Most organizations know that strategic planning is critical for determining the company’s mission, values, and long-term goals. An effective strategic plan is vital to navigating your company in a direction that does not force leadership to operate in reactive mode. But the mere act of drafting a strategic plan does not guarantee its success. That depends on effective implementation and operationalization – and how willing stakeholders are to participate in and own every strategic initiative.
Defining Strategic Initiative Implementation
Strategy implementation refers to the process companies use to transform and operationalize ideas into actionable strategies that help achieve specific goals and objectives. It defines how the organization will operationalize the knowledge, e.g., plans, policies, procedures, messaging, leadership guidelines, and team performance expectations across the organization, leading to more consistent performance, better productivity, and the right business outcomes.
Executive Leadership is responsible for making decisions that build the culture and boost performance and productivity. For many, the struggle is to give these decisions the needed visibility and operating plan to effectively implement strategic and performance objectives. Strategy implementation is more often successful when this best practice workflow is applied:
- Develop Strategy: Planning consists of a collaboration between stakeholders that results in strategies that can be documented. Companies need to have a clear, concise, and compelling strategic plan that makes sense for the business and can be easily communicated to employees, team members, and often, shareholders or partners. To ensure that messaging is clear and consistent, leadership must develop a framework for creating an operating plan and the knowledge that guides and reinforces the strategic vision and goals. Once the feedback loop is initiated, plans may need to be revised to better align with overall corporate objectives.
- Create Content: Documents such as operating playbooks, business procedures (SOPs), employee manuals, checklists, workflows, plays, and other performance knowledge that supports business initiatives often exist in diverse formats and locations. This information can be adapted and collected into guidebooks or playbooks, creating a library of content that can be easily assessed, organized, and disseminated as needed. These “playbooks” may cover Go-To-Market Strategies, New Product Launches, ESG Management, Succession Planning, Onboarding, and Leadership Development, among other strategic initiatives. Once the content is in digestible form, it can be shared with stakeholders to collect feedback.
- Gather Feedback: Successful implementation of an initiative is a team effort. When everyone shares ideas about their experience, guidebooks can be refined into real-world, actionable strategies. Effectively gathering and incorporating feedback inspires employee confidence and productivity, informs leadership of frontline challenges and successes, and provides solid guidance as to where additional resources or changes to existing content are needed to support the strategic plan.
- Make Decisions: The information gathered from a robust feedback loop can help leaders make decisions that will improve efficiency, quality, customer satisfaction, or other business outcomes. With supporting documentation and feedback in place, leadership can determine what roles are needed for the project, what resources are required, what changes to messaging are necessary, and the steps that must be implemented. Feedback is vital to manage expectations, timelines, gather intelligence, inform mid-course corrections, adjust leadership activities, and ensure nothing is overlooked. A strong and intentional leadership structure program will drive the initiative forward, keep it on track, develop its teams, and problem-solve when necessary.
The Process is Ongoing
Organizational strategic planning is not a one-time event; companies should have a mechanism to communicate often and encourage teamwork and collaboration. Productive feedback can help your employees stay focused, boost morale, and sustain the motivation to strive to achieve goals and objectives. Progress reports reveal what is or isn’t working, allowing leadership to reallocate resources as needed, identity knowledge gaps, or tweak processes to maintain productivity.
KLONE supports the strategic initiative implementation at every step of the process.
It helps to create robust knowledge bases that grow and adapt with experience.
It is always accessible and available, providing actionable information and operating guidance when managers are not available
It provides employees with the real-time knowledge they need to reinforce best practices and protocols.
It allows for a meaningful feedback loop that ensures all stakeholders at all levels have a voice.
KLONE is your partner to enable your organization to win and optimize strategic initiatives. Call today to learn more about how KLONE will help you operationalize and achieve your business outcomes.