For leaders striving to improve company performance and meet strategic goals, the path to success hinges on effective execution. A great strategy can easily falter without the right systems and processes to bring it to life. In this article, We’ll explore two valuable frameworks that can help ensure your strategy moves beyond the planning stage and is successfully implemented.
The Four Blocks of Strategy Execution
Top in the list is the framework put forward by Gary L. Nelson, Karla L. Martin, and Elizabeth Powers in their Harvard Business Review article, “The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution.” They indicate that successful execution lies in the orchestration of four essential building blocks:
- Information Flows
- Decision Rights
- Motivators
- Structure
Each block plays a critical role in steering towards and enabling strategy. This explains why so many re-organizations fail. Managers are quick to connect strategy with structure, but seldom are deliberate on clarifying the other blocks. Information flows need to be clarified, decision rights need to defined, and effective motivators designed.
While this framework is rich in process and method, it’s important to remember that successful execution also relies on having the right people in the right roles, equipped with the necessary skills and capabilities to carry out the strategy. This element ties back to structure but deserves extra emphasis. Balancing strategy with the right talent is key to organizational success.
The Cornerstones of Strategy Execution
in their article “Why Strategy Execution Unravel’s and what to do About it”Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull propose another model to avoid execution misses. For them, success in execution is achieved when organizations prioritize:
- Agility (caveat, this doesn’t mean running after every shiny object)
- Coordination across business units and departments
- Reallocation of people, processes and resources to adapt
The above mindset counters the below common pitfalls:
- Thinking that there’s misalignment, when there’s lack of coordination
- Thinking that sticking to the plan equals to staying true to the strategy
- Over-communicating the strategy, instead of providing clarity and simplicity
- Rewarding outcomes only, not rewarding enough behaviors that reinforce agility, coordination, and reallocation
- Driving strategy from the top, without articulating the role middle management has to adapt and execute
These frameworks fall short from being step-by-step guides. However, they serve as useful checklists and reminders. By incorporating these principles into our strategic approach, we are better equipped to navigate the complexities of execution, and keep our teams on track.