Linking Strategy, Culture, and Execution text
Strategy without execution is hallucination. How do you ensure your strategic plan gets implemented, and the organization executes key tasks and initiatives? You'll need to successfully define a winning strategy, build a culture that drives results, and focus on executing the most important tasks and projects if you want your strategy to become a reality. Strategy sets direction for the organization. It helps you allocate resources to top priority projects. Culture is the sum of your daily actions and behaviors. It becomes a set of norms for how you want your people to behave every single day. Execution is about setting that strategic direction, prioritization your efforts, putting processes in place to support execution, and driving those behaviors every single day. Without the right processes for prioritization, goal setting and performance management, execution won't focus on the right task to drive your strategy. I know one organization that did a great job combining strategy, culture, and execution. They laid out a very clear strategy for how they were going to win in the marketplace. They knew how they were differentiated versus their competitors. They then translated that strategy into very specific goals for every single business unit and function in the organization. Expectations were set. Everyone knew what the goals were and what the benefits or consequences would be, depending on performance versus that goal. The last thing they did was make sure every single day people were executing against the right tasks. It was an expectation. Those behaviors became ingrained in the organization, and they ended up with a culture where everybody focused on driving the strategy. So the question for you is what's your strategy, how are you building that culture, and how are you making sure that people are executing the right tasks every single day?
