ExtraMileIssue9
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By Jamie R. Van Doren, Associate Director of Marketing and Digital Engagement, the telos institute<br />
8<br />
and your team have put hours into crafting a strategic plan.<br />
YOU Maybe consultants, advisors or board members were involved<br />
as well. Regardless, it was a lot of work. Yet, so often strategic plans<br />
miss the critical next step – effective implementation.<br />
The percentage of strategic plans that fail isn’t clear – measures<br />
are all over the map. However, we know that plans fail for a variety<br />
of reasons. Plans may be overly ambitious, too complex and poorly<br />
understood or lacking any clear actions or metrics. Maybe there isn’t<br />
consensus on the plan or employees never even know about it. Finally,<br />
maybe once it’s been written, no one bothers to do anything with it.<br />
And we all know that a strategic plan without a plan for execution is<br />
little more than a binder on a shelf collecting dust.<br />
Why does this happen?<br />
Knowing that execution is important and having an actionable plan for<br />
HOW to execute, are not the same. It is critical for leaders to lay out the<br />
steps necessary to implement the plan and identify how to reprioritize<br />
and reengage in planning when the unexpected occurs.<br />
There are many ways to approach execution. In most cases, some of<br />
the steps are universally agreed upon. But it still leaves you with the<br />
“how” of implementing each step. For example, we all know that<br />
communicating the plan is essential. However, there might also be<br />
disagreement around what, specifically, to communicate (e.g. the whole<br />
plan or just the critical metrics that affect specific departments). There<br />
might be disagreement as to how to communicate the plan (do we have<br />
a meeting with department heads or create an online publication for<br />
everyone), and what the outcome of such communication should be.<br />
Because of these differing perspectives and often-unanswered<br />
questions, we’ve found that a model or a framework of some kind<br />
helps. To that end, we recommend a new model to guide your strategy<br />
implementation: The Engagement Model for Strategy Execution. (see<br />
figure 1 on the next page)<br />
The core of the model relies on and inspires higher levels of employee<br />
engagement. We know high levels of employee engagement<br />
profoundly influence the success of an organization or project. A study<br />
by Gallup found that organizations with highly engaged employees<br />
out-performed peer organizations by 85% in sales growth and 26% in<br />
gross margins. Not bad!<br />
As we go through The Engagement Model, we’ll periodically utilize a<br />
fictitious organization to illustrate a point. This fictitious organization,<br />
XYZ Trucking Company, is made up of an amalgamation of organizations<br />
we’ve worked with in the past, as well as the challenges they’ve faced.<br />
9