4 Disciplines Essential to Strategy Implementation

You have spent months working on your strategic plan, and now, finally, it has been approved. 

Kudos to you and your team!

Now, what?

How do you engage your operators in its implementation?

How indeed.  It is not like the rest of the organization has been standing idle during the planning process. Even those engaged in stages seem to have forgotten about it.

Now that you have clear goals and the resources to act on them, you need to reengage everyone in its goals and align them with current priorities.   Successful management of a new strategic direction depends on an organization's ability to guide strategy implementation while managing current plans and commitments.

In this series, I will take you through four steps to guide any organization through the first critical months of strategy implementation.

1.  Align management processes with influential external cycles.

Brilliant strategic plans come from dynamic strategic thinking, which opens the mind to new ways of viewing your business, its market, and the dynamics that may influence future success. When teams engage in strategic thinking, they discover new factors that could impact future success. These factors could be new insights into competitive pressures or emerging forces on customer preferences. These newly discovered or freshly identified variables may point to additional cycles affecting the business and its planning. After planning, examine these influential cycles and integrate them into regular management cycles to leverage these external forces proactively in planning and priority setting.  Read more about how to sustain strategic focus by aligning with external cycles.

2.  Show commitment by making tough decisions. 

A new strategic direction always means changing the status quo. These changes can be incremental, with little impact on the current team and relationships, or significant. Significant changes often include modifications to roles, reporting structures, or even eliminating positions. Changes that affect people are complicated to act on because we care about the people we work alongside. Making decisions that could impact others is never easy, but putting off tough choices is often seen as a leadership weakness and can contribute to why strategic plans fail. The three most significant tough decisions in strategy implementation are changing the organizational structure, adding new competencies, eliminating part of the business, or combining product lines or functional areas to free up plans and priorities.  Read how to commit to your success by making tough decisions early in implementation.

3.  Sort emerging issues from plan obstacles. 

As operational folks bring plans to life, they will identify issues, trends, and realities overlooked during strategy development. They may also identify completely new, emerging issues that require strategic thinking. Clarifying which of these issues are obstacles to be resolved by more detailed planning or if they may be significant enough to modify strategic priorities is vital to guiding strategy plan implementation.

The goal is to be mission-driven and market-responsive, but this balance is hard to strike, so we have three practices to build this core strength into your planning and management processes. First, share strategic goals and the thinking behind these goals fully as you begin implementation. Then, schedule regular times to explore possible emerging issues and evaluate their potential impact on your strategic goals. Finally, don’t be afraid to tact and re-prioritize to address an emerging issue. Don’t toss the plan out; modify it and stay focused on your end-game – the vision.  Learn to distinguish between an implementation obstacle and a real emerging issue.

4.  Connect progress with the plan at mid-year.

In the first few months after introducing a new set of long-range goals, attention to it can wane. It is usually too early to see significant changes in activities. Most of the organization is engaged as detailed implementation planning is still in progress. However, it is highly recommended to involve everyone in the strategic plan again midway through the first year to keep the commitment to it and its potential changes at the top of mind.

At the six-month mark, present the long-range plan again and call out the teams that are working on the first strategic objectives. If immediate changes have resulted from the strategic plan, acknowledge them as part of its implementation in action. You might also ask what change others see as a result of the strategic plan. Taking time to reconnect with your plan, even in the early days, will refuel excitement and momentum.

These leadership disciplines improve how a new plan is embraced during the critical early months after a strategic plan. We'll cover each in more detail in future posts. Look for them and embed them into your management practices to make the next cycle of strategic planning more effective.

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