The Question Boards Skip
Boards ask whether the strategy is right. They debate the market, the numbers, the competitors, the timeline. They hire a respected firm, receive a polished plan, and vote to approve it.
Then, twelve months later, the plan is stuck or stalled.
The board’s instinct is to blame the strategy and commission a new one. That instinct is wrong. In most cases the strategy was fine. The organization was not ready to execute it.
Ready, Set, Go
Strategy has three stages: READY, SET, GO.
READY is the capacity of an organization to successfully execute strategy.
SET is writing the plan, including hiring firms great firms like McKinsey & Company to help with it.
GO is execution by the Strategic Leadership team.
Most organizations skip READY. They write the plan and launch into execution unaware of their own deficiencies: leaders without the funding or autonomy to act, an organization that keeps pulling its best people back into the day-to-day activities, or a gap between what the plan assumes and what the organization can deliver.
Eisenhower said plans are useless but planning is essential. The same logic applies to readiness. The value is in the honest examination of your organization, not creating the strategic planning document.
Leader as the Fulcrum
Here is the uncomfortable part. Execution failure is a leadership problem, not a strategy problem.
Plans are not in search of leaders. Empowered leaders create and execute plans. When leadership is not funded, not autonomous, and constantly dragged back into current operations, strategy cannot move the organization to NEXT. It the strategic leader is not trained in strategy and empowered to act then no plan can compensate for these deficiencies.
Executive’s Perspective
Before your board or senior team approves the next strategic plan, put three questions on the table:
- Do the leaders responsible for executing this plan have dedicated funding?
- Do they have the autonomy to act without going through levels of approvals from existing internal decision-makers?
- Can we show, with evidence rather than opinion, that the organization is ready for strategy which by its nature is disruptive and transformative?
If the answer to any of them is “we don’t know,” you are not ready to execute and get the results your plan was created to achieve.
Measure Your Readiness
That is why I built the NOW to NEXT Strategic Leadership Readiness Index™. It is a 49-question diagnostic across seven areas of strategic leadership, takes about twelve minutes to complete and shows where a board or leadership team is strong and where it is exposed, before the plan is launched rather than after it stalls. It is also a foundation of my new book, NOW to NEXT.
Simply click here to take the survey. It is anonymous and free of charge.
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