Change strategy for strategic reasons only

Strategy making for any large business is BIG business. Leaders of business organizations have exciting processes around strategy formulation and invest large sums of money and time to have the best strategy in place. Some companies employ consultants.

A year later, when revisiting the strategy some learn that they did not come close to meeting their targets and objectives.

This is the common frustrating thing, I hear from managers who failed to deliver on strategy.

The breakdown in meeting goals often points to one critical reason, failure to execute.

Why does this routinely happen in organizations? When a strategy is communicated to the organization it is generally with the expectation that the new initiatives are a top priority because they are critical to the success of the organization.

This is where the breakdown begins. What is not communicated, is, what happens to the ongoing strategies so painstakingly developed that are currently active and were a part of previous years' key strategic initiatives. Are the newest always the most important or do strategies in progress realizing good results take precedence?

Prioritization

Good leaders understand the importance of prioritization and getting the right balance. While they know there are a lot of important initiatives, they prioritize and rank them to align with the organizational strategic direction.

The simple method that can be used to assist you in prioritization is - start, stop and continue. To start new projects, what projects do we have to stop? For those projects that we are unable to stop, they should remain on the list as those that we need to continue.

Unfortunately, the fear of pausing or stopping initiatives leads to the growing quantity on the continue list, which causes the list to become large and difficult to manage. The hardest step as a leader is to identify what needs to stop and when.

Unless there is a change in the resources available to complete all the initiatives, some initiatives need to be stopped to make room for new ones. Strategy is not about changing everything in place but getting the alignment with the external and internal changes to gain and maintain competitive advantage.

Companies have a tendency to raise expectations on a year-on-year basis and to achieve them they come up with new strategies and let go of old strategies. Prioritization will ultimately help prevent your strategy from failing.

Be realistic in goal setting

Setting expectations high is great, but only if you put the right resources behind plans to achieve them. Goals without allocating resources can only serve to demoralize employees.

How many of us have been in companies that put targets in place but do not provide the funds, time or people to accomplish them? Unfortunately, it's a common occurrence. Strategy should be simple.

A simple plan is easily understood and has fewer moving parts, that may end up breaking down. While it's important to adjust strategy to respond to events, constantly changing strategy where it is never finalized, is the path to ruin.

Change strategy only if the environment, competition, customer needs and wants or any other factor making your strategy obsolete has changed but not for the sake of changing strategy to satisfy your psyche, that you have new strategies in place.

Periodically, with your relevant team, pause and ask the question "are my strategies still capable of making my business win" and check the health of your plan. Keep shaping and re-shaping your plans to get the best fit to adequately respond to the challenges to capitalize on opportunities.

If you see potential failure or real failure of strategies not only should you question the strategy, but also execution effectiveness.

Ask questions such as, do we have the right people? Do people understand the strategy well? Are people executing effectively? Have we invested the right resources to support execution? Have we measured performance against the set criteria and have we given it enough time to see the returns?