Your next strategic planning summit is just around the corner! Excitement, anticipation, and maybe a bit of anxiety are building in the boardroom and amongst the executive team. Conversations might shift to a possible new vision, strategic direction, and considerations in the prevailing external environment.
Three years ago, your board and executive team experienced a riveting strategic planning retreat at a well-known resort. The retreat included fine dinners, 18 holes, spa sessions, and three days of dialogue, discussions, and decisions. The 1000-year-old methodology was facilitated by a well-meaning facilitator, who mined from participants’ assessments of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses compared with competitors and external opportunities, threats, and strengths. You may have tweaked standing projects or expanded initiatives. Participants departed with a sense of possibility, change, and a renewed purpose!
After the session, your organization created a list of initiatives and plans that needed to be completed in the next one to three years. On your shelf, in real time or metaphorically, is the famous three-ring binder that evolves into a more distant memory every week. Strategic conversations and many initiatives are no longer seemingly urgent and are consistently pushed to the back burner for other, more pressing daily operational needs. The hopes and spirit of fulfilling a new vision weigh heavily on the team in a slow suffocation, contracting future possibilities, stifled with each passing month, and drowned in the endless churning of projects and daily tasks.
What happened?
What’s going on is that your exciting strategic planning session and its promises dissipate with every passing week and become bothersome to remember or talk about, a thorn in the side of the increasing load of work you need to churn out every day. Your days are full, you are constantly busy, and strategic initiatives steadily remain at the starting gate awaiting their turn to be a priority.
The root cause of poor strategic plan execution is the lack of an execution plan, attention to behavioral changes, KPIs/measures of success, or consequences for not fulfilling the commitment. Most strategic plans forget or neglect to include the people component, including what changes are needed at the front line, mid-management, and executive levels.
Behavioral change rarely happens at the stroke of the pen. Eloquently crafting a strategy on paper does not guarantee that it will become a reality and does not constitute a commitment to the future. Most strategic planning or visioning sessions are misappropriated because they omit the people component. Most often, strategic initiatives require a behavioral change to favor a carefully crafted strategic plan that is most often just a list of projects without a given plan of execution.
Breathing new life into your plan
Unfortunately, many leaders don’t act like or speak like it is their responsibility and accountability to change their behavior as a model for others for the sake of fulfilling an organizational vision and strategy. If you want your team and organization to change, you must first change yourself!
The root cause of the lack of execution connects to the basics.
Clarity of the vision and strategies: The vision and strategic direction are to be communicated frequently, consistently, and coherently in the employees’ language. Every action, position description, committee meeting, goal, key measurement, and recruitment effort has a strategic tie to the vision and strategy; otherwise, it is a serious waste of resources.
Constant emphasis on the most important goals is needed from every manager, supervisor, CEO, and board member. Over 40% of employees are unable to name the organization’s most important goals and how their job connects to what is important to the organization; about half just go through the motions.
Expectations for accountability and performance measures are needed throughout the organization. Over half of the employees surveyed express that they are not accountable for the regular progress toward the organization’s goals. A majority of employees, up to 87%, are not clear on how their daily actions support a goal.
In summary:
- Tell people the goal and why it is important often and more frequently than you believe is needed.
- Cocreate action plans with employees to fulfill the goals, including check-in dates, key milestones, and measures of satisfaction or success. These measures should be tied to performance evaluations. As a leader, model accountability; your performance should be tied to the measures of success and strategic execution.
- Gain commitment from employees to support the goal and question actions that are contrary to the goal. Model this commitment in meetings and dialogues by simply asking, “How does this meeting/action/conversation support our strategic goal?”
- Reevaluate your process for decision making and allocation of resources that may support or hinder the strategic goals.
- Communicate, at least quarterly, how the organization is performing to the goals and measures.
- Conduct surveys that assess your organization’s alignment with what it believes is important and its performance. Move beyond just a culture or engagement survey, which typically does not focus on vision and strategic execution ownership.
- Be prepared and flexible to pivot and communicate the reason for the pivot.
- Celebrate success and constantly be compelling to solidify and regain commitment to the goals.
A leader’s job is never done: they are constantly on, compelling, visionary, focused, inclusive, vulnerable, and model the ability to make and execute decisions on behalf of the organization.
Avoid the slow suffocation of a vision and strategy by looking inward to your ownership and accountability. This will breathe life along with relevant and pragmatic action into the strategic direction of your organization.
