The Dilemma of Strategy Execution
Most of CEOs invests their time, efforts, and budgets in the development of business strategies while the effective execution of a strategy is the cornerstone to organizational success!
Strategy execution is about people, for people, and through people at any kind of organizations.
In a survey conducted by Harvard Business School, 95% of company’s employees are unaware of, or don’t understand its strategy.
I believe that strategy execution failures is due to issues related to people, and its mainly about the following:
- Confusion around ownership and responsibility when delivering business objectives that cross functions, has an adverse impact on time to market when launching critical products (lack of alignment).
- Decouple of decision making from facts and data (concerned about HR departments)
- Too many goals (focus issue).
- Conflicting priorities and the relentless trade-off between urgent and important issues.
- Measuring business performance and growth from commercial and financial perspectives without paying attention to health measurements of the organization (eg: eNPs & NPS).
- Low staff morale and Engagement
People experience / perception on how they feel and think about their employers will subsequently affect what they say about their employers, their interest to stay or leave, and ultimately their willingness to put discretionary efforts for organizations to succeed and win.
For successful strategy execution, I recommend the following:
- Adopting the growth mindset across all levels as its always about our ability to learn, develop, and grow, not our academic qualifications.
- HR practitioners to improve their business acumen, period.
- Introducing technology to take over all standardized personnel & business processes.
- HR to rely on people analytics and data driven approaches to decide on people issues and how it affects the implementation of business strategy.
- To invest in leadership capacity development programs across all levels not only people at senior positions.
- Defining clear terms of reference to board of directors, board committees, and role descriptions of each board member.
- Setting an evaluation system for board of directors.
- Introduce Employee Experience, Voice of Employees (VOE), and Net Promoter Score (eNPS) as a leading indicator to executives’ dashboard and as an indication of how strong the relationship between employees and their employers, how employee aligned/misaligned with company mission, and how economically its feasible and would be effective to execute organizational strategy.
- Senior executives to focus on outcome-based planning instead of deliverables (initiatives) and strategy roadmap that might or might not lead to the achievement of defined target/s.
- To have both functional and Team based organizational Structures.
- Introduction of strategy execution models such as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for better people alignment, cross functional cooperation, learning, and effective execution.
- To replace performance management systems with performance development with more focus on feedback and to get rid of performance ratings.
- Last but not least, to view sustainable business growth from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives and to have a balanced view to business performance by focusing on leading and lagging indicators.
Customer Experience (CX) & CRM Specialist | Lean Six Sigma Green Belt | Empowering Business Growth with Strategy and Data-Driven Decisions
3wFostering collaboration is key for any strategy execution. Here is a 5-step process that works most of the time 1. Define the objective & purpose for individual BUs that contribute to overall strategy 2. Assign specific KPI's that directly impact the overall strategy 3. Identify & involve the right people with clear responsibilities & expectations 4. Use effective methods, tools, formats & platforms for seamless collaboration 5. Build trust among team members & stakeholders with a supportive environment to ask questions, share opinions & raise concerns. I read about it in an article & used this approach the best way possible to execute CX strategy for 6 consecutive years & it worked like a charm every time.
Thanks a lot for sharing your advice from real hands-on experience MOHAMED AZIZ, SHRM-SCP , we all know many well-formulated strategies failed due to poor execution.
Leadership Development Consultant
3yVery interesting read with lots of insights. We can also say that as we are moving from visions to purpose, the strategy does need to flexible, as it evolves with changes in purpose and other dynamics. Enjoyed your article, and allow me to comment on making it an easy and thoughtful read with bullet points.
Strategist | Business Consultant
3yI Strongly Agree with all Mentioned Delmas and Solutions, but I like more 2 smart critical points frist one the engagement of the BOD. Second one is focusing on outcome-based planning. Rather than Deliverable
Digital Business Strategy, Organizational Design for Digital Transformation
3yThanks Mr. Mohamed for opening this topic. Traditionally in large organisations senior executives and their boards spend a lot of time defining strategy and the success of the company depends on a great deal on having a great strategy interestingly in the digital world strategy is less important, you should gasp now because traditionally we didn't think anything was more important than strategy but the reality is in the digital economy what we can do what technologies make possible what our customers want changes every day so our strategy is constantly evolving. Our success depends on being able to recognise when the existing strategy isn't quite right and then pivoted to something that will really hump. I would argue it is what every successful digital company will do so we want to focus on not how do you define strategy but rather how do you design yourself so that you can see these opportunities and then quickly deliver on them because that will be the thing that will trip up most companies are designed to do what they do really really well not to change really really fast.