How To Make Company Strategy Work

“Only 5% of employees understand their company’s strategy. This makes successful execution nearly impossible. So how can you help frontline employees not only understand but get behind your company’s strategy?” Source: “Making Your Strategy Work on the Frontline,” Harvard Business Review Blog, 6/24/2010.


Strategy may seem simple for senior management who can often look down on the organisation as a whole. However, strategy is only effective in so far as it is interpreted and implemented by people at ground level. How can employees know what to do if they don't understand the overall plan? As Michael Porter has continually reminded us,  if the salesperson doesn't know what the strategy is, he won't know which customers to call on. And if the engineer doesn't know what the strategy is, he wont know what products to build. The most successful leaders are the ones who make it their job to teach and communicate their company's strategy at every opportunity.       

Strategy

Strategy Delegation and Motivation

Barely half of senior managers are excited by their own business strategies.

Are your people skills weak? Are you out of touch with the needs and feelings of customers? Are you infuriated by dissent? According to an article in the Director magazine, if you answered, “yes” to these questions, congratulations, you’re a perfect candidate to craft business strategies in the world today.

“Business strategy is often conceived in an ivory tower by top executives and then handed down in tablets of stone for middle management to implement,” claims the article. “But, because the strategy is not grounded in the reality of the business and lacks ‘emotional edge,’ the rest of the organisation neither believes in it nor engages with it. So it's not surprising that only 19 per cent of corporate strategies achieve their objectives, according to new research among more than 1,600 top, senior and mid-level managers in public and private sector organizations.”

This article also points out the only 25 percent of executives themselves are excited or motivated by the strategies they create and just 28 percent of senior leaders are engaged by their strategies.

If this is the perception that senior executives have of their own business strategies, how can they expect middle management and employees to be motivated by them, embrace them or wholeheartedly implement them? Delegation of goals that are not fully “owned” is a recipe for mediocrity or failure.

Based on the statistics above, is it any wonder that 81 percent of strategies fail to achieve their objectives?

You can read it here

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Relevant topics: Strategy, Motivation, Delegation




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