14 April 2016
The Challenges of Strategy – How well do you Develop, Communicate and Implement your Company’s Strategy?

The Challenges of Strategy – How well do you Develop, Communicate and Implement your Company’s Strategy?

Strategic VisionWhen managers or leaders are asked “what is strategy?” several different answers are given.  Often managers say that a strategy is a plan. Some organisations claim to have a number of different strategic plans: one for each key department or division. They may not have an overview of what the organisation intends to deliver. Consequently, if this is a local government organisation it may have a plan for housing, another for street management, a third for HR and so on. You may ask – so what’s the problem? Or, like me, you may be very concerned about the siloed thinking this represents.

What if? – the repair of roads is more than expected and therefore needs more manpower and results in higher costs than budgeted for? How will this affect manpower and expenditure of the, say, the housing division? On what basis will senior managers prioritise both manpower and expenditure? Without being clear about what is more important, how will good decisions be taken?

How should importance be decided? Is it a subjective view of the directors or senior managers? Are there more objective ways to make decisions leading to better organisational outcomes? In the HBR article of June 2011, Kahneman, Lovallo and Sibony write about “Before you make that big decision” in which they describe how everyone, no matter how senior, is subject to subconscious biases, which impact on decision making. Kahneman achieved a Nobel Prize for his work on decisions, showing that a more objective approach leads to better results.

How is decision making relevant to strategy, you may ask? Well at the highest level in the organisation, decisions have to be taken about what the organisation is here to do, it’s Purpose or Mission; where it is going and what it wants to achieve, it’s Vision and Objectives; what is important in achieving these things, it’s Values; and how it will go about achieving them, it’s strategies. These are the words commonly used when managers are learning about “strategy”. How often are they used in day to day business life? Why are they in the domain of senior management, without others being aware or exposed to what these intentions are?

Lip ServiceLip service is often given to planning terminology. Consequently, the majority of employees do their ‘day job’ without an awareness of how they are contributing to the ‘big picture’. The apocryphal story of a visitor to NASA asking the person cleaning the floor what their job was and being told that “I helped to put a man on the moon” is a great example of aligning every person’s activities to the main aims of the organisation.

It’s clear that just having a strategy, is not enough. It must also be shared and communicated with everyone in the organisation, to enable them to contribute effectively.

First, strategies must be developed. A number of management gurus have expressed different ways of thinking about strategy. Some focus more on the external environment, for example, Michael Porter focuses on competitors and the organisation’s competitive position. Other academics have been more focused on the strengths and weaknesses of the organisation itself: Hamal & Prahalad have developed a competency based approach, to identify whether the organisational strengths are related to technology or people or their business model. McKinsey’s, the strategy consultancy, have developed a model known as the 7S’s – which recognises the need to balance the internal and external views, short, medium and long term needs and so forth. To be successful, companies must consider both the external situation they face now and can expect to face in the future, together with their existing capabilities.

All of this illustrates the complexity of developing robust strategies, creating business plans and communicating them effectively.

Our team of internationally recognised consultants and trainers deliver best in class programmes addressing strategy development and implementation. Through experiential learning, participants gain an understanding of theory and have the opportunity to test out new approaches which they can use on return from training. 

Join Lydia Hirst in London May 16-20, 2016 on the course Strategic Planning, Development & Implementation to explore these issues and learn techniques to managers to address them.


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