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You spend your days taking care of short-term needs and often putting out fires. Meantime, you do your best to strategic plan for the long-term.
However, if you’ve ever wondered why your masterful strategic plan hasn’t delivered strong results, many companies wonder the same thing.
They devote all kinds of resources to devise a great strategic plan. But in the end, they don’t manage to benefit from their planning. Why?
The critical reason is actually quite simple. They don’t link their strategy to execution.
Strategy and execution must be simultaneously cohesive at all levels – your organizational structure, business processes, human resources and technology.
Here are the 10 execution values to achieve your strategic objectives:
1. Maximize your talents
Without knowing it, companies tend to be complacent about their strengths. That means they fail to fully capitalize on them or fail to understand how their customers will rejoin them.
You can’t make smart decisions unless you know who you are and what your company is.
The solution is to reassess your strengths. Recall instances where and why you succeeded. Write down the reasons, and then determine what you must do to add to your strengths.
This also means you should be continually evaluating your core activities starting with your capabilities, collecting and analyzing data, and performing inquests of them.
Analyze the choices you make in the face of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Yes, a SWOT analysis will aid you.
2. In goal-setting, don’t engage in self-doubt
As you aim high on your goal-setting, make sure your company is fanatically dedicated to excellence in your execution. That means not settling at any level.
It starts at the top. You must set the highest-possible objectives, convey your reasoning to everyone in your organization and insist that each person strenuously perseveres with commitment and valor.
Of course, you must show leadership in these regards, too.
3. Think ambidextrously
Simply put, the left and right hands of your company must coordinate to the best of their abilities. That calls for a culture of ambidexterity.
Companies that are ambidextrous in practices and processes are most-likely to prevent setbacks.
You must focus on using strategy and execution simultaneously. Vigorously anticipate and view operational and technical functions and their outcomes for your entire sector.
Some examples:
— In finance, staffers should explain the relationship of each line item – to enhance each strategy and why it helps the overall welfare of your organization.
— Professionals in human resources must understand their roles in how to maximize profits in alignment with your overall objectives.
— Information technology employees must execute their migrations or upgrades with their eyes on solutions to best fit with your business strategy for the marketplace.
4. Delineate the role of each employee
Meet with each person to explain the big picture of all the issues facing your organization.
Specify you want them to make a personal commitment to make a difference in all details – from big to small. In this way, they will confidently help design and implement strategy for solutions.
While you’re at it, be sure to get good employee ideas, not whining.
5. Line up your culture and company structure with your strategy
Your identity – mission and value propositions – must be underpinned by your culture and structure.
A positive company culture means employees get your strategy and are successful in execution of strategy. Your metrics and incentives must reinforce effective employee behavior on a consistent basis.
When managers become coaches, you get a higher-performing workforce. You will have replaced mediocrity with strong performance. To optimize talent management, you might need to develop a coaching culture.
The same goes for your hierarchy. Your structure must enhance your abilities.
If your culture and structure don’t support your brand, it’s decision time. If you can’t change them, delete them.
6. Overcome obstacles with cross-functionality
In teamwork, your employees who have different functions must team up cohesive creatively and nonchalantly to accomplish goals together.
Yes, your finance, marketing, sales and operations personnel must be able to collaborate – communicate well – in working together and learning from each other.
For better teamwork, eliminate any destructive conflict.
7. Stay current in technology
It’s universally expected that you be on top of your game digitally.
You will not innovate and you will waste your tech investment, if your technology isn’t cutting-edge. You must be capable of introducing new interactions to your stakeholders – employees and customers, alike.
To fulfill your branding promises, you must economically align your business strategy with your tech expertise for great user experiences.
So, for instance, this means you might have to investigate new cloud options, outsource tech functions and decide what to keep internally.
It’s especially critical that your CFO uses best practices to stay current in technology.
8. Decide how to simplify implementation
It’s not easy, but focus on simplicity where feasible. In today’s age, business is inherently complex.
Everything seems multilayered and polygonal. But investments in people, systems and supply chains must drive value.
So for value-creation when you must add to your simplicity, harness your strategy as a controller to decide how and when to increase your convolution.
Be sure to make certain you install competencies to manage any increases in complexity.
9. Configure your value chain for competitiveness
OK, so now that you’re dealing with elements more effectively, don’t forget your value chain. You need vendors, brokers, distributors and retailers.
So you need to deepen your relationships with them.
That entails marketing to them. For maximum revenue, you need them to be effective and passionate about your company.
It also means keeping all real-time and other commitments you make to them from finance to operations.
10. Continuously manage and upgrade your culture
Company-wide trust is mandatory, especially so in our volatile, fast-changing world.
To maintain optimal communication in a disruptive marketplace, don’t let your company’s culture evolve into a monolithic bureaucracy.
Take steps to enhance your cultural attributes for flexibility, mutual encouragement and innovation.
From the Coach’s Corner, use the 10 principles to execute values. They will guarantee your strategic plan works.
Consider these related sources of information:
Finance Checklist for Strategic Planning, Growth — Strategic planning in finance for growth means avoiding trendy fads. Instead, it requires an ongoing down-to-earth approach in order to create value. Here are seven steps.
Employees Will Help You in Strategic Planning If You Use 3 Tips — Have you developed your strategy? It’s important to proceed without engaging in self doubt. But you’re concerned about involving your employees? There are three closely related basics in working with your employees to get the job done.
Mindset, Best Practices in Strategic Leadership for Growth — Whatever your situation in pursuing growth, the mindset and best practices in strategic leadership means maintaining a delicate balance – preparing for details and keeping an open mind regarding business uncertainty.
“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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