Top 10 tips for strategy implementation

Implementing strategy is a rare and highly appreciated skillset that sets apart the most successful and influential leaders in any business operating in any industry or sector.

The Strategy Implementation Institute found in 2020 that only 52% of organizations achieve two-thirds of their own strategic objectives. This is compounded by the fact that only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing and communicating strategy are able to explicitly list three of their company’s strategic priorities, and why a mere 5% of employees collectively responsible for strategy implementation can recall their own organization’s strategic objectives.

From this insight, it appears that far too many organizations focus on operational or tactical priorities rather than strategic ones (or the why an organization does what it does). As such, leaders are often asked to implement new strategy objectives but are not provided the roadmap to do so.

To help with this predicament, the Strategy Implementation Institute developed a roadmap as part of its body of knowledge. It covers seven key areas that everyone needs to know and outlines the required skills. These seven key areas and a few additional helpful tips follow.

1. Leadership Excellence: A leader’s role in strategy implementation is to drive and champion it. The employees are the ones taking the implementation actions every day. Leaders need to stay engaged throughout the implementation to constantly inspire and coach their employees while overseeing and tracking the implementation.
    
2. Financial Value: The goal is to develop and grow the financial value of the organization derived from the proposed strategy implementation. Once an organization has set its new strategy, it's essential to ensure that the budget is set after the strategy and it is fully aligned to the strategic objectives. The budgeting cycle is the most effective way to keep the business - and its finances – under control while implementing strategy.
    
3. Business Model: Adopting a new strategy means changing the business model. Using the Galbraith Star Model, changes to the business model may include strategy, structure, processes, rewards and/or people. Sometimes these business changes are minor and other times they require a whole business model transformation, for example, when adopting digitalization. Regardless, the business model must change to some extent to successfully support new strategy implementation.
    
4. Stakeholder management: The initial challenge is to present the new strategy to the whole organization. Leaders recognize that the launch is only 15% of the overall implementation communication goals. Too frequently in stakeholder management, communication around the implementation dissipates after the first six months. Stakeholder management places emphasis on nurturing the communications throughout the whole implementation journey.
    
5. Culture Evolution: Culture drives the way an organization implements its strategy. Two organizations can have the same strategy but how they implement will always be different as in every organization, the culture is different. Culture no longer eats strategy for breakfast because of the speed we are working today. Like Canadian President, Justine Trudeau once said “the pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.” There is a wonderful thing about technology, particularly in a digital environment. It changes everything! Strategy now drives the culture in many successful organizations and that drives the way leaders must implement strategy.
    
6. Employee engagement: Strategy by default means doing things differently and employees have to feel inspired to make the extra effort. According to Gallup’s recent State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees are either not engaged or actively disengaged at work. If your employees are disengaged, it is extremely difficult to inspire them to implement new strategies, which often requires doing more with the same resources. This is why it’s important to prepare employees with the right implementation attitude, knowledge and skills.
    
7. Track Performance: Taking corrective action along the way is critical for strategy implementation success though benefits realization. But how do you know where you are and what action to take if you are not diligently tracking your performance throughout the whole implementation journey? Tracking performance using a balanced scorecard and strategy map is an essential discipline. This is about ensuring the organization has the right leading and lagging measures in place to manage strategy implementation and the discipline to constantly review and communicate its performance.

Here are a few other helpful tips to improve strategy implementation:

• Develop a roadmap and use the “magic of 90 days” to take action with appropriate measures and metrics to assess performance. This is a powerful principle for successful strategy implementation where the aim is to achieve (at least) one measurable action that makes a discernible difference every 90 days.
• The “rule of seven” quite simply states that it takes an average of seven interactions before your strategy objectives are understood. That is, communication of new strategy objectives needs to be dynamic. Simply, employees who do not understand the new strategy objectives are unable to align their daily activities to its successful implementation.
• Ensure reviews become part of the organization’s culture. To change the dialog, ask this question: “What have you done this week to implement the strategy?” By asking this question at the start of every meeting, executives and middle managers place strategy and its implementation where it should be — front and centre.

Like Robin Speculand says “only when strategy is successfully executed (through benefits realization and benefits reporting) do you know if it was a good strategy. Only when it’s executed well do customers notice the difference. Only when the execution succeeds does it positively impact shareholder (or customer) value.”

Like Harvard Business School Professor, Michael E. Porter stated, strategy and its implementation is the deliberate “choice to perform activities differently, or to perform different activities, better than market competitors” in the delivery of your organization’s value proposition.