Last week, my second eBook Get Rid of the Strategy Tourists was launched.
I selected 3 of my favourite tips from the book.
Tip #1. Don’t break the strategy chain
Setting individual objectives isn’t an isolated exercise. In fact, it’s the final step in a series of events, all aimed at dividing the strategy into smaller parts. The sum of your individual objectives is your strategic action plan at the minutest level of detail. In order to make it all add up, the relationship with the next level up is crucial. Without it, the organisational value is completely lost and could result in great sounding objectives which don’t support your company strategy. Here are some practical tips:
- Make sure you understand the overall strategy.
- Make sure you have a good understanding of the objectives defined on the organisational level above you.
- Spend time communicating the strategy to your team.
- Visualise the link between lower- and higher-level objectives.
- Take ongoing responsibility to align objectives across hierarchical levels.
- Take ownership to connect lower-level goals with yours and make certain yours fit with the next level up.
- Don’t expect others to do it for you.
Tip #2. Make a clean sweep
A large or medium-sized company often has lots of great methodologies, tools and systems that have been piling up over the years, or even decades, each (hopefully) having been useful at some point in time. Today, however, the Strategy Execution process looks like a house originally constructed as a simple two-bedroom building in the 1970s that has since seen the addition of 27 new rooms in 18 different styles. Make an inventory of all existing material and sort them into three groups:
- Essentials that you want to continue to use.
- The non-essentials, but nice to haves.
- And last, but not least… all the duplicates and outdated materials and methodologies.
After some thorough research of all departments, you could easily end up with three piles large enough to fill a boardroom table. It also helps to get away from your desk and talk to managers in the field. They will give you valuable insights into the usability of the materials and methodologies – something you can’t figure out just by looking at documents.
Tip #3. Automate with care
Imagine that you want to automate part of the individual objective-setting process. You start by selecting a software package. You launch an expensive IT project to customise the solution. Nine months later, you receive many suggestions (and complaints) from managers regarding the user-friendliness of the software. After a closer look, you decide they are right and agree the underlying process needs to change. But that would demand, yet again, some quite extensive IT system changes. You find it inappropriate to launch a new IT project as the previous one was more expensive than anticipated. So you decide to wait. My tip: I would suggest you either choose a standard software solution and change your process or postpone automation until you are 100 percent happy with the underlying process.
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