You cannot just communicate a strategy to your personnel. People need to understand what it means in their own work.
Does this sound familiar?
The organisation has an excellent strategy that everyone supposedly knows like the back of their hand. Reality is not always so rosy: according to one study, only 28% of the executives and managers responsible for strategy work could name their organisation's three most important strategic priorities. With personnel the gap is even wider: in another study, only 29% of employees correctly identified their own organisation's strategy.
The strategy slides may be immaculate too. (Especially if they were bought from a consulting firm for the price of a Finnish median annual salary.)
AND STILL the strategy goes unexecuted.
The problem is not necessarily in the strategy ITSELF. The problem is what happens after the launch, when the strategy should actually be put into practice in everyday work.
Understanding the strategy and executing the strategy are different things, but both stall.
Organisations are often able to articulate what the organisation is aiming for. For example, "We are pursuing 20% growth in our core sector while increasing shareholder value".
A much harder question than the goal itself is:
What does this mean in our team's everyday work on a Tuesday morning?
Management may not be able to answer that. Nor should it have to.
The details of the work, the dynamics between people and the customer encounters are best known by the personnel and the teams themselves.
That is why strategy needs conversation, not just communication.
Strategy does not turn into action with PowerPoint
A strategy presentation event (the so-called launch) is certainly necessary. It helps people understand what management is aiming for and why.
But after that, teams should get to reflect on questions such as:
- What in the strategy concerns us in particular?
- What should we do differently?
- What should we do more of?
- What should we perhaps let go of?
- What is stopping us from executing the strategy?
- What can we ourselves do next?
- What could the organisation do better to execute the strategy?
At this point the strategy starts to change from management's strategy into the organisation's strategy.
The conversation has to scale
Organising one strategy discussion for the leadership team is easy (there is typically a professional facilitator and filled croissants on hand).
Engaging 500 or 5,000 people is a different matter. It takes time and money, and it is therefore worth doing as sensibly as possible. Not every team can have a professional facilitator, so the organisation needs a shared way of holding the conversation.
In Topaasia, dedicated content is built from the organisation's strategy, and with it teams hold the conversation around the same structure. Every conversation is still different, because teams examine the strategy through their own work.
This way, strategy conversations scale in a modern, people-centred way that genuinely takes the strategy into everyday work and captures the qualitative data from the conversations.
Data to support management: the conversation leaves behind more than a good feeling
When strategy conversations are held widely across the organisation, knowledge is also generated:
Which things recur across teams?
Where is the strategy well understood?
What raises uncertainty?
What would people like to take on?
Where are there visible obstacles to executing the strategy?
What are the clearest opportunities for executing the strategy?
A single conversation helps a team, and the data formed by hundreds of conversations can help the whole organisation.
Engaging people in strategy does not mean outsourcing strategy to the personnel
Engagement does not mean, however, that every strategic decision should be put to a joint vote. (Although even that is possible in some organisations; at the very least, it is good to ask for the personnel's views in a participatory way when planning the strategy.)
It is still management's job to make choices. But since executing a strategy often requires the actions of hundreds or thousands of people, these people need to be able to form an understanding of what the strategy means in their work.
Strategy can be led from the top. Executing it, however, happens in the everyday life of the organisation.
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Shall we turn your strategy into its own conversation content?
Book a 15 min slot where we create your own strategy content, which you can immediately test with your team.
How others have succeeded in strategy work with Topaasia:
Hoivatie: A spot-on tool for strategy work
Granlund: Digital strategy implementation for a 1,000+ person organisation
City of Turku: Implementing the city strategy