Ensuring Excellence in Strategy Execution

The role of your management team is instrumental in the success or failure of strategy execution. CLG has identified some issues that we have found most often holding you back from effectively executing your strategy:

• Lack of visible sponsorship and support by your leaders during implementation
• Lack of alignment and buy-in on what is implemented and how success will be measured
• Insufficient planning for the implementation of change
• Insufficient communication
• Having the wrong people in key roles
• Leadership that is unaware of what they don’t know

Effectively Execute Your Strategy

You could have the very best strategy in your field, but if your company’s leaders are not well-aligned, it’s unlikely that it will be effective. The consequences of unsuccessful strategy execution are many. Insufficient implementation means the quality of your efforts to lead will suffer, as will the trust levels and confidence of the people whom you expect to drive change within your organization.

Strategy Implementation

Leaders who can skillfully execute their strategies, quickly and with measurable results, are the ones who will experience success in today’s marketplace. First, however, your managers and senior leaders must decide where to focus their efforts. Consider that:

• Your leaders’ time is a scarce resource, to be used strategically
• As a leader, what you say and do sends a message to others in your organization that it is acceptable for them to do the same
• It is critical for you to be personally involved in the deployment of a key strategy
• Your employees will look to you to determine how committed you are to the new strategy; accordingly, your words and actions will be closely examined

CLG’s Make-It^® Model for Organizational Behavior Change

Many senior executives spend a great deal of time executing changes and leading their organizations by using our Make-It^® Model. There are four steps inherent in the Make-It^® Model:

• Make-It^® Clear: Visibly define your strategic direction for change, making sure that all senior leaders are in agreement with your direction. Ask your leaders to identify their highest priority business opportunity and specify how they will measure its achievement.
• Make-It^® Real: New results require new behaviors. That means your work in this segment of our model is finished only when your leaders can confirm their targeted results. Additionally, this is the stage where you should be able to pinpoint the critical few behaviors that are essential to your success.
  • Take action to deploy strategic communications, focus groups and leader training to prepare your management teams to zero in on the key behaviors needed in the next stage, Make-It^® Happen
  • Your leaders’ behavior during implementation is crucial, so this is the time to ensure that your people have the support they need to successfully navigate themselves and others through the new strategy
• Make-It^® Happen: This is an opportunity for your top leaders to systematically activate the right behaviors to get them started. This stage requires:
  • Intensive coaching and feedback on effective leadership behaviors
  • Tracking of deployment success
  • Active removal of barriers discovered as new strategies are executed
• Make-It^® Last: Focus on sustaining the change, transferring the new behaviors and ways of working until they become the norm. Making change last requires organizational systems alignment to ensure that processes and systems are consistent with the new vision/way of working – and are actively prompting and encouraging new behaviors.

Learn more about CLG’s Make-It^® Model here.

For additional information, check out our related white paper, Strategy Execution and Culture Change.