You can have the grandest vision in the world, but without strategies to achieve it, your vision is bound to be incomplete. If your Values are about how employees are expected to behave and your Vision is your company’s espoused state, your Strategies are what move your company toward that state and tell your employees how to apply expected behaviors to realize the Vision.
Define Your Focus Areas
Over a three-to-five-year period, I believe you need to have a minimum of three and no more than five major buckets on which to concentrate your energy in order to achieve your Vision and live your purpose. You want to get everybody in the same boat, rowing in the same direction. If you have too many Strategies, your focus will be divided. As I like to say, “When you have too many main things, you don’t have a main thing.”
Then, break down those big Strategies into smaller goals. Say one of your Strategies is to expand geographically, and one is to provide a superior customer experience. What three to five things are you going to do this year to expand geographically? What three to five things are you going to do to enhance your customer experience?
Establish Ownership of Strategies
Once you have decided on your strategic initiatives, establish ownership: each initiative should have an owner to manage and execute the strategy. For example, our strategic initiatives at Barge were employee experience, client experience, quality delivery, and growth. As the head of HR, I owned employee experience. Our head of sales and marketing owned client experience. The COO and CFO owned quality delivery, and the CEO owned growth. Then, the owner of each initiative creates systems and Processes to align with that initiative and the Values of the company.
Once you have assigned ownership of strategic initiatives, the owner becomes responsible for driving positive outcomes and mobilizing resources effectively. If I own the employee experience initiative, I’m responsible for proactively implementing three to five key initiatives that enhance employee experience across the organization. I will ask myself each year what three to five things we should be doing to move the needle on our employee experience initiative.
Giving each executive ownership of a strategic initiative creates a deeper sense of commitment and buy-in, and the same is true at the management and team levels. The executive who owns the strategic initiative is usually not the one actually executing the strategy; generally, the executive manages the people executing the strategy, which is usually your managers and their direct reports. The executive’s job is to take that multi-year strategic initiative and break it into pieces so that each manager knows their responsibility. For example, when I was in charge of employee experience, I broke that initiative down into talent acquisition, talent management, total rewards, and total wellness, and assigned a manager to be responsible for each of those.
This not only breaks the significant strategic initiative into manageable and achievable shorter-term goals, but it also gives your managers that same sense of ownership the executives get when given ownership over their strategic goals. They know what their part is, and they understand how it connects to the more significant strategic initiative and how that connects to the larger Vision for the company. This creates commitment and allegiance and gets your managers entirely on board, laser-focused, and vertically aligned with the company’s Vision.
The managers then break down their objective into tasks for their direct reports to complete. When you do this, every single one of those individuals knows exactly how their job is tied to the company’s strategic direction, Vision, and Purpose. They can see the direct line from what they do at work every day, at their desk, on the factory floor, or working remotely from home, to the company’s overall purpose.
Strategies Help Envision the Vision
It can be difficult for people to get on board if they don’t understand how their role fits into the bigger picture. If they can see exactly how their job impacts the significant Strategies and Vision of the company, it gives a sense of purpose and meaning to their work.
If your Strategies are not aligned with your culture and vice versa, your culture will eat strategy for breakfast every single time (to paraphrase Peter Drucker, one of the fathers of modern management theory). If your goals align with your Strategies, and your Strategies align with your Vision, you will be amazed at how quickly you can move toward that bright future state you are aiming for.