Organizations usually have some kind of corporate strategy and individual employees commonly have a list of deliverables but, too often, the connection between them is foggy. This unclear relationship results in money, time and energy being spent with no measurable impact – and loads of leadership frustration.
To avoid this misalignment in your organizations, let’s explore how these 5 Golden Rules for cascading your strategy can improve strategic execution and produce better results.
Golden Rule #1: Use Cause and Effect Thinking
Most organizations lack a systematic way to align their strategy to their teams’ work, and thus skip the important part of engaging the people who are actually doing the work. As a result, employees often continue to do what they have always done and avoid the need to change.
Try this instead: Turn your people’s efforts into a meaningful story of achievement, by asking questions that help them think about their “part or role” in the strategic change that is needed.
For example:
If the corporate goal is about wanting customers to be more loyal, then we would start by wondering…
- What makes customers more loyal?
In our first level of cascading from the corporate goal to a division, led by a Vice President or Sr. Director, this above question and the resulting conversation, can help us discover important cascaded goals such as:
- We are attracting more ideal customers.
- We keep our promises to our customers.
- We solve customers’ real problems quickly and easily.
Notice that these are not “action” statements, but, instead, they are “sub-set” goals or “aligned outcomes” that reveal the specific change needed to continue to grow more loyal customers for the organization. They are cause and effect relationships.
Once the division has created these aligned goal statements, your organization’s next level of cascading could be to teams, and we might start by wondering:
- What makes it possible to attract more ideal customers?
- What would help us keep our promises to our customers?
- How do we better focus on solving our customers’ “real problems”?
We keep this approach of “aligned” questioning until we have reached individuals, where each person can align their contributions (within their control or influence to change) with what is strategically important for the teams they are a member of.
What do you notice about this explorative line of questions?
- The conversation is very specific and helps people or employees connect directly from the work they do, to what the corporate strategy has prioritized.
- The questions lead to a logical cause-and-effect story of achievement (if we improve this, then that should improve too) by those who have enough control and influence to change it.
Outcome: Employees have the information they need to understand the impact of their day-to-day choices of where and how they apply their human and financial resources.
Golden Rule #2: Focus Where you Have Influence
Only a few parts of the organization will truly have the control and influence to create a meaningful impact on a specific corporate goal. Leaders must recognize the folly in trying to have every division figure out a way to support all the corporate goals.
Try this instead: Help your team/division focus on where they can have the most significant impact for strategic change because of their expertise, skills, knowledge and work responsibilities. Help them realize they don’t have to justify their existence by saying they can impact every corporate goal, and, at the same time, they will minimize waste of time and resources.
For example:
- The operations division generally has the most significant impact on safety.
- The marketing department generally has the most impact on which customers to attract.
- The production department generally has the most impact on product quality.
To effectively cascade strategy without fracturing and diluting everyone’s focus across all the strategic goals, leaders must keep asking this question:
- Where can our division have the most impact (from our time, budget and effort) to deliver on our strategic direction?
Outcome: Individuals, teams and divisions are focused where they have the most influence and impact to change and improve.
Golden Rule #3: Make Alignment a Visual Conversation
When planning a long trip with other people, it helps to look at a map to see where we are starting and where we are heading, so we can then chart our preferred course. The same can be said for the achievement of our organization’s strategy. As the famous saying goes: “If you don’t know where you are going, any direction will take you there”.
Try this instead: Use a Results Map (also called Strategy Alignment Map) to incorporate the content from Golden Rules 1 and 2, so we can see the whole strategic picture and then navigate to find where our ability to impact and improve lies, specifically. This visual tool is particularly powerful at revealing critical processes in our organizations and when/how they may cross-over from one division to another. It takes us beyond the traditional silo approach that most leaders use to align strategy, which often fails because an organization’s most important processes work across silos, not just within one division. Leaders realize that, to improve this crossover, they require a new level of collaboration among business units.
Outcome: Each person/team/division has a good idea of the decisions and actions for which they are responsible, and where they may need to work on shared goals with other teams outside their own division.
Golden Rule #4: Stop Telling and Start Involving
Speeches about the corporate strategy generally don’t get us very far when it comes to strategy achievement. We need buy-in or not much will change in our day-to-day work.
Try this instead: We find that the most meaning comes when we take part in discovering for ourselves the change that is needed, and testing ways for improvement. When people’s knowledge and experience are valued and they are trusted to think about how the changes they make can impact the achievement of a better future, the collaboration and commitment is magnified. These people are the same ones that take part in the conversations inspired by the Golden Rule 1 questions. Then they take the outcomes and create the story of alignment using the Results Map (aka Strategy Alignment Map).
Outcome: Team members buy into decisions and are less likely to second-guess decisions made by colleagues, stall progress, and shirk responsibilities to change.
Golden Rule #5: Shift from Judging to Learning
Judging people kills buy-in and motivation during strategy execution, plain and simple. Yet organizations become obsessed with rewarding and punishing their people, based often on KPIs and measures that no one trusts, and everyone avoids. This creates tremendous dysfunction and inhibits successful strategy execution.
Try this instead: We need to break away from (1) assumptions that measures are for “reporting upwards” and (2) allowing teams to default to trivial measures that are easy, convenient or traditional, but not useful. Instead, we need to encourage and support teams to design measures that tell them something important about their performance improvement – even if it means replacing existing measures or collecting new data. Encourage teams to learn how to be more rigorous in collecting the data their measures require. Support them to make careful decisions about which measures will be worth the effort to implement and which won’t.
Note: These KPIs and measures must be owned by the team that owns the improvement.
Outcome: Accountability and responsibility for strategic improvement is clearly owned throughout the organization and teams use meaningful measures for decision-making during strategy execution. They seek to know when something is not improving, as much as when something is improving.
Ultimately, leaders need to remember that employees want to work towards something bigger than themselves. Working together, in dialogue, to discover their team’s alignment and process-crossover is “therapy for the strategic soul”
Author Louise Watson is the Official PuMP & EBL Partner for Canada and the Americas.
Special thanks to Stacey Barr, Founder of the PuMP Performance Measurement Process, including the Results Map.
