Creating Line of Sight for All Employees
In the article, Connecting to Purpose: Creating a Purpose-Driven Strategic Framework for Success, I shared how strategic objectives can fit together with mission, vision, values, and operating models to establish an anchor to which individuals can connect their personal sense of purpose.
Here, we spend some time going deeper into how these objectives fit into the process of deconstructing abstract strategy into tangible, everyday activities to achieve company results.
Whether you are a large or small company, strategic objectives are an important link in creating line of sight that connects abstract and often confidential strategic ideas to everyday employee activities.
What Is Meant by Deconstructing Strategy?
A strategic plan can be overwhelming and often leaders are not clear on where to start. Or they try and do too many things randomly and all at once.
Breaking a strategy into parts or deconstructing the concepts into increasingly more concrete concepts and actions that are easy to understand is a powerful way to mitigate the anxiety and non-productive swirl that can sink effective strategy implementation.
Why Is Deconstructing Strategy Important?
Whereas strategic plans tend to be confidential and are typically not for public consumption, strategic objectives, as a reflection of the strategy, can be made more visible to at least the internal management team.
I have seen organizations treat strategy as monolithic, kept secret from the broader organization. Employees are in the dark about the goals of the company and how they can contribute. As a result, the culture defaults to a “do as I say” management style, which requires a deep and unquestioning level of blind trust that is very difficult to sustain.
By separating out strategic objectives from the overarching strategy, leaders have a means of creating a line of sight for their employees to the overall success of the company.
How to Deconstruct Abstract Strategy into Tangible & Practical Action
Effective translation of strategy into action requires breaking apart abstract concepts into tangible and practical parts. I have found that this methodical approach can be customized to create clarity and understanding across a diversity of groups from the C-suite to the frontline.
NOTE: Not every component of the deconstruction process needs to be in place on day one. From a change leadership perspective, depending on the readiness of management teams to embrace these practices, phasing each step in over time may be more palatable and increase the likelihood of hardwiring sustained adoption.
STEP 1: Define Your Strategic Pillars
Start by defining high-level categories of activity or “pillars” by looking to the measures of success that you identified during the strategy design phase and revisit what must be true for your strategy to succeed. Is it customer growth? Retention of customers? Efficient cost structure? Favorable operating margin? Diverse and engaged workforce? As you generate the list, organize related measures of success into categories.
Here are some examples of categories or “Strategic Pillars”:
- Growth & Sustainability Measures related to increased sales, growth, & customers
- Financial Viability Measures related to financial performance
- Consumer Engagement Measures related to customer experience & retention
- People & Performance Measures related to a healthy & productive workforce culture
3-5 pillars is probably the most even a seasoned executive will be able to remember off the top of their head.
STEP 2: Engage Others to Draft Annual Strategic Objectives
Strategic objectives are outcomes that, when achieved, move a company towards its future state vision. Too few strategic objectives and your canvas may be so broad that you do not achieve the focus and clarity you desire. Too many, and you dilute valuable resources that will slow pace and momentum. I have found that the sweet spot for a manageable and meaningful number of annual objectives tends to be between 6-8. Resisting the temptation to try and boil the ocean represents a shift in mindset from making incremental gains across numerous initiatives to having a significant impact across a critical few.
Although this step can seem a bit time-consuming, I have led and observed a variety of different, effective ways of navigating this process and I like to think of it as going slow upfront to go fast later. This process is a valuable exercise in capturing the diverse opinions of your leadership team to arrive at the best ideas, creating a safe space for building clarity and understanding, and perhaps most importantly, allowing for your leadership team to build their fingerprints into the plan and connect with their personal sense of purpose early on. This level of connection empowers leaders with a sense of ownership and self-directed personal accountability that spreads the burden of execution across a greater number of leaders.
Workshop your categories with other leaders by brainstorming specific objectives within each pillar. Once you have a working list, prioritize by applying criteria such as expected impact, intensity of lift, or whatever is most relevant for your organization and industry.
I have found the SMART goals criteria, which have been well-characterized in the literature, are helpful in this exercise, i.e., is the objective Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-based? When establishing your concrete targets for success, a gradation of scoring can help build team motivation as cliff objectives may be demoralizing and damaging to overall team engagement if not achieved.
Here are a couple examples of annual objectives with scoring scales by strategic pillar:
- Growth & Sustainability
- Increase net new customers
- Threshold: 3% increase
- Meets: 5% increase
- Exceeds: 7% increase
- Increase net new customers
- Financial Viability
- Increase operating margin
- Threshold: 2% increase
- Meets: 4% increase
- Exceeds: 6% increase
- Increase operating margin
These examples are meant to provoke a general understanding of the concept of setting annual objectives though there is more to be said beyond the scope of this article about the process of how to construct a scoring system and process for validating performance against targets including defining data sources, measurement methodologies, etc.
STEP 3: Align Appropriate Incentives
In some circumstances, it may be appropriate to create an incentive benefit program customized for different levels of employees in the company and that rewards contribution to and achievement of annual strategic objectives. These benefits can take the form of compensation bonuses or something else of regulatory-appropriate value and can be administered annually or in alignment with whatever timeframe is determined to yield the greatest results.
STEP 4: Communicate, Educate, and Make It Tangible
- Communicate Socialize key highlights such as the strategic pillars and objectives with your direct reports all the way to the frontline. Leverage as many face-to-face and written interactions as possible to describe and reiterate the purpose of the objectives and what they are. Examples include defining the strategic objectives and why they are important at management forums, departmental meetings, and 1:1s.
- Educate Most individuals are not well-versed in goal setting and the purpose of strategic objectives so taking the time to meet people where they are and orient them to the “why” of the strategic pillars and objectives will create important context that will enable them to see how their work powers the overall organization. Taking the time to check-in periodically with team members individually and in groups to calibrate what they are spending their time on with the strategic objectives is a tangible action for keeping everyone moving in the same direction and cutting off scope creep early.
- Make It Tangible At each progressive level of management from the C-suite to business units to individual departments, charging each group with building quarterly goals relevant to their scope and span of control can be an effective way to further deconstruct objectives into even more digestible bites. Quarterly goals are more tactical in orientation and provide the context for individuals to identify what specific tasks in their day-to-day work should be prioritized to support accomplishment of quarterly goals and by extension move the group towards achievement of the annual objectives. Each successive quarter involves iterative updating of goals.
An example of a quarterly goal for the Financial Viability objective of Improving operating margin could be to achieve an expense reduction target of $500,000. Actions to achieve this goal might include renegotiating the financial terms of a contract.
This is an invaluable opportunity to call people to action. Leaders can help employees be concrete about how their personal purpose connects to these objectives as well as create clear expectations about how they can prioritize their day-to-day tasks, meetings, and projects to align with the company’s success. This is not about micromanaging but helping individuals develop the skills to independently manage their otherwise intense workload in a manner that empowers them to triage issues in the moment and provides an appropriate degree of autonomy.
STEP 5: Continuously & Consistently Review Progress
No one likes unpleasant surprises. Creating visually intuitive and easy to understand dashboards or other progress tracking tools that are reviewed on a regular basis can help mitigate the risk of results being left to chance. Rather than waiting for a “big reveal” at the end of the performance year, early identification of barriers and gaps throughout the year will increase the predictability of positive results.
One management team I led used a basic progress tracking table that summarized the quarterly goals and aggregated the executive team members’ individual workplan highlights. The status of each task was updated on a biweekly basis and color-coded: green (on track), yellow (at risk for drifting off track), and red (definitively off track). The leadership team maximized their time together by focusing on the yellow and red items and took this as an opportunity to volunteer or ask for help from one another. Often times, tasks were yellow or red because of critical dependencies with other areas of the organization that needed attention and through early identification and review with the leaders of those areas, remediation plans were put into action much faster to get things back on track.
Conclusion
As with most leadership and management topics, there are many ways to skin the proverbial cat. The five steps outlined here are meant to provide a basis for customizing a process that works for the size and style of your company. The key takeaway is that deconstructing abstract strategy into tangible and manageable pieces is critical for generating the line of sight needed for employees to connect their individual role and personal sense of purpose to the overarching company strategy. This is the type of environment in which strategy comes alive and the power of harnessing the respective efforts of employees rowing in the same direction create a competitive edge.
To learn more or to find out how EverSparq can help, contact info@eversparq.com.
