Mastering Strategy Execution: The Key Components to Achieving Organizational Success
- Understanding Strategy Execution
- Preparing for Strategy Execution
- Building an Effective Execution Plan
- Communicating the Strategy
- Aligning People and Processes
- Monitoring and Tracking Progress
- Making Adjustments and Knowing When to Say No
- Sustaining Strategy Execution Excellence
- The Secret to Strategy Execution
All leaders know that results require both strategy and execution. Unfortunately, we overvalue strategy and underestimate the challenges of execution.
Here’s an important truth every leader must face: Even the best vision for the direction of your business will fall flat without a solid plan to turn your ideas into action.
Effective strategy execution keeps teams aligned, drives performance, and enables organizations to adapt and thrive in a competitive landscape. It bridges the gap between vision and results, unlocking the potential for growth, innovation, and sustainable success.
The stakes are high: For instance, barely one-third of software projects are considered a complete success, researchers have found. Half of these implementations experience various challenges, and 15% fail entirely due to execution-related issues. More broadly, Harvard professor Robert Kaplan maintains that 90% of organizations fail to successfully execute their strategies.
Mastering strategy execution greatly increases the likelihood of achieving hoped-for outcomes and the realization of organizational objectives. But what’s truly involved in turning vision into reality? And how can your organization beat the odds as part of your own strategic execution?
Understanding Strategy Execution
Strategy execution refers to the process of implementing and operationalizing a strategic plan. It involves translating strategic goals into actionable tasks, allocating resources, aligning teams, monitoring progress, and making necessary adjustments on the fly.
There are many key components of strategy execution. But they become even more apparent when things go wrong, as they often do during any project.
When it comes to strategy execution, teams too often lose sight of what success looks like, especially as a project is in motion. When you Begin With the End in Mind®, the second habit of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®, leaders and teams can work together to define clear measures for success and create a plan to achieve those measures so that everyone’s on the same page.
Properly identifying lead measures, or activities that are likely to drive success, is the first of many key components in strategy execution. This isn’t just that you’ve checked a box along the way, but that the right activities that will lead to success are taking place.
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“Hitting a milestone on a project is not a true lead measure,” says FranklinCovey senior consultant Andy Cindrich. “For a lead measure to be effective in strategy execution, it has to be both predictive as well as something we can influence.”
Other aspects of strategy execution include ensuring an adequate amount of leadership attention, prioritizing resources at the executive level, maintaining a flexible mindset to allow for innovation when the process inevitably stumbles, and establishing a clear set of guidelines and expectations that are articulated to all parties from the beginning of a given initiative or project.
All that said, knowing what’s required for strategic execution isn’t enough to actually achieve it. Leaders must know how to properly prepare and build a plan with a number of integral pieces in place.
Preparing for Strategy Execution
The first step in properly executing a strategy is defining its objectives and end results. Setting clear goals and the desired outcome will prove paramount. It’s just as important, though, to not let a focus on end goals and objectives cause you to skip steps along the way.
“Almost every project disappointment is a result of unclear or mismanaged expectations,” Cindrich says.
For example, if you launch a project with arbitrary deadlines, then you’ve made a critical decision without thoroughly consulting with stakeholders. Instead, start with stakeholders—doing everything possible to have comprehensive conversations with all concerned parties before a single deadline is set. If key decision makers are not involved, and expectations are not set, you open yourself up to multiple failure points.
Some deadlines, of course, are not arbitrary. However, having stakeholder input will still mitigate risks.
Almost every project that depends on strategy execution could benefit from this clear articulation of expectations, through conversations with stakeholders.
Building an Effective Execution Plan
Nearly six out of ten senior executives believe that their organizations struggle with bridging the gap between strategy formulation and strategy execution, according to an Economist Intelligence Unit survey. This should come as no surprise.
Even the best-laid plans are going to encounter roadblocks—hurdles that must be cleared. For those plans to become a reality, you need to first agree upon the measurements that will indicate you’re headed in the right direction.
Again, these are not milestones; they are lead measures.
Take, for example, one FranklinCovey client: One of the fastest-growing metro areas in North America was struggling with over 30 initiatives deemed critical to support the growing strain on the city’s infrastructure. But these projects had been sitting, uncompleted, for years as the city continued to grow.
Clearly, whatever lead measures had been agreed upon at the start were not working. In the end, new lead measures—simple ones—were all that were needed. What mattered was that the most important people spent dedicated time every week doing uninterrupted work on the projects. Once those key people were given a single key performance indicator that made sense, every other part of the project began to fall into place.
Communicating the Strategy
It’s up to leadership to articulate and execute a clear strategic vision. But poor communication around goals is unfortunately commonplace. In fact, our research has found that only 15% of employees know their organization’s most important goals. How can your teams execute on your strategy if they don’t understand what it is or how they can have a direct impact on it?
Your average project management team might have 12 parallel initiatives. Obviously, not all 12 can be equally important. Yet, the people responsible for those 12 might clamor for an equal amount of mindshare.
This is where higher-level decision-makers must step up. Those who are responsible for what’s best for a department or an entire organization need to make hard choices and show some courage while doing so. Those hard choices then need to be communicated in a way that’s so clear it can’t help but cascade throughout the organization.
Aligning People and Processes
The challenge is to create a shared view of what is important—what matters most.
Another reason projects get in trouble is that we allow the people responsible for the effort to be divorced from the outcome.
Consider this example: A marketing team might be responsible for allocating dollars to a new ad campaign. For designing and paying for mockups. For doing everything as it relates to the look, feel, and cost of a project. But they don’t own sales. What happens when the sales team doesn’t close new business? Marketing blames sales, and sales blames marketing.
Proper alignment of people and processes is key to strategy execution. It’s another way in which effective leadership matters.
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Monitoring and Tracking Progress
Lead measures can keep you attuned to the pace of progress, reinforcing the confidence that you’re on task and on target. These measures can sometimes be typical key performance indicators (KPIs), but other times, they may be a measure of unique behaviors that the team believes will drive success—such as the uninterrupted time needed in the city planning example above.
Every project should have an outlook meeting, typically at a weekly cadence, that allows you to consider the needs and risks ahead. The scope of how far in the future your team will scan for issues ahead would be determined by the kind of project you’re running.
If you’re in manufacturing and your supply lines are simple, that might mean looking ahead two weeks—acknowledging that team members also need to keep abreast of details much further down the road. But if you’re creating a new piece of software and are coordinating teams in various global locations, maybe it’s one month. What matters is the time frame (every week), the length you’re looking ahead (situationally dependent), and what you’re looking for (any risks to your schedule, suppliers, etc., that need to be mitigated).
If you’re managing a restaurant chain with a look-ahead time of two weeks, maybe it’s deliveries of truckloads of food and serving supplies, along with staff scheduling, that are top priorities. If the deliveries don’t arrive on time, it means team members can’t do their jobs and customers can’t be served. Whatever it might be for your business, you can’t monitor and track your progress without first having a mechanism to recognize the risks that may arise.
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Making Adjustments and Knowing When to Say No
Often, people running a project may find an excuse to give leeway when something goes awry. “One of the reasons projects are always late,” Cindrich says, “is that we allow ourselves to change the deadline when the unanticipated happens.”
This is not the same as making continuous improvements or adjustments due to new information. Those can be established during a regular look-ahead meeting. Rather, this refers to letting everyday complications turn into requests for more time and resources.
Maybe the lead programmer on a project just left. The contractor you’ve hired in the interim and their permanent replacement need to get up to speed. Or perhaps the company responsible for all our outsourced work was just acquired. The unexpected happens. Challenges arise. And when those things happen, leaders need to show courage—namely, the courage to say no.
There are moments that require saying “no” to more time or “no” to more resources. Many leaders worry that saying no will hurt their reputation or their team members. But when you say no in these instances, what you’re also saying is that you trust the team you’ve established to get the project done on time with the resources they already have. You trust in their abilities to innovate. If you don’t say no, what you’re really saying is that when issues arise, your standards can drop and timelines can slip. And then when some new challenge arises in the future, you’ve set the precedent that you’ll be just as willing then as you are now to give in, lower expectations, and give away more.
“When people feel stretched by the vision, the strategy, and the goals, they will often ask for more people, more time, or more money to get it done,” Cindrich says. “What they need is better thinking—not more hours of work, more people, a bigger budget, or to push the deadlines out.”
Leaders shouldn’t take this assessment lightly. But there’s a lot of power in saying no—if you have the courage to say it.
Sustaining Strategy Execution Excellence
Flexible thinking can surmount challenges that inevitably arise. This flexibility of thinking underpins and sustains execution excellence and is the key to an environment of ongoing learning and innovation. It’s an ability to get the job done no matter the circumstances. This creates an environment of “directed autonomy,” in the words of Stephen R. Covey, where employees know the stakes, know their restrictions, and know they’re empowered to reach the goal in the most efficient way they possibly can.
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Leaders can do their part by knowing how to effectively guide their teams through these changes—whether they’re small adjustments or big shifts—and by encouraging the development of self-management skills. Self-leadership skills like being proactive, maintaining a growth mindset, knowing how to receive feedback, and managing time and energy effectively can allow organizations to develop teams of resilient, effective individuals who understand their strengths and apply those strengths in ways that can make the biggest difference for your strategy execution.
The Secret to Strategy Execution
The all-too-common gap between strategic vision and the outcome is why strategy execution matters. The oft-cited adage is that “vision without execution is hallucination,” but for those that have lived through a failed project, it can feel more like a nightmare.
Strategy execution includes a number of factors: It’s identifying the proper lead measures and establishing the cadence of a regular, ongoing look-ahead meeting. It’s the courage to say no when asked for more money or people at a problem that requires better thinking. Mostly, though, it’s the willingness to sufficiently prepare beforehand and being ready to adjust once the going gets tough.
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