How many times have you read books, taken courses, attended events, or paid for a consultation session because you needed a strategy to grow your sustainable business financially; yet 6 months later, you didn’t have any tangible results to show for the time and money you invested in those books, consultation, event, etc? You may have guessed already that it’s easy to find strategies but not so easy to carry out effective strategy execution.
Most times, it’s not that the strategy or consultant is flawed. The challenge is that knowing the right strategy to execute for sustainable business growth is one thing and knowing how to manage the execution process is a totally different job that requires different skill sets.
So, keep the following points handy to ensure that you and your team are equipped to see good return on investment for the strategies you choose to execute.
1. Align goals for strategy execution
To manage a strategy execution process effectively, you need to align your employee goals with the goals you’ve set for the organization. In a recent survey conducted by Mentis, 73% of respondents said that the area where managers needed to improve most was aligning employee goals with those of the organization.
These 3 tips can help you here
- Involve your team when setting goals. Please don’t do all the talking, give each member time to share their ideas and listen attentively.
- Find out their personal goals as it relates with building and sustaining customer devotion and align their objectives with yours where necessary.
- Break down goals into doable and measurable tasks.
2. Improve continuously
Make it easy for your team members to exceed expectations and add value to everything they do. How do you do this?
- Communicate high expectations. If your team knows how highly you think of them and expect of them; it will affect their performance level positively. This is called the pygmalion effect.
- Turn failure into an opportunity to learn and grow. Strategy execution is not always a straight path so there might small falls and even bug falls. Don’t make your team feel bad when their efforts don’t turn out positively. That would make them become scared of trying new things or new ways of doing things. Instead, let them know that you see the effort that they put in achieving the goal and you appreciate them. Go farther by asking them what challenges they faced, where they’d do differently next time, areas where they see opportunities for improvement, and how they think you or other team members can help.
- Scale yourself and your team. Your business can only grow to the extent that you and your team grows. Whatever your goals are, ensure that you and your team have the skill to achieve the goal. Invest in trainings through books, courses, mentorship, workshops, etc
- Set metrics for measuring progress on goals and make it a norm for team members to find better ways of doing what they do. Also, recognise and celebrate members when they think out of the box.
3. Manage change for successful strategy execution
Whether your goal is to embrace AI, adopt a new leadership style, embrace a better operational model or build and sustain customer devotion; achieving it will cause some changes in your organization and the way your team works.
It is important that you understand what change needs to happen, how it will affect the role of each team member, and how you’re going to help your team comply with the changes.
A study by Gartner found that 50% of change initiatives fail, only 34% are a clear success, and the remaining 16% are a mix of failure and success.
But don’t let that scare you because nobody is born with change management skills. It’s something that is learned; so you too can learn it.
These tips will get you on the right track.
Understand what change the strategy you want to adopt requires
One of the worst things that can happen when you embrace a growth strategy is to discover midway that you need to change and you’re not prepared for it.
Knowing what changes are necessary for a growth strategy to work enables you and your team to make the needed adjustments for success.
Communicate the importance of the change
Please do not assume your team will understand why they have to make certain changes; so take the time to explain why the change is necessary and how it makes things better for all of you. Also, help them to understand the cost of not changing versus the benefits of embracing the change.
Share your vision and plan with your team
What’s your vision as regards the growth strategy you’re adopting and the change that it requires? Share them with your team and let them join you as you make plans to achieve the vision. Allow them to own the planning and implementation process with you.
Prepare for readjustments
No plan works out exactly as it’s drafted on paper. Be ready to deal with unexpected roadblocks, make adjustments, and refine your plan and process.
Need support or guidance executing a growth strategy for your business?
Strategy Implementation