Its December 2020 and many organisations are defining their Strategic goals for 2021, if they haven’t done so already. The only downer is many of these Strategic initiatives fail when it comes to execution. Key reason, Strategy Misalignment.
Have you ever seen your company’s strategy but had no idea exactly how each person or team can tangibly contribute to the successful execution of the strategy?
Guess what, you’re not alone! Many companies get together about once a year to go through their Strategic Cycle Planning, leaders issue their strategic vision/goals, their supporting management present what they believe is attainable across different market segments, some exciting and encouraging pep talks are given, handshakes/agreements are made, and voila, bob’s your uncle! However, In reality, the rest of the team, “the doers”, and the senior leaders, don’t have the slightest idea as to how to achieve these goals. This is called the Strategy Misalignment. Strategy misalignment happens when the Strategic Plan/vision does not have a clear and tangible Execution Strategy.
When strategy misalignment occurs, organisations face several challenges, below we will review a few:
Inability to Measure Success of the Strategic Plan
When strategy planning occurs and is not tangibly defined with an execution plan, then it’s difficult to draw a correlation between the actions and the results. It’s kicking a ball into the dark and hoping it made it into the goal. You could come and find a ball in the net at some point when you walk up to the goal, but was it shot number 1, 2, or 3 (which aimed in different directions) that actually made it into the net.
Unnecessary Strategy Execution Costs
Think of the term “over-processing”, over processing happens whenever goods are processed beyond their needed specifications. Whenever there’s Strategic Misalignment, there’s also a great probability that there are unnecessary costs being spent that have no impact on the results. Remember, at this point, people are working from the perception of “If i do this enough, eventually, we will win”. Using this mindset eliminates the exit criteria and therefore it’s a non ending battle.
Low team morale
Low team morale, discouragement, disengagement, alienation all could occur as a result of Strategy Misalignment. When there’s Strategy Misalignment, people have a difficult time seeing the value they add to the company’s success. Naturally people have a desire to feel accomplished. Therefore closing the Strategy Misalignment gap will directly impact team morale.
If you’ve found yourself and your company in a similar position, then it’s your day! As a team, we’ve coached many business leaders into translating the strategy into becoming tangible and executable.
We’ve all heard, the truth for any good goal is to make it SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound), however, SMART isn’t simple enough at times, for us simple people. Today I’d like to introduce you to the Critical to Quality Model (CTQ) that will simplify translating Strategic goals into executable and measurable wins for your Organisation.
The above CTQ Tree gives a simple idea of how to translate a Strategic Goal into a measure. From the measurement level, now SMART goals can be set, and initiatives directly contributing to the metrics can be driven. These measures become the Strategy Scoreboard that the entire organisation drive to impact in daily operations.