Strategy execution is more than allocating resources to carry out the initiatives identified in the strategy. Attempts to dive right into execution without paying attention to alignment, capabilities, results tracking, accountability, and data-driven culture would impact speed and results. These five disciplines are essential to successful delivery of strategic results.
Alignment among leaders
When business objectives are broad and vague, both the executives and managers often struggle with filtering noise. They end up committing to way too many initiatives.
For example, a goal to improve margin could lead to initiatives such as reducing headcount, decreasing operating budgets across the board, and shelving new product development. Though these initiatives contribute to a better margin, each has different ripple effects when decision makers are not aligned on factors such as short-term gain and long-term capability building.
Reducing headcount could be a short-term solution to margin improvement. However, it can affect long-term capability building when the reduction happens in the product development area, for instance.
Alignment among leaders on specific outcomes and the strategic intent helps to filter initiatives. It also adds clarity to communication across the business.
Operational optimization
Operational effectiveness affects the speed of strategy execution. When processes are clunky, people would be fighting with bottlenecks, competing for people’s time, and wasting energy on workarounds necessary to bypass havocs created by archaic technologies and tools.
For example, a paper-based order fulfillment process for a distributor is a hurdle for growth. Hiring more staff is a solution but this short-term fix is not sustainable. The distributor needs to address the hurdle by identifying ways to optimize its order fulfillment activities.
Investment in technology is likely a necessity but it ought to capture the biggest issues and build appropriate capabilities that support the business’s long-term growth ambition.
Operational optimization is an exercise that every business needs to do with an objective lens. By conducting regular reviews and investing in appropriate technology to automate workflows, businesses will maintain an efficient operation for strategy execution.
Meaningful results tracking
It is frustrating for business leaders not knowing how well the business is meeting its objectives. To manage the business proactively, leaders need to capture timely data on important activities that drive the business.
For example, timely project completion is a critical strategic imperative for an engineering firm. Timely project completion depends heavily on on-time material delivery by vendors. The firm ought to have the capability internally to track delivery timeliness by material and by vendor.
The information enables the project team to take action quickly and adjust schedules accordingly. In addition, the tracking is useful for vendor performance evaluation.
Many businesses lack the capabilities to identify what is important to measure other than financial results. Financial results are lag indicators. It is too late to do any course correction then. For strategy execution, meaningful results monitoring of activities for each initiative is paramount.
Clear accountability
The cascading of accountability tends to become less clear as we move down the organization hierarchy. This affects interdependent teams as they rely on each other to complete tasks for initiatives.
For example, an ambitious growth plan requires the marketing team to lead campaign development. Successful execution of the campaign, however, hinges on coherence of work across sales, procurement, logistics, communications, and customer support.
Each area is accountable for its tasks related to the campaign. Therefore, clear accountability removes confusion when problems arise. It also relieves marketing from becoming the sole contact point, improving execution speed end-to-end.
Clear accountability assignment is important throughout the organization. This minimizes potential bottlenecks that stall strategy execution.
Collaborative data-driven culture
As businesses catch up with distilling insights from data, they uncover a vault for business intelligence. To become adept with using data for problem-solving and decision-making, it is necessary to develop a data-driven culture.
Operational optimization requires investment in technology to automate onerous tasks and improve productivity. This transition builds a reliable data source for results review.
When the distributor in the above example automated the order fulfillment process, warehouse employees can easily look up order statuses. The timely data enable them to share information quickly with the delivery driver, and coordinate activities to meet customer needs.
By building a data-driven culture, employees become adept with using concrete data to pinpoint issue, working with peers to optimize solutions. This helps execution of any work, not just initiatives for the strategic plan.
In order to maintain focus, momentum and be proactive in course correction along the way, these principles enable the organization to remain coherent in its pursuit of goals. When all contributors are aligned and supported, little time is wasted in sorting out confusion. Everyone stays on course and collaborates with commitment to high performance.
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