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Without execution, there is no strategy.

Think about that statement and how it rings true. Execution is what makes your strategy happen. It’s what turns your ideas into results. You should be putting more time into the planning and execution of the strategy than you did into its development.

Otherwise, you spend all that time developing the right strategy, and you don’t achieve any of the expected results. This happens all too often because organizations either behave as if the development of the strategy is the end goal, or they don’t take enough time to plan the rollout of the strategy effectively. The main question you should be asking yourself is, “Do our daily actions align with our strategic priorities?”

Too many times we have seen clients waste time, energy, and resources on the wrong priorities.

They don’t define a set of critical success factors to ensure the decisions they make help make progress on their strategy. The company that implements a new technology system instead of fixing the underlying broken business processes, which only enables you to make bad decisions faster. The company that launches a new product without understanding the potential marketplace and what its’ customers truly value. The company that relies on service excellence for success but doesn’t appropriately measure their service. I could go on and on.

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If you are experiencing these or similar pain points, here are six steps you can follow to ensure that you are spending time, energy, and resources on the right initiatives:

1. Clearly define your vision and strategy so that the desired outcomes and critical path are obvious and clear to everyone in the organization. Focus on critical success factors that drive value to the customer.
2. Develop a communication plan to effectively communicate the strategy, and keep it top of mind for your employees. Deliver the message in a way that ensures employees know their roles and what is expected of them in making the strategy happen.
   
   
3. Develop a plan on how the strategy will be executed. Identify the key activities, who is responsible for completing those activities, by when, and what is the expected outcome.
   
   
4. Identify and measure outcomes and defendable results, not activities. Choose a small number of “success metrics” that will show progress towards your vision and strategy.
   
   
5. Make decisions that align with your strategic direction. Ensure your people are using criteria like effort, impact, capability, and alignment to triage projects and problems so that you are working on those ideas that can move your strategy forward. If an idea doesn’t help you make progress towards your strategy and vision, why put any time or people behind it?
   
   
6. Review results regularly and make required adjustments. This means continue to communicate the strategy and remind people how important it is. Strategy is organic so you constantly review where you want to be and how you will get there.

These are a few things that not many organizations do well but that everyone needs to master. Your next step is to ensure you have a clearly defined strategy and bring people together towards a common goal.

If you are interested in discussing any of these concepts further, please get in touch - I would be happy to speak with you about how they would apply to your organization.

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Andrew Miller

About the Author

Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller is a leading expert in operational excellence, having written two commercially published books on the subject, Redefining Operational Excellence (AMACOM, 2014) and The Unified Theory of Profitability (Business Expert Press, 2016).

He is a Principal at Carly Rian Group, a management consulting firm that partners with organizations to solve business problems related to cost, quality, and time. Andrew can be reached at andrew.miller@carlyriangroup.com or www.carlyriangroup.com.