If you thought the hard part was over once you created your strategic plan...think again. As Thomas Edison said: " Vision without execution is hallucination." How do you ensure that everyone is on the same page and pulling in the same direction? Through effective communications.
What should you be communicating about your plan, and to whom, how, and when? To answer these questions, when working with teams, I facilitate the creation of a communication matrix that captures all of this information in one easy document:
If your strategic plan was created by a leadership team, but needs to be executed by a much larger team of people who were not present during its original creation, then you must develop an approach to share and gain the executors’ input on the strategic mission, vision, priorities and dashboard. In fact, you might not even want to determine the milestones and create the timeline in the small leadership session. Instead, bring the team together to gain buy-in and/or create the above strategic plan elements, reality test them, identify key challenges, and engage everyone in solving them. This is true, two-way communication, and it is vital to helping everyone connect the dots between what they do on a daily basis and how that activity contributes to the overall success of the organization—in other words, that what they do really matters.
In his book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job , Patrick Lencioni makes a very strong case that employees who don’t know how their work impacts the lives of others will experience irrelevance, and will not be fulfilled in their jobs. Similarly, everyone coming out of this session should have a clear line of sight into at least one metric to which they can directly contribute. This information will then allow them to take it all the way down to determining their individual objectives and setting budgets. All that’s left now is to follow up, celebrate successes, and course correct…which will be discussed in the next post!
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