The Many Benefits of a Clear Strategy
We looked at organizational health data from clients we started to work with in mid-2020, and despite the incredible amount of change and challenge these companies have experienced, we found that our clients have actually over-indexed on communicating their strategy (what we call Strategic Understanding) and goals to employees.
We use a powerful tool called Line-of-Sight, and in our mid-pandemic study group, we found these organizations had high scores in Strategic Understanding indicating high degrees of:
Individual and collective understanding of the strategy
Perceived focus of the leadership team on sharing the strategy with employees
Perceived value of the strategy to guiding employees’ work
Shared sense of purpose
Understanding of the company’s differentiation strategy
This success for our clients, in many cases was made possible by the need to “pivot” their business strategy because of the pandemic. And while evidence of employee confidence in the strategy, a shared sense of purpose, and the value of the strategy in guiding employee work are incredible, it’s not a guarantee that the market positioning they pursue will be successful. It does means that leaders are creating strong Strategic Understanding by communicating and discussing their strategic intent broadly across their organization. This in turn means that they have created more opportunities for critical discussions, which are likely to lead to refining their positioning into a more robust strategy.
Strategic Understanding is only one aspect of good execution, but so far, we see that our clients have stepped up to broadly share their strategic goals.
Their challenge will be to maintain this transparency and clarity as they head into the post-pandemic phase. When the economy improves, there will be a greater risk of focusing on the more tactical aspects of operations and getting the collective eyes of the organization off the strategy ball. There will also be a greater risk of losing focus on a single, clear positioning strategy, as improving financials create more opportunities to add more activities, people, and metrics, in ways that may be less rigorously aligned with the original strategy.
Our clients use Line-of-SightSM scans regularly to measure how they are doing with their execution excellence. It provides actionable data and insights to diagnose hard-to-capture execution issues in six critical areas.