As the beach break vibes of January fade to black, and the turbines of 2023 start rotating at pace, chances are you're already noticing the pressures of the right-now-urgent pushing your long-term-important thinking aside.
If so, here’s a quick call to breathe and think a moment.
If you and your best built or refreshed a strategic plan last year, and it’s a good one – it fits, it’s considered and informed and realistic and pointing at what you really want longer term – then it’s on you to bring it to life and keep it alive.
5 things you can start with.
- Visibility. Is it there, in front of you, right now? Can you access it quickly? Is it automatically appearing in your eyeline, where you’re reminded, refocused and prompted to rebalance tactics and strategy, continually???Is it the same for your team? Have they all seen it? Have they been walked through it to understand it? Have they now actively engaged with it, all able to see their place and role and responsibility and opportunities within it???If it sits in a file on your computer or lays dying a dusty death in a desk drawer (or only gets to see sunlight at bi-monthly Board meetings), you’re killing it. Find ways to make it omnipresent for those charged with enlivening it and living it.
- Dialect.??It’s nice that the fancy-words consultant helped you build your eloquent 36-page SP document used terms like “strategic thrust”, “value chain synergies” and “aligned operational interdependencies”. But if that’s not how your people speak (and they really shouldn’t), then transcribe it into plain speaking form (or ask the fancy-words consultant to help you to). Clearly written goals that are as simple as they can be expressed, understandable by all. Priority areas, projects and agreed principles that, on reading, your people automatically just “get”, quickly and clearly. Break the flowery boardroom words down and share it with the crew using the unique dialect of your organisation. Doesn’t matter if that means using words and terms that don’t make sense or fit anywhere else. It’s yours and theirs. Make it sound so.
- Rituals.?Repeated, regular activities that you do in your organisation, stuff that constitutes “part of the unique way we do things here”. 8am Monday morning toolbox meetings. Monthly team lunch and learns. Quarterly stump speeches from the boss. Town Hall Zooms twice a year. Friday knockoffs and The Week That Was campfires. New team member induction ceremonies. Values awards. Post-engagement debrief sessions. Whatever yours are (and there is significant value in developing and cultivating healthy rituals that fit your culture), employ them to elevate the strategy and to reflect on why you’re employing it.??Sure, ad hoc watercooler chitchat is lube that helps the daily work turbines keep turning, but ritualised conversations with the crew reflecting on your Purpose, Vision, Values, Priorities, Principles, Key Activities and the stories of how things are unfolding within these areas???That’s next level strategy life support.
- Stories.??In the last 48 hours, chances are you’ve heard a story of how someone in your team is undertaking work that’s embodying your values, aligned with your strategic priorities or embedding the principles you’ve agreed upon. Have you shared it with others in the crew, highlighting the connection? Case studies are much better educators than generalised strategy documents. When a real story presents that shines a light on an aspect of why you picked the strategy you picked (and they’re there, just below the surface, each and every day), make the effort to connect the dots and share them with others in the crew. If elements of your strategy are alive in daily conversation, it stands half a chance of being lived again by others tomorrow.
- Bring trusted outsiders in.?As a strategic planning process facilitator, it can be tough enough convincing some Boards of the merits of sharing the full strat plan with all inside the tent. But outsiders? Please, I encourage you to go there. The key supply chain partners you have relied or will rely upon over the next few years. The external advisors, service providers and trusted others that sit outside your org chart, but have committed to helping you sustain and succeed.??Even trusted clients you want to work collaboratively with for the foreseeable future, to keep evolving for and adding ever-greater to. Share with them what you’re about, why you’re here, what you’re prioritising and how you’re committing to go about it. It recruits an external support team that now feel more deeply connected to you. It makes you hold yourself to account, and it gives you a campfire crew to sit with periodically to discuss progress and opportunities for evolution and next steps. The right others engaged will help your strategy live.
Of course, if your strategy is alive, it’s also doing one of two things. Growing in strength and impact, or dying. Time and testing and close observation will tell you which. In the end, left alone, unchanged, unevolving, they all die. But the ones that do evolve and deliver are the ones that are carefully tended, cultivated, nurtured, entrusted to more helpers, and led with energy and forward focus.?
It's lovely that you had the strat planning workshop and now have a document.
But it only works when it’s brought to life and kept alive by more than you.
If you need a hand tailoring and embedding approaches to help your strategy come to life, stay alive and sustain your growth and health ambitions, give me a shout.
(And if you’re ready for the next strategy rebuild, let’s do it together with “long, impactful and healthy life” in mind. That's what a strategy life should be about.)
Chief Executive Officer at Statewide Appliance Spares Pty. Ltd.
2 年A great article. Thanks Troy once again you got me thinking and doing