Business Strategy Goals – Strategy implementation is the implementation of a strategic plan to achieve organizational goals. It consists of the day-to-day structure, systems and operational goals that set your team up for success.
Even the best strategic plans can fail without proper execution. In fact, poor performance is more common than you might realize. Research by Bridges Business Consultancy shows that 48 percent of organizations are failing to achieve at least half of their strategic goals, and only seven percent of business leaders believe their organizations are successful in executing their strategy.
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“If you’ve looked at the news lately, you’ve probably seen business stories with grand strategies,” says Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons, who teaches the Strategy Implementation course. “In each case we found a well-formulated but poorly executed business strategy.”
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How can you equip yourself and your team to execute the plan you’ve created? Here are five keys to implementing a successful strategy that you can apply to your organization.
A Harvard Business Review study found that 71 percent of employees at poorly performing companies believe strategic decisions are second-guessed, compared to 45 percent of employees at strong performing companies.
Ensures that decision makers and their teams are aligned on a common goal before implementing a strategic plan. It creates a shared understanding of the larger strategic plan across the organization.
Strategy is not static – it must evolve with new challenges and opportunities. Communication is important to get you and your colleagues on the same page in the planning process and stay aligned over time.
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One obstacle many companies face in implementing an effective strategy is that the role of employees is not designed with strategy in mind.
This can happen before the strategy is formulated, or when the role is assigned to fit the company’s strategy.
In strategy implementation, Simons argues that work is optimized for high performance when aligned with the organization’s strategy. He created the Job Design Optimization Tool (JDOT) that people can use to assess whether their organization’s workplaces are designed to implement successful strategies.
“Each interval can be adjusted narrower or wider or somewhere,” Simons wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “I think the adjustment is done on a slider like on a music amplifier. If you make the right adjustments, you can create workplaces where talented individuals can successfully execute your company’s strategy. But if you don’t get the settings right, it will be difficult for any employee to be effective.
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When it comes to strategy execution, don’t forget the power of clear communication. Given that 95 percent of employees either don’t understand or don’t know their company’s strategy, communication is a skill to improve.
Strategy execution depends on the day-to-day tasks and decisions of every member of your organization, so everyone needs to understand not only the company’s broad strategic goals, but also how their personal responsibilities enable them to achieve those goals.
Data from the Harvard Business Review shows that 61 percent of employees at companies with strong implementations believe that field and line workers are given the information they need to understand the impact of work policies and decisions. In poorly implemented organizations, only 28 percent believe this is true.
To improve your organization’s performance and empower your employees, train managers to communicate the impact of their teams’ day-to-day work, address the organization at all-staff meetings, and foster a culture that celebrates milestones on the way to achieving larger strategic goals.
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Implementation of the strategy depends on continuous evaluation of the target. To effectively measure your organization’s performance, define quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) during the strategic planning phase. Quantitative goals serve as effective means for you and your team to track performance, monitor progress, and assess the need to make changes based on that progress.
For example, your company’s strategic goal may be to increase its customer retention rate by 30 percent by 2024. By recording changes in customer retention rates on a weekly or monthly basis, you can track data trends over time.
If records show that your customer retention rate is decreasing month after month, this may be a sign that your strategic plan is in need because it is not driving the change you want. However, if your data shows steady month-over-month growth, you can predict that you will be able to achieve your goal of increasing this trend by 30 percent by 2024.
While innovation is an important driver for company growth, don’t let it derail your strategy.
Strategic Planning: Alignment Of Goals And Kpis
Develop a process to assess emerging challenges, obstacles, and opportunities to drive innovation and monitor the execution of your current strategy. Who makes the decisions that can change the focus of your strategy? What parts of the strategy are non-negotiable? Answering such front-end questions can provide clarity during implementation.
Also, remember that an unstable organization has no room for growth. Encourage employees to be creative, experiment, and take calculated risks with strategic initiatives in mind.
Setting strategic goals, making plans, and executing strategies each require different skills and come with their own challenges. Remember that even the best formulated strategy can be poorly executed, so consider strengthening your execution skills before setting strategic goals and planning. Developing these skills can have a lasting impact on your organization’s future performance.
Interested in designing systems and structures to achieve your organization’s strategic goals? Explore our eight-week Strategy Execution Course and other strategy courses to improve your strategic planning and execution skills. Download the free flowchart to find the HBS Strategy course that’s right for you.
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Kathryn Cote is a marketing coordinator at Harvard Business School. Before joining HBS, he worked at a SaaS startup, where he discovered his passion for content writing, and at a digital consulting agency specializing in SEO. Ekaterina B.A. From Holy Cross, she studied psychology, education and Chinese. When he’s not working, you can find him traveling, seeing a play or theater, or hunting for the best burger in Boston. This article is the fourth in our Strategic Leadership series, where we explore the qualities of effective business leaders and ways to improve our own leadership skills.
One of the most important operational projects in any company is the process of goal setting, setting future goals, setting key initiatives, and defining metrics to measure success. There are many popular methods to help companies set their goals for the year, from Peter Drucker’s SMART goals, Intel and Google’s OKRs (objectives and key results), psychologist David Van Rooys’s three-step BSQ method (Think Big, Act Small, Move). Fast).
In our experience helping other companies with their strategic planning, we have not found that any particular method of goal setting at Creative Business is better than any other. But one thing we’ve noticed is that most of these frameworks focus only on initiatives and outcomes—rarely connecting to the bigger picture. When this happens, it becomes very easy for employees to focus on individual goals and lose sight of the company’s core purpose and vision.
Instead, the goal setting process should always be aligned with your company’s core philosophy and values.
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At the heart of this framework are your company’s core vision and values, two aspects that serve as the foundation for your company. Your ultimate vision is an eternally high goal. This should not only define your ultimate goal as a business, but is almost impossible to achieve. David Packard called it a “guiding star on the horizon,” a goal forever sought but never achieved.
At Creative Business, for example, our vision is to be the “gold standard” of financial services companies. As times change, so do the standards for our industry, and we must grow and improve to meet our vision.
Core values are important and enduring principles that define what your company is all about. They are the foundation on which your entire company operates, from hiring and management to strategy and operations.
Defining your company’s core values seems simple, but can be one of the most difficult aspects of your company’s strategy. Management Expert Jim Collins (Author)
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) explains that “you can’t set organizational values,” you can only find them. “Your core values are largely determined by the behavior and culture of the people in your company, and it’s very difficult to define.
To properly identify your company’s core values, Collins suggests you build a “Mars team.” Imagine you are asked to build the best attributes of your business on another planet, but you can only send 5-7 people. Who would you send and why? Usually they represent your organization as an example – they show the highest level of competence, have the highest level of trust, and understand the core values.
Group of Mars
