Failing to adequately articulate your strategy – or ensure that it is understood by employees – risks teams wasting time on projects that do not move the company’s vision forward.
Amid widespread layoffs and cost-cutting across industries, leaders are under immense pressure to innovate and support the same workload with fewer resources than ever – all while corporate growth and profitability expectations continue to ratchet upwards.
Employees are eager to work on high-impact, high-value projects, but there’s often a lack of clarity on what that means within each business unit. Executive churn leaves mid-level managers uncertain about the direction in which their teams should be heading. Grappling with change, they’re unable to effectively prioritise their team’s efforts. With the business’s overall strategy poorly articulated or poorly understood, teams spend time on projects that fail to move the company vision forward and are either oblivious to the disconnect or worse – they’re aware of it but are not engaged enough to fix it.
With a constrained workforce, it has never been more important to strengthen the connection between strategy and operations. By ensuring that long-term goals and plans are closely aligned with day-to-day activities, you can empower your organisation to work more efficiently and effectively towards its objectives. A company is really just an assembly of people whose collective efforts add up to something – or not. You cannot afford to leave this essential connectivity up to chance.
Here’s what you need to do to get started:
- Ensure clarity of vision and strategy at multiple levels
- Foster a healthy debate around strategy
- Broadly communicate strategy
- Ensure that progress is visible and measured consistently, but don’t overdo it
- Assess, iterate, and adapt
Learn more in the full article on Management Today.
