What Is the Strategy Again?

As we discussed?last week, in most organizations, the strategy doesn’t make it very far beneath the C-suite.?This isn’t obvious when you are part of the senior team that creates that strategy. From that vantage point, because you are perpetually thinking about, measuring, and discussing it, it’s easy to assume that everyone else in the organization shares that context. But we know from the data that, while direct reports of the most senior leaders may have?some?familiarity with it, anyone in middle management or below, likely has no clue of what the strategy is or how they can help to accelerate it.

In one large survey,?90% of the senior leaders?said they believed that educating and empowering frontline employees to understand and make decisions based on the strategy was critical.?But only 10% of those same leaders had done so. Given this huge disparity, one might assume that either the leaders are disingenuous about caring, or that they simply haven’t tried to do it. But, neither is true.

Top Leaders Sense It’s Bad

In a?survey?of 300 top leaders at companies with revenues of $1billion or more, one third of the respondents did not believe their employees could articulate the company’s strategy.

At the same time, of 1000 surveyed American employees, 40% said they had no idea what the company’s strategy was and had never seen or heard of it. In that same survey, two thirds of them said they would be able to do their jobs better?if they did understand the company’s direction.

Is Anyone Working on This?

In fact, many organizations try to share strategy through?a?“cascade”?form of communication. The C-suite shares the strategy at a town hall or other large gathering. That establishes the credibility of the message. From there, the top leaders’ direct reports share it in greater detail with their own teams, and then each level of leader does the same. Ultimately, everyone will have heard about the strategy from their own manager, and voila! the strategy has been “cascaded”.

In practice, this doesn’t work. But it fails in a?very particular way. One way to assess this is to ask employees at every level of the organization to simply list the top three strategic priorities. If everyone names the same 3 –and they are the ones that the strategy articulates –then the communication has been effective.

But the actual data are shocking. At the very top level,?only 54% of C-suite executives?list the same top 3 priorities.?Among themselves!?That problem is one of alignment, not communication.

One of 2 things is missing in those organizations’?strategic planning: Either they are designing strategy without building sufficient clarity and consensus; or they are failing to keep the strategy alive through ongoing discussion, iteration, measurement, and assessment.

Either way, 54% agreement is as good as it gets. When researchers ask the same question of those who report to the C-suite-–typically, heads of departments or divisions—the ability to name the 3 top priorities plummets to 22%. That’s the biggest drop in the whole organizational puzzle. From there the cascade continues to drop incrementally. By the time you ask frontline workers, only about 13% know what the priorities are.

The Communication Dilemma

It seems strange that there is so much disparity in understanding of the strategy within the C-suite itself. But there are two reasons why this shouldn’t surprise us.

1) Strategy is rarely articulated in a simple, replicable way. And,

2) Leaders often focus on the execution piece of the strategy and neglect its articulation —because our innate bias is toward action, not language.

But both of these issues lead to mischief where it matters. In the alignment of teams (especially the top team) with the strategy, and its execution. Execution depends on shared understanding for coordination and quality.

I have two recommendations to begin to create alignment at the executive level. Only when the C-suite has a shared understanding can we even begin to think about how best to communicate it to their direct reports. I’m going to share one of them today. The next will be in tomorrow’s edition.

Start with the Strategy Itself

We could probably launch a series of global conference intended to define what a strategy is and how to do it and represent it. But consider viewing your strategy as a rule or heuristic. No matter how complicated it may be in terms of the particles that define its execution, it can likely be distilled into some clear rules.

One of my clients is a digital platform that provides machine learning utilities to e-commerce, so that customers can get purchasing recommendations that represent the brand’s point of view. You can imagine that top fashion, lifestyle, and home decor brands have a strong point of view.

Their customer value proposition is their deep understanding of the brand, and the comprehensiveness of their offering for the customer’s own operational excellence. They can easily summarize their strategy as a rule or heuristic. Will it make it easier for our customers to communicate their vision to their customers?

When the answer is yes, then the initiative falls within the purview of the strategy. When the answer is no, it does not. That doesn’t necessarily mean the latter is verboten —but it does then require a conversation.

Every well thought-out strategy can formulate a rule, guideline or heuristic that summarizes its strategy. For Walmart it might be “Is this the best value for money and do our customers want it?”. For Uber, “Does this give our customers the greatest convenience without them having to drive anywhere?”. And so on. Of course, you first need that clear, thoughtful strategy piece.

But assuming you have that….

Create a rule or heuristic. Make sure your entire executive team embraces it. Test it. Edit it. Play with it. There’s a kind of visceral “THUNK’ when it’s right. Go for the thunk.

Strategy Communication is Integral to Strategy Fulfillment

This isn’t an internal issue about the executive team, or even the company. Those organizations who are focused on the clarity of their strategy succeed. Moreover, those that see communicating their strategy as a key objective, thrive in the marketplace.

But valuing strategy communication must start with clarifying it. When it’s clear, the communication plan becomes something that is approachable. But when the strategy is over-complexified and can’t be simply shared, no communication plan will bridge the gaps in understanding even within the executive team. And when that’s the case, how can the rest of the organization, stakeholders or the marketplace ever hope to understand it?

How clear is your organization’s strategy? If it isn’t, start there. But if it is, dive into distilling it into a rule, guideline or heuristic. It may be the single, simplest thing you can do to align your organization and streamline executing your strategy.

Begin building a clear strategy for your organization, one that will lead to the kind of breakthroughs—discontinuous results—that seem out of reach. Schedule a call with me to learn how Beyond Better Strategy can help you and your team to accomplish bigger goals than you have dared to attempt in the past.