The Dilemma of Strategy Execution

The Dilemma of Strategy Execution

Most of CEOs invests their time, efforts, and budgets in the development of business strategies while the effective execution of a strategy is the cornerstone to organizational success!

Strategy execution is about people, for people, and through people at any kind of organizations.

In a survey conducted by Harvard Business School, 95% of company’s employees are unaware of, or don’t understand its strategy.

??I believe that strategy execution failures is due to issues related to people, and its mainly about the following:

• Confusion around ownership and responsibility when delivering business objectives that cross functions, has an adverse impact on time to market when launching critical products (lack of alignment).
• Decouple of decision making from facts and data (concerned about HR departments)
• Too many goals (focus issue).
• Conflicting priorities and the relentless trade-off between urgent and important issues.
• Measuring business performance and growth from commercial and financial perspectives without paying attention to health measurements of the organization (eg: eNPs & NPS).?
• Low staff morale and Engagement ?

People experience / perception on how they feel and think about their employers will subsequently affect what they say about their employers, their interest to stay or leave, and ultimately their willingness to put discretionary efforts for organizations to succeed and win.

For successful strategy execution, I recommend the following:

• Adopting the growth mindset across all levels as its always about our ability to learn, develop, and grow, not our academic qualifications.
• HR practitioners to improve their business acumen, period.
• Introducing technology to take over all standardized personnel & business processes.
• HR to rely on people analytics and data driven approaches to decide on people issues and how it affects the implementation of business strategy.
• To invest in leadership capacity development programs across all levels not only people at senior positions.
• Defining clear terms of reference to board of directors, board committees, and role descriptions of each board member.
• Setting an evaluation system for board of directors.
• Introduce Employee Experience, Voice of Employees (VOE), and Net Promoter Score (eNPS) as a leading indicator to executives’ dashboard and as an indication of how strong the relationship between employees and their employers, how employee aligned/misaligned with company mission, and how economically its feasible and would be effective to execute organizational strategy.
• Senior executives to focus on outcome-based planning instead of deliverables (initiatives) and strategy roadmap that might or might not lead to the achievement of defined target/s.
• To have both functional and Team based organizational Structures.
• Introduction of strategy execution models such as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for better people alignment, cross functional cooperation, learning, and effective execution.
• To replace performance management systems with performance development with more focus on feedback and to get rid of performance ratings.
• Last but not least, to view sustainable business growth from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives and to have a balanced view to business performance by focusing on leading and lagging ?indicators.

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