In my experience with my own teams and advising other executive teams on getting their strategy implemented, there are five major obstacles that you need to overcome.
As a leader you need to do these things on purpose if you actually want to get your strategy implemented and get your team to do the things you all keep talking about.
1. Lack of Clarity
Everyone is clear on the big picture, but really fuzzy about what specific actions to take, what projects to prioritize and what things to measure.
They might be talking about “beating the competition” or “improving the product”, but there is no clear definition of what that means they need to go do.
They are all inspired to win, but there is no concrete plan as to which product plans will be prioritized, and if the winning approach is indeed different products, of if it’s more sales training, different pricing, or changes to channel policy.
Lack of clarity = lack of momentum
Everyone leaves the room with the mission of “Beating the Competition”, but nothing different happens. Everyone is already doing good, important work, so there is just not enough reason or motivation to do something new.
2. Weak Support
Every business faces dilemas — persistent, unresolved questions — things that block action until they are decided. And there are typically widely differing opinions about how to resolve them.
Are we a service company or a product company? Will we hurt the installed base by launching a new product? Should we raise or lower prices?
Is your strategy any good?
Once you have your strategy in place, how do you know if it is a good strategy? Are you certain that everyone on your team is bought in? Have you closed all the unanswered questions? Have you had the debates? or have you assumed people are ready and on board?
“Gracious Non-Compliance”
Generally it’s just much easier to sit in the meeting and nod your head, than it is voice your concern or disagreement…
…It’s better to just get out of this meeting than to drag it out even longer by disagreeing… my opinion won’t change anything, and it won’t matter anyway because we never follow through with these kinds of things. Why not just be pleasent about it during the meeting so I look like a team player, and save time?
3. Fuzzy Resources
Once the team agrees something specific is important, then comes the directive to go “make it happen”. I have never seen resource shifts between projects happen by asking the team to go do this offline.
Even if their intentions are good, they will come to the resource trade-off discussion with their peers, with the point of view that the resources for the new thing were supposed to come from somewhere else.
You as the leader are responsible for trade-offs.
You need to assign resources to the new thing and take them away from the existing stuff. Your team members each need to figure out how to best deal with less resources for the old stuff.
But don’t expect them as individuals to give up resources, or as a group re-align resources to do new stuff. It just doen’t work. That is your job.
4. Poor Communication
You can’t over communicate. Once you have (really) agreed, and articulated your strategy, and have your specific, concrete, priorities and tasks defined, communicate them over and over again, every chance you get throughout the organization.
Consistency is a big lever.
Start and end every team meeting with it. Start and end every all hands meeting with it. Start and end every 1-1 meeting with it. Unless you are completely bored with articulating your strategy, don’t fool yourself that the organization at large has even begun to hear it. People need to know you are serious.
Values and Socialization
Often, not only behaviors and skills need to change, but values need to change – to be more customer focused, quality oriented, tough on spending… Have you done what it takes to engage your organization with the new values?
Socializing the new approach, talking about how “this is the way we do things now”, is a critical component to make sure people know that is it OK to act differently than they used to. If it is not being socialized it will not live in the minds and actions of your organization.
It needs to be the new “cool” way of working if you want to maintain action.
Repetition, Repetition
There is well studied marketing information on communicating messages to your target audience. It takes your audience seven exposures to your message for them to internalize and act on it. For each of the seven, they need to see or hear your message three times.
That’s 21 times to get across, “Buy this digital camera“. So for certain, 21 times is not overkill for “Buy these 5 points of my strategy and understand what you need to do about it” — Think more like a few hundred.
5. Lack of measures
Even if you strategy gets off to a good start, you won’t gain momentum unless you have a set of measures, tracking and review process that are set up specifically to support progress on the new strategy.
You need to identify the few key metrics which will drive the change, and make them very visible througout the change process.
Don’t leave anything important to chance.
Don’t assume progress will happen because it was agreed. Make sure your whole team remains focused on the few critical things that change the game.
CARTOON CREDIT: Gary Larson: The Far Side
