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Successful execution depends on more than the annual strategic planning event. Strive to make your strategy “dust-free”.
If you want your investment in strategic planning to be a catalyst for success, you need to stop thinking of planning as an annual event and instead embed the strategic planning process into your organization’s culture and day-to-day habits.
In my conversations with business executives, I am often impressed with the effort, thought and, in many cases, creativity that has gone into the development of their organizations’ strategic plan. When I share with them my passion and experiences for engaging teams in translating that corporate strategy into action, they will inevitably share their own struggles at trying to get their strategies adopted.
This headline is of course a somewhat subjective statement and since only one is really acceptable in the workplace, I shouldn’t really be leading you on with a sexy lost leader. Yet, co-creation remains a powerful concept and is a business practice being used by Starbucks, Nike, Cisco and Dell (which makes it sort of sexy too), and I use it with my clients as often as possible. It is based on the simple concept that together we build more value and that organizations prosper when they focus on building healthy relationships with employees, stakeholders and customers.
Tips to improve how strategy is employed in your workplace can show up where you might not expect it. My son plays a lot of soccer, and many an evening I stand at the side of the pitch as the cold rain drips down my neck. I often find things to occupy my mind, but one night my interest was piqued by a phrase I heard his coach repeating to the boys – “Slow down the pace. Speed up the brain”. I was intrigued by the coach’s approach with these 11 year-old minds as we all often rush from one seemingly urgent matter to the next and then wondered what we accomplished that day.