Execute Company Strategy

Your company has a strategy. Are you confident it is ready to go off without a hitch? Most likely not, as 60%-90% of company strategy implementations fail and only 14% of executives are happy with the execution of a strategy. This post introduces a framework to assess your company’s strategy execution readiness, in order to align leaders around how to bridge your strategy to execution gaps.

Execute Company Strategy

Before a company strategy can be deployed and executed effectively, you need to have leadership alignment around execution readiness. Your leadership team has to ask themselves at least the following four questions:

1. Do we have the best possible circumstances to execute your strategy?
2. If not, what are the gaps to effectively execute your strategy?
3. What are your most important strategy to execution gaps?
4. How and when are you going to address these gaps?

Answers to these questions will provide understanding between your leaders on how they perceive the risk profile of executing the strategy. It will give your leadership team insight if they feel ready to execute their company strategy. But most important, it will create alignment on how your company can create the best possible circumstances to execute the strategy successfully.

Leadership Alignment Company Strategy:

There is collective leadership and common language around purpose, vision, behaviors, strategic capabilities, balanced scorecard and budget objectives. This supports decision making, resource allocation and issue resolution.

• 60% of organizations do not have strategic initiatives in the budget

Mindset and Behaviors Company Strategy:

A resilient, positive and growth mindset culture, with effective behaviors and group dynamics supports alignment, integration and strategy execution. These cultures are proven to outperform negative, fearful cultures with aggressive behaviors. People & Culture get a mention in 6 from 7 researched strategy frameworks, however:

• 30% of managers mention cross unit working as greatest challenge to strategy execution

Performance and Appraisal:

The strategy is cascaded to individual performance level. Objectives , rewards and consequences are clear and include the ‘What’ as well as the ‘How’ we do it. Recruitment policies are in a straight line with values and behaviors. There is action towards performance issues. Reward systems comes up in 6 out of 7 researched strategy frameworks, however:

• 70% of middle management and 90% of front line employees incentives is not linked to strategy

Organization Change:

The organizational structure supports the strategy. There is strategic capability building, clear roles and responsibilities and continuous formal, informal and two-way strategy communication to engage employees. Organizational structure comes up in 7 out of 7 researched strategy frameworks, however:

• In 38% of companies, managers do not inform their team about the chosen strategic direction

Integrated Planning & Monitoring Company Strategy:

There is a strategy implementation plan. A periodic rolling forecast provides visibility in gaps to budget and supports enterprise resource re-allocation.

• Strategic initiatives
• goals
• measurements
• targets

Control, process, information systems and goals are mentioned in 5 out of 7 researched strategy frameworks, however:

• 92% of companies do not report on strategic lead performance indicators

If you and your leadership team ask yourselves the right questions around these five key strategy execution themes, you will create understanding around your strategy to execution gaps. You will start a conversation together about your strategy execution readiness. You will hold up a mirror and ask; Are we ready to execute?

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