Any business starts with an idea. Yet, even good ideas might stay unrealized due to the lack of a well-thought strategic plan or its poor execution. It often happens that company leaders and decision-makers get engulfed by operational routines, and their ability to generate insights and progressive ideas are blurred over time.
With a modern leadership concept built around adaptivity and agility, strategic thinking is one of the most important skills an effective manager should own today. Executives at all company levels should be able to retain a strategic perspective and stay focused on bigger goals even when deeply involved in day-to-day operations.
Here, we are going to consider the main hurdles that hinder the execution of your strategic plan and slow down your teams when they strive to get things done right. Those challenges might not lie on the surface, yet, once you are armed with the info, you’ll be able to find ways to overcome them.
What Is Strategy Execution?
Generating an efficient strategy that promises to hit the targeted goals and achieve successful results is only half the battle since more than 60% of strategies fail to be executed in the way they were conceived.
Most often than not, efficient strategy implementation is a challenging task. The thing is that most executives and managers broadly treat strategy execution as a realization of a plan. They bind themselves rather to a process than final results.
However, successful strategy implementation is about converting ideas into certain actions to gain the best outcomes and reach strategic goals.
3 Problems Hampering Strategy Execution
In most cases, strategies suffer a setback not due to incorrect planning or wrong initiative but rather due to incorrect implementation. Let’s take a look at the most common hurdles or obstacles that prevent strategy realization. We’ll also provide tips on how to settle them to gain the desired results.
Lack of Time
It’s by far the biggest challenge all companies face on the way to strategy execution. Yet, not all of them accept this problem or even notice it. With a lot of responsibilities and duties to them, managers have a lot of activities to organize and control.
They often lose a big-picture view for the following reasons:
- They strive to embrace all intermediate purposes and end up overwhelmed with minor tasks and objectives;
- They don’t look back to evaluate the progress;
- They don’t take time to assess intermediate results and think strategically.
The lack of time makes the whole process revolve around routine activities, thus, nullifying the focus on strategic results.
Tip: Do some sub-planning to split your initial strategic plan into clear steps to stay on top of your tasks and still have a bigger goal in mind.
Lack of Involvement and Commitment
Strange though it might sound, nearly 95% of employees and team members don’t quite get into the strategy and don’t understand how it relates to their own tasks and professional goals. Where there is no interest and understanding, you can’t expect engagement and commitment to work.
Tip: You should translate strategic goals into employees’ personal objectives and correlate those with their own preferences, aspirations, and ambitions. Employees should feel valued and perceive themselves as a part of a strategic team working toward a common goal.
Poor Prioritizing
For resultative strategy execution, making employees and executives aware of a general strategy and strategic goals is not enough. Strategy implementation is a multi-faceted process often engaging more than one team or department and embracing a few stages or levels.
Hence, establishing clear priorities is vital for letting employees understand what they should do and see the “why” behind each activity, move, and action they take.
Tip: To ensure that ongoing work is aimed at achieving strategic goals, set priorities from the start and align them with people, teams, and intermediate objectives. When properly organized, this approach will result in successfully accomplished smaller tasks contributing to a major goal and promoting the strategy execution.
Bottom Line
Some consider strategic planning a challenging task, yet real challenges will wait for you ahead when you delve into the strategy implementation process. Surely enough, success will largely depend on the people and resources involved. However, knowing the pitfalls and hurdles that might derail the progress, you’ll be able to minimize the difficulties associated with the strategy execution.
