Business Execution: From Strategy to People and Operations

This is the third course of the Business Execution series.

Effective Learning

Understanding the Fundamentals * Crafting a Business Strategy that Executes * Linking Strategy to People and Operations * Monitoring and Evaluating Initiatives

FAQs

Creating an exceptional strategy doesn't guarantee that it'll be executed successfully. To ensure your strategy is implemented effectively, it's important that employees understand how their work fits in with the big picture.

All too often, organizations create well-formulated strategies that appear to take every contingency into account, but fail to get the desired results. On paper, your organization may have a brilliant plan.

Before communicating strategies to employees, you first need to consider your organization's mission, values, and vision. These concepts are central to most companies.

The Science of Better Learning

Having developed a strategy based on your mission, values, and vision statements, you then communicate this strategy by applying several important principles.

Purpose: Use this job aid to review principles for communicating your organization's corporate strategy.

As a leader, an effective way of aligning operational processes within your organization is to use a corporate balanced scorecard.

Suppose you've created a strategy based on your company's mission, values, and vision statements. And suppose you've communicated this strategy to your employees so they understand and support the plan.

Your organization's corporate strategy is represented by a high-level balanced scorecard. But to execute this strategy, you need to translate this high-level scorecard into department, team, and individual scorecards.

The next principle of cascading BSCs is that each business unit should examine the high-level scorecard and select the objective that it can execute.

The final principle when cascading BSCs is that all the business unit scorecards combined should cover all the high-level objectives. Just because your organization has created scorecards for each department, unit, or team doesn't necessarily mean they're all aligned to the high-level objectives.

Purpose: Use this job aid to find out how to align your corporate scorecard to other levels within your organization.

When cascading your corporate scorecard, you must link employees' personal objectives with your organization's strategy. Once you've aligned individual scorecards to the high-level scorecard, you need to create a clear picture for your staff of how their tasks can affect the success of the strategy.

Good strategy execution depends on having employees with the right competencies in the right places. Essential competencies involve knowledge or expertise of a particular area, abilities such as interpersonal skills, and personal values such as honesty, creativity, and customer focus.

As a leader, you must nurture a talented workforce to help your organization execute its strategy. Decisions about strategic direction are essentially decisions about talent.

Clearly, competent employees are one of your organization's most valuable resources. Without the right knowledge, skills, and values in place, it can be a costly and time-wasting exercise to implement your organization's strategy.

The first step in assessing employee competencies is to create a detailed list of competencies required for each strategic position in your organization.

The next step in the competency assessment process is to identify gaps in an employee's portfolio of competencies. At this stage, you need to compare the results of your employee assessment to the requirements of the position.

The next step in the process of assessing employee competency is to create a development plan to address gaps in your employees' portfolios of competencies.

Purpose: Use this follow-on activity to analyze what competencies are required for a specific position in your organization, what competencies employees currently have, and how they may be developed.

All too often, organizations create well-formulated strategies that appear to take every contingency into account, but fail to get the desired results. One key reason may be because they don't clearly communicate their strategic goals to employees.

The balanced scorecard, or BSC, is a performance management process that can help you monitor your employees' objectives and ensure their tasks align with your organization's goals.

Organizations are increasingly reliant on having people with the right competencies. Creating an executable strategy means having the desired competency in place.

This is the third course of the Business Execution series.

You think knowing stuff changes the game? You think sitting in a library, stacking up facts like you’re building a Jenga tower, is gonna make you a winner? Man, that’s cute. But life ain't a trivia night. Information alone? It’s worthless. It’s like having a Lamborghini in your garage but you never learned how to drive. You just sit in it, making engine noises. Vroom vroom. People walk by, they see the car, but they also see you ain't going nowhere. You got all this knowledge, all these textbooks, but when life throws a punch, you’re still looking up the definition of "duck." It’s what you *do* with that information that actually matters. Don't be the person with the shiny car and no keys.