Congratulations on completing your 3-year Strategic Plan!
Now comes the crucial phase: execution.
However, before diving in, it’s critical to assess whether your organization possesses the alignment necessary to realize your 2024 Growth Strategies. Research by LSA Global reveals that highly aligned companies experience a staggering 58% faster revenue growth and are 72% more profitable.
So, let’s assess the strategies necessary to ensure alignment and maximize your chances of success.
- Aligning Leaders on Strategic Priorities: It’s essential to get leadership fully on board with the strategic priorities. Rather than treating alignment as a one-time event, I recommend utilizing a dynamic Line-of-Sight tool (like this one). This empowers leadership teams to continuously engage with their respective departments, ensuring clarity and buy-in regarding how each team aligns with the company’s strategic objectives. Regular updates and quarterly revisions keep the process agile and responsive. Leaders should foster focused discussions within their teams, ensuring that the strategic plan is not just understood but deemed clear, believable, and actionable.
- Reinforcing Core Values and Practices: Once alignment on objectives is achieved, the next step is to reinforce the values and practices that drive success. This entails assessing and nurturing your corporate culture, promoting transparency within the workplace, and cultivating a culture of accountability among leaders. By making strategic plans, progress, and challenges visible to all stakeholders, leaders foster an environment of open dialogue and inquiry, facilitating smoother execution.
- Consistent Inspection of Expectations: Leaders must consistently model, reward, and reinforce desired behaviors and actions. This involves aligning success metrics and reward systems with strategic objectives, ensuring that they incentivize behaviors conducive to strategy execution. By regularly assessing whether behaviors align with organizational goals, leaders can course-correct where necessary, fostering a cohesive, forward-moving workforce.
Are you empowering your workforce to row in the same direction?
If not, it’s time to realign and drive towards success.
Achieving alignment is not a one-time task but an ongoing process that requires dedication and proactive leadership. By aligning leaders, reinforcing core values, and consistently inspecting expectations, organizations can position themselves for success in executing their 2024 Growth Strategies. When you commit to fostering alignment at every level of the organization and watch as our collective efforts propel us toward our desired outcomes.