:
executive coaching,
leadership,
strategy execution
Sandra Oliver
Sandra Oliver Sandra Oliver is a leadership coach and consultant with more than 17 years experience in Corporate HR leadership roles. Her expertise includes change management and succession planning. Sandra is the founder of IMPACT Consulting Inc.
