5 Pitfalls to Avoid In Strategy Execution

For the past two weeks, I’ve written about the important distinction between strategy implementation and strategy execution. For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume you’ve implemented your new strategy in the ways I talked about here. Now it’s time to execute the plan. Plenty of studies that indicate less than 30% of strategic plans are executed successfully. There are a myriad of reasons for this but I want to focus on five major ones you must avoid.

• You've formulated a strategy that is too broad or too non-specific. No organization can be all things to all people. Define your audience well, build your programs to serve their needs and resist the temptation to say yes to everyone and everything. Make sure your staff knows where you're going and, more importantly, where you're not. To quote Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."

• Your staff wasn’t involved in the formulation of the plan so they feel no sense of ownership.  To be clear, by staff, I mean ALL of them, not just your senior leadership. They don’t have to be in every strategy development meeting but they do need to be kept in the loop and understand why the strategy is changing. Better yet, make them a part of the process of development.

• Your members heard about the new strategic plan for the first time in a press release. These are the people that have invested in your organization, both financially and emotionally and hopefully for a long time. If you’re going to change course, don’t surprise them. Better yet, get their input along the way.

• The plan calls for lots of new programs and initiatives but none of the old programs are eliminated. Unless you can afford to hire a bunch of new staff, you’ll experience a bandwidth problem pretty quickly. Look for opportunities to eliminate programs/products that don't support the new strategic goals.

• You don’t have metrics to evaluate your progress toward the new goal(s). If you’re expecting the organization to evolve into something new, how will you know when you’ve succeeded? Progress needs to measurable and routinely assessed.

As I said, there are many other ways to undermine the execution of a new strategic plan, but if you avoid these you'll have a much greater chance to succeed.