How to implement your strategy....

By Stuart Ross - High Growth

After completing a strategy process, a lot of managing directors I work with are tempted to breathe a sigh of relief. However, if you think going through the process of discussing strategy and creating a plan means it will magically be implemented, think again. Only 10% of companies implement their strategy successfully.

A few years ago, Fortune Magazine published a surprising statistic that stated only 10% of employees understand their company’s strategy. If employees don’t understand their company’s strategy, how can they possibly be expected to implement it? Strategy implementation requires its own effort and plan of action. The following three steps will help you start this process:

Innovation is Meaningless!

  

Recent research by a large multinational organisation concluded that the word ‘innovation’ has become so overused that it no longer has any useful meaning for their customers. Indeed, it is positively damaging because the perception is that ‘innovation’ is rather boring incremental stuff. Imagination is no longer part of the organisational psyche.

This aligns very well with my own experience and a number of you will have heard me banging on about how ‘labels’, such as ‘vision’ and ‘mission’ are very powerful when applied as they were intended.

#6 in How do we create a High Performance Culture?

Avoiding the Strategy Gap

High performing organisations tend to have one thing in common – they have a strategy, but more importantly they know how to execute that strategy.

Knowing what to do does not necessarily on its own lead to success. Having a strategy without the ability to implement it, to make it a reality, is also all too common. I call this the Strategy Gap. The result is unfulfilled expectations and all too often a falling out around the Board Room table! So what can be done to “mind the gap”?

#5 in How do we create a High Performance Culture?

Ask for Help

I mentioned in #4 about avoiding blame. This not the same as not accepting responsibility when something does not turn out as expected and certainly not an excuse for doing nothing!

Responsibility and accountability are the flip side of autonomy and ownership. You cannot have one without the other. The task, therefore, is in accepting responsibility and being accountable, that when things do not follow the plan you step up to the mark and start looking for solutions. More importantly, if you are stuck, ask for help!

How to Test if Your Strategic Goal Is Really Strategic

When you struggle to find meaningful measures for your strategic goals, there are a few problems that have to be fixed. I've written passionately and prolifically about how weasel words make goals immeasurable. And there's another problem too, called multi-focus. Multi-focus is when we blend several performance results into a single goal statement. And when this happens, you are at great risk of having a goal that isn't truly strategic. Here's why...

Dealing With the KPI Terminology Problem

The words frequently used in the performance management field include ‘performance measure’, ‘metric’, ‘performance indicator’, ‘key performance indicator (KPI)’, ‘key result indicator (KRI)’, ‘lead indicator’, ‘lag indicator’, ‘initiative’, ‘strategy’, ‘goal’, ‘objective’, ‘target’, ‘priority’, ‘critical success factor (CSF)’, ‘key result area (KRA)’, ‘strategic theme’, ‘vision’, ‘mission’ – and no doubt many more.

The problem isn’t the sheer volume of words we use. The problem is that we use them differently, with varying and overlapping meanings, and we fail to explain our meanings to each other. For example, here are some variations in definition:

David Parmenter, author of Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing and Using Winning KPIs, defines some of these terms like this:

A key result indicator (KRI) tells us ‘how you have done in a perspective’

A performance indicator (PI) tells us ‘what to do’

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a performance measure that tells us ‘what to do to increase performance dramatically’, as opposed to other types of performance measures

Why You Should Start Small With a New KPI Methodology

One mistake organisations make in performance measurement is to not have a real methodology. They treat measuring performance as an ad hoc activity or event. But when you do adopt a performance measurement methodology, another mistake is to do too much too soon. Starting small is important for a few reasons...

Rushing into a full implementation of your new performance measurement methodology, without a strong enough performance culture (and how many of us can claim to have that?), is a recipe for failure:

You'll overwhelm people and burn them out.

You'll make mistakes without noticing, and leave them uncorrected.

You'll feel out of your depth and lack confidence when you need it most.

You'll fail to get a measurable return on investment for your measurement approach.

Starting small, just like a pilot test, has some very worthwhile advantages:

Why driving change is hard work

How many times do you hear or read the term “driving change”? It’s a very assertive message, the intent to make it happen no matter what, but I wonder if the concept of driving is the root cause of many initiatives failing to deliver on expectations.

Driving, it seems, implies forcing others to go in a direction they don’t want to; little wonder then that, as soon as the driving force is removed, they revert back to what they feel happiest with. Driving change, then, is hard work and demands constant ongoing effort from the driver.

Life would be perfect were it not for the customers!

Many years ago I formed the opinion that, once an organisation reaches a certain size, it develops the ability to remain busy, no matter what the level of sales. By that stage, responding to customers’ requirements almost becomes a disruption; customers, in fact, only provide the cash to keep the mechanism turning!

Are These 8 Excuses Holding You Back From Great KPIs?

If your KPIs suck, even though you’ve long wished for better ones, it’s likely that something is holding you back. That ‘something’ could be a very good reason, or it could simply be an excuse that you’re mistaking for a reason…

There are good reasons for not prioritising the development of a good performance measurement system.

One reason is if your organisation has a blame culture, where there’s very little trust and teamwork, and where measures are used to punish and reward, rather than to learn and improve. There’s no point having better measures if they’re just going to be ‘gamed’ and used to hit people over the head.

Another reason is that your organisation has no strategy at all, and people simply have no idea what results matter or what the organisation is trying to achieve. There’s no point having measures if you don’t know which results matter and need improving.