Cascading Strategy, Ascending Goals

You can have it all, further your strategy and goals that inspire people. Thomas Edison said “a strategy without a plan is hallucination.”  When it comes to the strategic and tactical, one does not live long without the other. Though strategy articulates where the organization wants to go, in today's knowledge economy, people cannot simply be told what to do to get there. It is often up to people to figure out how to get there in the course of the work they (want to) do. "Want to do" is the inspiration catalyst to executing strategy so that people persist in helping to achieve it; in fact hard goals correlate with persistence. But first people have to really understand the strategy and where the organization is placing its bets.

How far does your strategy reach?

For all the lip service paid to cascading strategy to all levels,”it’s not unusual for an organization to acknowledge that they have no strategic business plan beyond a few, well-articulated talking points. Whether any strategy document actually exists, is uniformly known, accepted, and used (as well as up-to-date), is still a mystery to too many managers.” (Kallas, Kosta, Neuman)  One reason for this is strategy is a dynamic moving target… so it requires continuous affirmation and communication.  What are your systems and institutionalized practices to affirm strategy?  Baldrige winning organizations who have consistently outperformed the S&P 500, have established practices to ensure: 
 

•  A vision and strategic plan for meeting customer requirements shared by top leadership guides staff’s day to day decisions.

• Continuous planning, goal setting, workforce planning, and budgeting based on performance measures of key customers’ current and anticipated requirements.

Got capital to execute your strategy? (human capital, that is)

A study in Harvard Business Review “How to help employees get your strategy” confirms employees whose overall view of their company is positive are more likely to understand and agree with the company’s strategy.  But surprisingly length of service did not automatically correlate with understanding the current strategy. My hypothesis is that people can fall into a comfort zone/“auto pilot” mode and get out of touch.  It’s documented that people who have been in their roles for five years have mastered their competencies; however if they are not engaged in developmental stretch roles, their productivity drops. Leaders can solve for this through smart deployment. Reviewing your talent, particularly A players, to deploy individuals into critical roles to execute strategy and develop innovative products and services, is an optimal use of human capital resources. Hindustan Unilever regularly reviews where their 50 best performers are deployed, to ensure they in the most strategic jobs.

 

Communicate directly from the top and often.  Communication standards show that important messages need to be communicated in seven different ways, and not delegated or watered down by communicating through others.  Politicians' campaign managers get their candidate's facetime and platform in front of constituencies; it’s the same with making sure leaders personally communicate strategy throughout your organization, using several mediums. Many leaders tirelessly talk of their vision but are not as explicit or thorough at communicating their strategy--it's time to be more transparent about strategy. If the analysts want to know your strategy for shareholders, so do the stakeholders within your organization, and if they don't know, you're leaving strategy execution to chance. 

 

Use ascending goals to support strategy.  How do organizations ensure their strategy cascades so that workers’ daily decisions and behaviors support the firm’s competitive intentions?  Rather than rely on cascading goals, try ascending goals.  An efficient process for this is called “15-5” .  Here's how it works-- everyone spends 15 mnutes writing what they did each week to advance the strategy; their manager takes five minutes to read it, and takes 15 minutes to summarize everyone's input for the top team. If people have to be selective about what they write about, they will write about what inspires them the most and what they think is most important to the organization.  An e-collaboration space would be an effective transparent forum for ascending goals. Zappos makes their culture book (written by everyone) transparent; similarly an organization could make their dynamic "strategy book" transparent. Instead of hiding all that good work in a performance management system, if this technology was named as "strategy management" it would engage people more. 

Josh Bersin notes, "many companies have focused heavily on implementing complex 'cascading goals' programs through the use of talent management software... such programs do not necessarily drive alignment or engagement in the company's strategy as much as we may have believed...because they are too rigid and hard to change. In today's volatile and agile work environment... it's important for top leaders to [use an] 'agile model of management'."  If you're driving strategy and change, agility is an essential organizational capability. 

So we can have it both ways-- strategy cascading down to people at all levels who make it happen and inspired tactical goals ascending to support the strategy, because the reality is one cannot endure without the other.

What are your thoughts and practices in this area?  Drop me a line...