I've seen firsthand the challenges organizations face when trying to turn their strategic plans into reality. Despite the best intentions and most brilliant strategies, many companies struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and effective execution.
In this post, I'll outline some of the top challenges in strategy execution and provide practical advice on how to overcome them.
Challenge #1: Lack of Alignment and Buy-In
One of the biggest obstacles to successful strategy execution is a lack of alignment and buy-in across the organization. If employees at all levels don't understand and embrace the strategy, execution will be an uphill battle.
To overcome this:
Engage key stakeholders for input early in strategy development. Getting input and perspective from stakeholders across the organization is vital for ensuring the strategy is well-informed, realistic, and more likely to be embraced later. Early involvement creates psychological ownership over the strategy versus it feeling like something imposed top-down. It surfaces potential roadblocks and allows the strategy to be shaped by the people closest to customers, processes, and implementation realities.
Communicate the strategy clearly and repeatedly through various channels. Clear, consistent communication is essential for ensuring the rationale and details of the strategy are fully understood across all levels. Using multiple channels like town halls, videos, print materials, and regular manager check-ins allows the message to reach everyone in the way they best consume information. Repetition is key, as brain science shows people need to hear things many times before it truly sinks in.
Connect the strategy to employees' roles so they see how they contribute. When individual employees can connect the overarching strategy to the work, they do day-to-day, it makes the strategy feel far more tangible and meaningful. They can see how their efforts lead to broader objectives. Finding those linkages and making them explicit gives people greater purpose and motivation to fully lean into strategic shifts.
Gain visible commitment and modeling of the strategy from senior leaders. For any major change initiative to take hold, people must see leaders truly embodying it through their actions, decisions, and messaging. If senior stakeholders merely pay lip service to the strategy while behaving in contradictory ways, it will breed cynicism fast. Vocal and visible championship from those at the top is a powerful driver of buy-in throughout the ranks.
Challenge #2: Competing Priorities and Silos
In many organizations, strategies get derailed by competing priorities, departmental silos, and a lack of cross-functional coordination. Turf wars and misaligned incentives exacerbate the problem.
Solutions:
Clarify and commit resources to a few key strategic priorities. When there are too many conflicting priorities vying for limited resources and attention, strategic initiatives get compromised or stalled.
Establish cross-functional teams and governance to manage execution. Silos and lack of cross-functional coordination creates redundancies, handoff issues, and suboptimal decision-making. Overcoming this challenge is crucial for focusing efforts, achieving seamless execution, and operating as a cohesive whole.
Align performance management and incentives to the strategic goals. When employees see their performance, objectives, metrics, and incentives directly link to executing the strategy, it signals ‘this is a priority’. If performance goals are tied solely to departmental, individual or site goals, it perpetuates territorial competition.
Break down silos through job rotation and open communication. It builds enterprise-wide perspective. Having employees rotate across different roles and functions increases their understanding of interdependencies and constructs their problem-solving with the overall organization in mind versus just their silo. It boosts cross-pollination of ideas. Rotations facilitate sharing diverse perspectives and best practices across boundaries which can generate innovative solutions tied to strategic goals. When people have worked in other groups, it builds familiarity, trust, and connections across the organizational network - essential for the level of cross-functional collaboration strategic execution requires.
Challenge #3: Inadequate Execution Capabilities
Having a world-class strategy means nothing without the skills and systems to carry it out effectively. Organizations can have the best strategic vision but still fall woefully short on delivering results if they lack robust execution capabilities. Building these muscle skills equips teams to expertly navigate the complexities of strategic change.
To build execution muscle:
Invest in building execution skills like project management and change management. Strategy execution does not happen through luck or guesswork. Project management skills like defining deliverables, resource planning, risk management, etc. instill the structure and discipline required to systematically drive initiatives through to completion. Change management capabilities ensure adoption by addressing people's resistance to new processes/systems. Most strategic initiatives span multiple functions, departments and teams. Robust project and change management protocols create the integration mechanisms, shared language, and communication rhythms that allow diverse groups to operate in lockstep during execution, spanning silos. They build organizational capabilities. Achieving strategic results isn't a one-off event. By developing execution skill mastery across the company through formal training and certifications, it cultivates execution as an institutional core competency for the long-term.
Simplify and streamline key operational processes. Eliminate non-value-added activities. Over time, operational processes can become bloated, inefficient, and weighed down by legacy practices. Simplifying cuts out unnecessary steps, handoffs, and bureaucracy that bog down execution speed and sap productivity. Simpler processes require less specialized knowledge, which lowers execution risk when staffing changes occur. New people can get up to speed quicker.
Implement systems, tools, and metrics to track execution progress. You must have objective data to measure performance. When progress is transparent, it creates a motivating sense of achievement and accountability as milestones are checked off. It allows for continuous improvement of execution capabilities. The data generated enables analysis to optimize future task planning, resourcing, and execution approach effectiveness.
Consider bringing in expertise through hiring or consulting. Execution knowledge transfer is desired, along with continuous improvement of the execution skills, governance, and project delivery. Working alongside seasoned execution experts provides an opportunity for staff to develop their own capabilities, improving organizational execution capability.
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Challenge #4: Cultural Resistance to Change
Even if employees intellectually understand the need to adapt, an organizational culture anchored in the status quo can reject strategic shifts. Inertia and fear of change loom large. Corporate culture can be one of the hardest things to change, yet it is a formidable blocker if misaligned with strategy. Even slight divergences between an organization's culture and the shifts required by its new strategic direction introduces friction. Overcoming cultural resistance enables smoother adoption of new mindsets and ways of operating.
Steps to drive a shift:
Directly address the perceived risks and benefits of change. People inherently fear change, especially when it impacts their day-to-day work routines. By proactively acknowledging the perceived risks upfront and counterbalancing them with the potential upsides, you reduce resistance. Be transparent about addressing concerns like job security, added workload, capability deficits, etc. But also paint a motivating vision of the improvements and opportunities the changes will unlock. This open dialogue builds trust.
Highlight crises or burning platforms that make change essential. While the overall vision may be compelling, humans are also highly motivated by crisis and burning platforms that demand immediate action. Highlighting quantifiable threats like market share losses, customer defections, cash flow risks, or other burning issues makes the costs of not changing crystal clear. It creates productive organizational urgency to propel strategic shifts.
Enlist change champions to role model and reinforce new behaviors. Even when a strategy is logically communicated, changing habits requires role modeling from respected champions. These formalized change agents embed into teams to actively demonstrate new mindsets and practices in action. Their consistent advocacy, coaching, and forced repetition is invaluable for making strategic changes stick as new social norms.
Celebrate small wins and recognize those embracing the new strategy. Meaningful transformation takes time, so it's important to celebrate process milestones and recognize those going above and beyond to drive execution. This positive reinforcement pollinates successful new behaviors and fuels continued motivation. It's easy for skeptics to dismiss grand future goals, but smaller incremental wins prove the shifting reality and value.
Challenge #5: Losing Steam Over Time
Initial enthusiasm eventually gives way to fatigue, distraction, or complacency. People tend to revert to old habits once the pressure is off or tough times hit. Strategic shifts require sustainable effort and vigilance over long periods. However, complacency, fatigue, turnover, and constantly shifting priorities threaten to derail progress. Combating loss of momentum keeps teams focused and steadily advancing towards milestones instead of succumbing to distraction or discouragement when hurdles inevitably arise.
Ways to maintain momentum:
Embed strategy reviews into regular management rhythms. The strategy is not a ‘set it and forget it’ activity. It's easy for the daily whirlwind of operations to consume everyone's attention, causing strategic priorities to drift out of focus. Institutionalizing strategy reviews into calendared management meetings and reporting cycles makes execution an ingrained rhythm. It keeps the strategy top-of-mind and allows for consistent tracking, issue resolution, and reinforcement of priorities before they get derailed.
Continuously reallocate resources from legacy to strategic priorities. Businesses often fall into the inertia of continuing to fund and staff legacy activities that are no longer aligned with new strategic goals. Maintaining an unflinching commitment to continuously shift resources (budget, people, time) away from low-impact efforts and towards higher-impact strategic work is vital. It starves the momentum-killers and fuels strategic acceleration.
Rotate fresh leaders into key execution roles periodically. Even the most dedicated leaders can run out of gas after spearheading major initiatives over an extended period. Rotating new leaders into critical roles at calculated intervals injects revitalized energy, fresh perspectives, and a renewed sense of organizational focus on the strategy's successful delivery.
Revisit and adapt the strategy as situations change. While realigning resources is important, so too is realigning the strategy itself when circumstances demand it. No strategic plan can perfectly predict the future. Regularly pressure-testing assumptions and adjusting as customer needs, competitor moves, or external factors evolve prevents an organization from doggedly pursuing an outdated or irrelevant strategy.
These practices enforce the mindset that effective strategy execution is an ongoing process rather than a one-and-done event. They instill crucial behavioral habits of consistently prioritizing, optimizing resources, maintaining leadership stamina, and staying coordinated with marketplace realities. Without these systemic mechanisms, even initially promising strategies tend to slowly fray and dissipate over time as more immediate fires demand attention. These steps protect strategic integrity for the long-haul.
While challenging, delivering strategic goals is far from impossible. With focus, committed leadership, and supporting execution capabilities, organizations can turn their strategies into real-world success stories.
If your organization has struggled with realizing strategic goals, we can help. From facilitating the development of your strategic plan to aligning your portfolio with strategic objectives, from developing project managers, project standards, and governance processes to enabling best practices to improve execution capabilities, we offer services tailored to your organization and needs. For more information or to schedule a call, visit us at:
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