Genius Strategies Fail Without These Four Disciplines

New year, new batch of ideas brimming with potential. But then again, leaders rarely have a shortage of those. What they do lack is a goal which survives the leap from the planning table to execution on the frontlines.

Are you confident in your strategic roadmap for 2024?

A successful strategic roadmap is a blueprint that outlines an organisation's vision, goals, and key initiatives in a structured and adaptable manner. It provides a clear trajectory for achieving long-term objectives, effectively prioritising initiatives, allocating resources, and aligning stakeholders. It is a foundational concept, central to what organisations do to grow and compete. This does not mean it's successful.

With 80% of strategies failing, a Gartner report on the topic states “ strategic planning is often a disappointment to all involved. The objective sounds simple enough: Define the organisation’s strategy and make resource allocation decisions to pursue it. The problem is, the results often fail to meet expectations.”

A global FranklinCovey survey found 68% of people believed the change they were experiencing required them to do nothing differently and behave no differently. When every step of a strategic roadmap assumes and depends on people's willingness to do those very things, understanding how to overcome the obstacles to human motivation and momentum is a major competitive advantage.

Urgency beats strategy every day

Leaders are under pressure to do more and more with less, whilst also safeguarding the wellbeing of their people. Towing this line can lead to over-goaling and underperforming as teams are tasked with too many conflicting initiatives they can’t connect with, and aren’t held accountable to anyway.

It becomes easy for overwhelmed leaders to start blaming teams, or team members to start blaming each other, pinning a lack of results on a lack of adaptability, commitment or competence. In reality, people are simply preoccupied with keeping things going and ensuring there is a viable company to build upon.

The real problem is that the day job and all its essential activities devour every available ounce of energy, leaving us in a constant state of urgency. When faced with collective upheaval, replacing and onboarding talent and fluctuating team dynamics, this urgency becomes even more all encompassing.

Follow four timeless high-performance principles to consistent results:

The thing about busyness is that it feels productive, clever, important, whilst slowly withering your focus and muddying progress without you even realising.

But there is a way it can all be done. Here are four field-tested disciplines your results depends on in 2024:

1. Focus

The first bump strategic roadmaps never recover from: veering off in the wrong direction. The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. This is a stark, inescapable principle we all live with.

Somewhere along the way, most leaders forget this. Why? Because most intelligent, ambitious people don’t want to do less, especially if it means saying no to good ideas. They’re wired to do more, but there are always more good ideas than there is capacity to execute.

When there is too much to aim for, efforts become scattergun and we start playing with the law of diminishing returns. The result is disorientation and disengagement. According to Gallup research, 78% of employees don’t think their leaders have a clear direction for the organisation.

When building your strategy, identify what is worth achieving and what must be achieved. Then, ask yourself what must be achieved that won’t be achieved through normal day to day business.

The relentless focus of each frontline team is where the strategy will make or break. When a team has buy-in, they don’t feel they are working for you, they feel they are working with you. Goal-setting is a leadership responsibility but the process should be inclusive of the team. Doing so keeps communication transparent, avoids unsettling surprises and helps prevent individual team members from being or feeling unfairly burdened by team objectives.

2. Leverage

Success and innovation depend on your employees being able to sustainably carry out the day job + 1 incredibly important thing. Identifying what that one thing should be every day or week, means embracing the reality that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your activities.

Frontline teams, who are in the thick of the work every day, will know what these critical activities are. It is a leader’s job to equip them with the tools to identify, measure and plan around them. This means helping them to look at the goal differently.

Looking to the future rather than the past is inherently more optimistic and proactive, yet even when we believe we’re being innovative, most of us don’t do that. Progress gets dragged down by lag measures which only tell you if you’ve achieved the goal. The opportunity to influence it has passed. Your team needs to be directed by lead measures, which tell you if you are likely to achieve the goal.

Empower your people to understand and leverage their influence by showing them how their individual actions contribute to a shared goal that is important to the organisation. By working to measures which are predictive of success, stretched teams are given a level of control which is particularly powerful when so much else is uncertain.

Click here to continue reading and discover the two remaining disciplines.

Want to understand the proof behind these principles? Join FranklinCovey Execution Lead Ray McGrath for a free webinar or at a complimentary networking event London on 23rd January to delve deeper into a repeatable formula for success in the form of The 4 Disciplines of Execution? framework.