Once managers have decided on a strategy, the emphasis turns to converting it into actions and good results. Putting the strategy into place and getting the organization to execute it well call for different sets of managerial skills.
Good strategy execution requires a team effort. All managers have strategy execution responsibility in their areas of authority, and all employees are active participants in the strategy execution. How well managers perform these eight tasks has a decisive impact on whether the outcome is a spectacular success, a colossal failure, or something in between.
Proficient strategy execution depends heavily on competent personnel, better-than-adequate competitive capabilities, and an effective internal organization. Building a capable organization is thus always a top priority in strategy execution. Building new competencies and capabilities is a multistage process that occurs over a period of months and years. It is not something that is accomplished overnight.
This includes careful screening of requests for more people and new facilities and equipment, approving those that hold promise for making a contribution to strategy execution, and turning down those that don’t. A company’s strategic priorities must drive how capital allocations are made and the size of each unit’s operating budgets.
Anytime a company makes changes to its business strategy, managers are well advised to carefully review existing policies and procedures, and revise or discard those that are out of sync. Well-conceived policies and procedures aid strategy execution; out-of-sync ones are barriers to effective implementation.
Process management programs drive continuous improvement and help an organization achieve operating excellence. The purpose of using benchmarking, best practices, business process reengineering, TQM, Six Sigma, or other operational improvement programs is to improve the performance of strategy-critical activities and promote superior strategy execution.
A properly designed reward structure is management’s most powerful tool for gaining employee commitment to superior strategy execution and excellent operating results. Managers must learn how and why the use of well-designed incentives and rewards can be management’s single most powerful tool for promoting operating excellence.
Corporate culture is a company’s internal work climate and is shaped by its core values, beliefs, and business principles. A company’s culture is important because it influences its traditions, work practices, and style of operating. A company’s culture is important because it influences the organization’s actions and approaches to conducting business-in a very real sense, the culture is the company’s organizational DNA.
Leaders have to be out in the field, seeing for themselves how well operations are going, gathering information firsthand, and gauging the progress being made. Proficient strategy execution requires company managers to be diligent and adept in spotting problems, learning what obstacles lie in the path of good execution, and then clearing the way for progress: the goal must be to produce better results speedily and productively.
Clearly, when a company’s strategy or its execution efforts are not delivering good results, it is the leader’s responsibility to step forward and push corrective actions.