How do you, as a leader, involve the organisation in strategy formulation and execution?
Too often strategy formulation stays a boardroom exercise: many Management Teams take months to formulate a strategy. This results in valuable time that is lost.
If you want your company to breath the strategy, you need to share the strategy and insights in the strategy formulation process with the organisation!
A few key points to do this successfully:
- As a Management Team, you have to stay critical towards you own role in the strategy formulation process. Decide to what level you want to formulate the strategy. Which details do you fill in and which ones do you leave open for middle management to specify?
- Trust the execution power of your organisation. A strategic framework can already be sufficient, so that middle management and subsequently operational management can fill in the further details. In this way you involve them, and you stimulate buy-in, ownership and engagement.
Example: A Management Team of a utilities company starts in January with the formulation of a new strategy. Previous years the Management Team did the specification of the goals per strategic priority herself. However, it took them months before the goals and the implications where adopted by the business. Also, the rest of the company thought the Management Team was being secretive about the sessions and developed a negative attitude towards the outcomes, before the outcomes were even communicated.
This year the team decides to choose a different path: the 3 most important strategic priorities are formulated in general terms. After this is done the members of the Management Team formulate the assignment for middle management to further specify the priorities. For the manager of Customer Service this means that she will decide on how to translate the priority “reliability”. She decides to involve her team and together they formulate 3 objectives: 1) Availability of Customer Service, 2) First Time Right concerning information enquiries, 3) the Net Promoter Score from customers. Together they formulate targets for these objectives and KPI’s. This results in ownership and buy-in on the (strategic) priorities within the different organisational hierarchical layers.
3. Don’t under estimate the power of effective communication during the strategy formulation. Communicate both about content and process. Often people wait until the “content is finished” to communicate. Inform the company about the steps you take to get to completion. Both content and process are valuable and communicating about both of these contributes to establishing buy-in and gaining support from the organisation.
4. Communicate consistently and regularly. Nothing is more frustrated than a lost newsletter or inconsistent messages from management.
Example: Within a manufacturer employees are stimulated to come up with ideas for improvement for better execution of the strategic goals. The managers collect these ideas. The managers discuss within the Management Team meeting. However, often employees don’t get feedback after they submit their ideas for improvement. This makes it seem that their efforts have no results. At the coffee machine people are talking: “ The management does not do anything with our ideas, they don’t listen and why should I be bothered?”
To improve communication the Management Team decides to schedule a bi-weekly communication briefing directly after their meeting. In this briefing the Management Team decides which agenda points will be communicated and the note-taker immediately formulates the message that goes out to the employees. Decisions are clearly communicated and feedback is formulated for the suggestions for improvement. The employees receive the first newsletters sceptically: “ Let’s see how long they stick to this initiative”. However, the Management Team does stick to sending out the newsletter, and as a result the enthusiasm of employees to come up with ideas increases.
Next week the third and final ingredient: Leadership. Are you a leader that truly develops your employees?
Interested in the first one, strategic consensus?