ExtraMileIssue9

By Jamie R. Van Doren, Associate Director of Marketing and Digital Engagement, the telos institute
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and your team have put hours into crafting a strategic plan.
YOU Maybe consultants, advisors or board members were involved
as well. Regardless, it was a lot of work. Yet, so often strategic plans
miss the critical next step – effective implementation.
The percentage of strategic plans that fail isn’t clear – measures
are all over the map. However, we know that plans fail for a variety
of reasons. Plans may be overly ambitious, too complex and poorly
understood or lacking any clear actions or metrics. Maybe there isn’t
consensus on the plan or employees never even know about it. Finally,
maybe once it’s been written, no one bothers to do anything with it.
And we all know that a strategic plan without a plan for execution is
little more than a binder on a shelf collecting dust.
Why does this happen?
Knowing that execution is important and having an actionable plan for
HOW to execute, are not the same. It is critical for leaders to lay out the
steps necessary to implement the plan and identify how to reprioritize
and reengage in planning when the unexpected occurs.
There are many ways to approach execution. In most cases, some of
the steps are universally agreed upon. But it still leaves you with the
“how” of implementing each step. For example, we all know that
communicating the plan is essential. However, there might also be
disagreement around what, specifically, to communicate (e.g. the whole
plan or just the critical metrics that affect specific departments). There
might be disagreement as to how to communicate the plan (do we have
a meeting with department heads or create an online publication for
everyone), and what the outcome of such communication should be.
Because of these differing perspectives and often-unanswered
questions, we’ve found that a model or a framework of some kind
helps. To that end, we recommend a new model to guide your strategy
implementation: The Engagement Model for Strategy Execution. (see
figure 1 on the next page)
The core of the model relies on and inspires higher levels of employee
engagement. We know high levels of employee engagement
profoundly influence the success of an organization or project. A study
by Gallup found that organizations with highly engaged employees
out-performed peer organizations by 85% in sales growth and 26% in
gross margins. Not bad!
As we go through The Engagement Model, we’ll periodically utilize a
fictitious organization to illustrate a point. This fictitious organization,
XYZ Trucking Company, is made up of an amalgamation of organizations
we’ve worked with in the past, as well as the challenges they’ve faced.
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