In both private and public companies, a well-crafted strategy serves as the guiding star for success. However, many businesses, across various sectors, often overlook fundamental elements of a good strategy. Or they fail to activate it effectively to drive key decisions, engage employees, and steer the company’s plans and activities.
Can you confidently answer these six essential questions about your company’s strategy?
1. Mission/Purpose: Why does your business exist?
2. Vision: What is the future your business envisions, in terms of scope, scale, and nature?
3. Business and Financial Goals: What are your time-based achievements for the next three years, including revenue and profit?
4. Portfolio Strategy: What are your goals for growth, investment, harvesting, or divestment within each business unit?
5. Go-to-Market Strategy: How will you reach your goals? Which customer segments, geographies, and products are your key targets? What’s the enterprise and business unit plan for marketing and sales?
6. Operations, Technology, and Digital Strategy: What functionally-driven strategies and initiatives are needed to execute your business strategy?
But activating your strategy demands more than crafting a great roadmap for future success. Your company must also develop the organizational capabilities or “muscles” to execute the strategy and set your business apart. Strategic capabilities require top-level executive ownership, effective role alignment, the right processes, systems, people practices, skills, know-how, metrics, and incentives.
One critical capability that is often missing is a sense of shared ownership of the strategy throughout the entire organization. This begins with executive leadership commitment to bringing the strategic vision and goals to life with employees across the organization. This commitment requires sustained focus on driving the business forward with clear prioritization mechanisms, an ownership mindset among all employees, and data-driven KPIs and metrics.
In the fast-paced and ever-evolving business landscape, crafting a robust strategy is just the beginning. It’s the effective activation of that strategy that truly sets high-performing organizations and teams apart.
As we integrate AI further into work tasks and roles, while constantly toggling between IRL and remote work, we continue to need clarity and feedback from other humans about what we are doing and how well we are doing it.
That’s because humans are driven by our fundamental needs for achievement, approval and belonging. So, the best of the classic tools and frameworks for organizing people and activities in the workplace to achieve specific performance outcomes remain at the top of the charts today.
But where did the goal-setting imperative come from?
Many people have learned to set OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based). These goal-setting tools were developed in the 1970s and 1980s and can be traced back to Peter Drucker’s MBOs (Managing by Objectives) from the 1950s.
But the pioneers of goal-setting psychology are Edwin A. Locke, an American psychologist, and Gary P. Latham, a Canadian psychologist. The theory they began researching and developing in the late 1960s is that effective goal-setting motivates and drives people’s performance in the workplace.
The theory is that to motivate performance, goals must be clear, challenging yet achievable, committed to, and regular feedback must be provided to individuals regarding their performance on those goals. (The caveat is that when goals refer to more complex tasks, they need to be broken down further.)
What better antidote to workplace malaise is there than being highly motivated by other humans to achieve a clear set of challenging goals and receiving ongoing feedback to learn and adapt along the way?
It sounds simple, and it is really. What’s critical is building the capability throughout an organization to do goal-setting and performance feedback well, along with the workplace routines to do them regularly and often. The capability has to be designed to fit the organization, and that can incorporate AI as well as a hybrid workweek.
While AI and the hybrid workplace continue reshaping our jobs and our workplaces, the human motives and behaviors that drive performance in the workplace remain constant. We must continuously adapt and adopt the best of the classic tools and frameworks to effectively motivate and coordinate people in the workplace to achieve outstanding results.