The Strategy Dialogue

Over the last two days I’ve been writing about the importance of sharing strategy beyond the C-suite. Yesterday, we looked at the huge demoralization that employees can feel when they are locked out of the strategy. And on Tuesday, we looked at the ways that employees struggle to make decisions in the abs end of the rules and guidelines a strategy provides. Both have significant business ramifications and c]are quantifiable in financial terms. It’s expensive to hoard the strategy.

But what are some ways that organizations overcome this tendency? How can you ensure that your employees understand the strategy? And perhaps equally importantly. How can you percolate insight from the frontline to the C-suite so that it can be used to iterate upon the strategy?

Communicate Communicate Communicate

One way to start building strategic alignment is by overhauling internal communications approaches. Instead of sharing metrics, set up a cascading teach-in. Ensure that every manager is educated about the strategy and that their teams —even their individual team members—contribute to the strategy’s fulfillment.

This should go way beyond the vision and mission. It needs to include the theory about the HOW.  

Moreover, HR should use its central role as communicator to link all initiatives, policies, practices and metrics to strategy. Not generically, but specifically. The greater the transparency of those connections, the more accessible it is for everyone.

Employees at all levels must know what the company’s strategy is, and have opportunities to ask themselves and discuss with their peers and manager ways that they can better forward it.

Product managers should be looking for ways to add features that build competitive advantage. Salespeople should consider which prospects, given their organization’s strategy, they should be pursuing. When the strategy is that central to organizational life, it becomes a shared artifact of the culture.

When teams are consistently working to add value to the strategy through their own work, they generate ideas that can be assimilated into new iterations of the strategy. Executives disregard those ideas at their peril. The smartest CEOs and founders find ways consistently to collect that insight and use it —giving credit where it is due. That creates a virtuous cycle of ongoing strategic dynamism.

Role Models

Lincoln Electric Company was founded in 1911. It continues, to this day, to thrive. It has never laid off an employee and often pays bonuses of as much as 80% of employee’s salaries. The premise of the pioneering management style begins with the founder, James Lincoln’s key insight. “I knew that if I could get the people in the company to want to succeed as badly as I did, there would be no problem we could not solve together.” 

Today, Lincoln is a $2.9b multinational company. But some things have not changed. Every 2 weeks, an employee advisory board meets with the company’s top executives. Together, they make every major decision. That has included such pivotal strategic decisions as expanding to overseas markets.

Compensation is tied entirely to production and outcomes, and until the company went public a few years back, management and employees owned all of the stock.

The company manages its strategy through small employee teams. They tie every practice and process to the strategy and the core values of the organization.

The Container Store is considered a paragon of strategic alignment and employee expertise.

Their strategy considers employees to be at the heart of delivering their value proposition—which is a combination of extraordinary service and product knowledge. To that end, they provide 263 hours of training to full time employees. That training includes the 7 principles they invoke, and their strategy. That level of education and involvement has built a culture of engagement and results.

Starting Out

Maybe the most important first step is to build a strategy that is shareable. This is not the place to go into it. But you can’t share what you can’t articulate. So begin by crafting a display, map, description or depiction of your key strategic hypothesis. That plus the initiatives that will fulfill it is enough to start communicating.

Build a plan to train your employees in the strategy that is as rich and interactive as the best skills training program you have ever witnessed. There are an innumerable number of ways to create processes and structures that allow strategy to be transparent and modified in public. But it starts, like every important initiative, with a commitment to do it.

When your employees are your partners in strategy, you will feel your hair blown back by the increase in your organization’s velocity.

Interested in building something that blows back your hair? Schedule a call to learn how Beyond Better Strategy and Coaching can help you accelerate and produce breakthroughs in your results.