How To Align Your Executive Team for Strategic Success
According to a study by Harvard Business Review, companies with a well-defined strategy achieve a 5.2% higher annual revenue growth rate than those without one. A healthy strategy helps organizations stay focused, make informed decisions, and achieve their business objectives at scale and speed.
However, 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully. This month, Transcend Organizational Psychology expert Meghan McClimon sat down with Senior Strategists and Executive Coaches Andrea Dowding and Jaci Reed to discuss how strategic readiness could be the missing linchpin for those failed strategies and how to properly prepare your organization for strategic success.
What is strategic readiness and why is it important?
Strategic readiness is the process of gathering information throughout critical areas of the business to understand the current state of alignment and readiness to execute strategy.
One primary reason strategic execution fails is that executive leadership is not aligned with the priorities of the business through an enterprise-first lens. By incorporating a framework for strategic readiness, executives and other key leaders can reflect on what matters most for the business outside of their own vertical, both long- and short-term. When an executive team takes the time to prepare their shared mindset ahead of jumping into the strategy, it allows everyone to start from the same place, adding in their unique viewpoints and expertise to create something better for the business in the end. The true magic that comes from the collective genius of a unified group doesn’t happen on its own; there must be a process in place to unlock it.
Moreover, strategic readiness reinforces common strengths and addresses gaps within the business to focus decision-making and strategy on the most critical areas—something that is only possible when starting from a place of shared understanding.
Assessing an organization’s readiness prior to the actual strategic planning session is a crucial step to ensure that a well-developed strategy will perform favorably.
We begin the process with a strategic readiness assessment, gathering data through a series of interviews and surveys. These provide the basis for what will become a robust insights report. Allowing the executive team time to process and reflect on this report before the strategy session has several benefits that will impact execution. These include:
- Providing a common language for the executive team regarding enterprise strengths and opportunities.
- Incorporating data that the CEO and executive team can use to evaluate needs and investments within the organization with a greater degree of accuracy and alignment.
- Informing the prework and planning of the strategy session to ensure that transparency is fully integrated into strategic discussions, becoming a catalyst for successful execution and rapid transformation.
What are the Critical Areas of Strategic Readiness?
In short, strategic readiness is about the mindsets and structures necessary to execute strategy. Within the readiness process, it is important to measure both the tactical and relational structures and dynamics of the business. Blending the two is key to strategic success.
At Transcend, we assess six different areas of strategic readiness. These include the following:
These areas are essential because they help everyone involved in strategy creation understand and delineate the mindsets and behaviors within leadership and the organization that can either facilitate or stall the planning and execution of the strategy.
By understanding where the organization is starting from, the enterprise team can prioritize efforts and resources around the strategic levers that will help deliver the business to its desired state.
Focus Area of Note: Growth and Innovation
Each area mentioned above has an intentional and unique purpose that will drive significant value for the enterprise. However, due to its robust nature, we want to dive deeper into the area of Growth and Innovation.
When it comes to planning a strategy, there is usually no shortage of ideas about growth and innovation. Strategic readiness in this area provides a framework of rigor and data-based reference points to enable and accelerate effective collaboration and alignment around these ideas. Team members can agree on prioritization, pacing, and success factors, accelerating decision-making during the strategic session.
Gathering data and key insights regarding an organization’s propensity, capability, and capacity to generate and sustain growth and innovation is imperative for strategic effectiveness.
We gather information in the following key areas required to support growth and innovation:
- Change Capability:
- How well does the organization handle change?
- Does the organization need to strengthen its readiness for change?
- Capabilities and capacity to enable a long-range strategic plan:
- Does the organization have what it takes in talent, data and analytics, technology, and operations to deliver with excellence?
- What are the strengths and gaps of each vertical?
- Future Growth Opportunities:
- What are the ideas on innovation across the organization, and where might those ideas lead
- Where is the leadership team underperforming compared to their competitors?
- Current Mindsets:
- What current mindsets have aided in the company’s success?
- Where are mindsets misaligned, and what new mindsets will be required to unlock future growth?
Centralizing the Strategy
Within every company, there are individual, team, and enterprise dynamics at play. To keep the energy focused, with every member of the team rowing the proverbial boat in the same direction, the strategy must be at the very center of the ecosystem. A strategic readiness assessment will engage a wide swath of leaders throughout the enterprise, in addition to the CEO and their immediate team, creating an entire ecosystem of leaders who are engaged in and evangelizing the overall strategic direction. This culture of empowerment will stimulate tremendous momentum that fuels execution.
Leadership team performance dynamics must be assessed throughout the strategic process, ensuring the strategy stays center-of-desk. Without regular touchpoints, executives can easily get caught up in the daily tasks of maintaining the business and lose sight of the strategic vision. With a leadership cadence of communication and collaboration, the strategy will remain prioritized, and everyone will have collective accountability toward desired outcomes. These meetings make space for strategic decision-making and enable agility within the strategy to ensure a collective focus when market conditions inevitably shift or enterprise dynamics change.
Alignment, Alignment, Alignment
Collecting data and insights to evaluate readiness at the enterprise, team, and individual levels enables and empowers executives to focus on what matters most to the business and where it needs to be in the future during the strategic planning process. Moreover, it will accelerate strategic execution with excellence, leading to a heightened sense of alignment, empowerment, collaboration, and accountability at every level.
Don’t sleep on the first step of strategy. Align leaders and teams at the onset to create maximum value for the business.
To ensure your strategy is ready for execution, contact Transcend, and we will connect you with one of our strategy experts. You can also reach out directly to the speakers of this month’s webinar here.
Transcend deploys tactical and executive performance resources that have increased the speed of enterprise transformation by an average of 40 percent.
Our webinar series, “How Executives Drive Lasting Transformation,” continues November 7, 2pm ET / 11am PT on LinkedIn Live. This time, we’ll discuss building a performance culture within portfolio companies. Register here.
