Do you see the picture above?
Unfortunately that describes a lot of organization’s idea of good strategy.
“Look, we have a great idea.”
“Hey, look at the shiny object over there.”
Too bad that if your strategy takes on that sort of mentality is that you can almost be certain that your company is going to be in trouble.
What your strategy needs is to do two things:
- Be focused on the future and growth.
- Be focused on action and being proactive.
The second part of the strategy initiative is what I want to focus on here, because I see it as a challenge for a lot of organizations.
Why?
Because too many times, it becomes easy to focus on a new plan or a new opportunity than it is to drill down, take action and understand what your action is doing for your company.
So how do you focus your organization and orient everything towards action?
Here are a few ideas:
1. Make sure that your strategy is focused on outcomes:
Too many strategic efforts are targeted at activities.
This causes organizations to jump around after the latest fads with such gusto. You know the kind of organizations that have to have a social media strategy today, or that are chasing likes, or that are running from one strategy to another.
The better way is to spend time working on a strategy that is focused on the outcomes that will indicate success for you and your organization.
Then, orient all of your actions towards those.
This will help you judge whether or not a new strategy or action is necessary or wise.
2. Don’t measure activities for activities sake:
You maybe have heard the tale of sales boiler rooms with their cold call quotas?
If you haven’t, these relics of the 1980s are where teams of “sales people” sit and make 100+ sales calls a day, and that is how they are measured on whether or not they are selling successfully.
Its a lot like Alec Baldwin’s office in Glengarry Glen Ross.
The problem with this mentality is that are these activities the real way that you should measure success?
And, this attitude still permeates many industries. Where you see sales leaders and executives wanting to know how many “likes” they have or what their “engagement” looks like.
These things are meaningless unless you point them directly to how you are going to profit from them. No amount of liking or engaging is great unless you know how to use it to turn these mild or meaningless forms of interest into real, paying customers.
3. Build off ramps for you to review your strategies:
I feel like one of the big challenges that drive erratic strategic implementation is that executives and teams don’t do a great job of planning for reviewing, revising, and reorienting their strategy.
Which simply means that if you don’t ever know when you are going to take an action or investigate what has worked, not worked, and take action against that…you are likely to always be dealing with your strategy from a state of apprehension because it can feel very daunting to feel like your strategy has to be 100% on all the time.
The better way to do this is have breaks and reviews built into your strategy.
This allows you to know that your strategy isn’t going to be perfect and that you have a plan in place to allow you to revisit things that are working and not working on a set schedule.