Strategic Change

You are about to invest a ton of money in refocusing the organisation and driving new strategic imperatives, but how do you know they are the right ones? How do you get people to act differently to deliver them?

 Any change, transformation or strategy work relies on the willingness of employees to adopt it move to action. They can either be the blockers of implementation or your best asset. If you involve them in part of the process and give them space to consider what it will mean for them, there is a greater possibility the change will be successful and sustainable.

 

Meaningful Purpose and Strategy is co-created, challenging and connected to action.


Strategic Clarity & Alignment

Formulating strategy is essential to the identification of business objectives and articulating the purpose of an organisation. What we experience is that there are two common challenges that often occur at this stage:

  1. We don’t all speak the same language - words have different meaning for each of us - This creates unexpected alignment issues and means that mixed messages can be passed on.

  2. There is an assumption that the strategy created is easily translatable to employees and often the steps to achieving the strategic intentions are identified at the same time, by the same group of people - without testing the efficacy of the strategy itself.

 

 Alignment within the senior team is key.

Working at this level challenges executive teams to be open, honest and challenge each other.

We work with executive teams, supporting them to articulate and clarify the strategy in their own words, sharing back and identifying gaps and differences in interpretation. We spend time with these teams, challenging the meaning and implications of the strategy. 

 We work with you to:

 ●      Facilitate sessions for Strategy Creation.

●      Draw out strategy helping you to identify not just what it sounds like but also what it looks like.

●      Align together and work through the challenges of clarifying strategy.

●      Supporting you to develop relationally and move past blockers which jeopardise strategy work.

●      Align together around a clear purpose - not just the words but what they actually mean.

●      Support you to bring together often competing strategic imperatives cohesively.

 

Testing Strategic feasibility

Your Situation

You have created a strategy, you feel good about it, but for some reason no one else seems to care. You have presented it, told people about it and yet no one is doing anything differently. No one has even asked any questions about it. Why has this happened?

 

Often this is because the strategic intent hasn’t been tested and that people find it difficult to connect it to their day-to-day activities. What does the strategy mean in reality? How does it affect the lived experience of colleagues and customers? How feasible is it to achieve? This is not about ripping up the Exec Team strategy, but it is about considering all the practical implications and honing/editing it where required.

Why would you do this?

 There are two key reasons why this step is essential:

  1. It is pointless to put out strategic imperatives that are just not feasible in practice or that will affect something unexpectedly.

  2. By co-creating the strategy with people you are building both ownership of a co-owned strategy and also a deeper understanding at a personal and team level of what the strategy actually means for them.

 

We work with you to:

●      Take your strategy out further - testing and exploring the implications and meaning.

●      Create a psychologically brave space to co-evolve strategy with employees.

●      Analyse and make sense of feedback and ideas - identifying both blockers to the strategic imperatives and where the strategy can be evolved, or the meaning clarified.

●      Facilitate space for the exec team to re-evaluate the strategy and where/what needs to be evolve.

 

Strategic Communication

You have sent out the email…with PowerPoint attached of the new strategy. You have put together some one pagers telling employees what it is all about…but has anyone read it? Why in the most recent employee survey did employees say they did not understand the company’s strategy. It is clear, it is in a PowerPoint, you have shared it with your senior leaders…why is nothing changing?

 

 In a word ‘meaning’. The question that any person asks or considers when seeing the purpose change or the targets change is what does this mean for me? If you have ever received an email or been ‘taken through’ a PowerPoint about a new/evolved/renewed strategy the meaning is often missing.

 A strategy is so often experienced by employees as just words on a page passed out - often by email - with the expectation that meaning and understanding can be drawn from them. No meaning or personal connection can be found and so action isn’t taken.

We ensure your strategy is connected to the reality of those who will ultimately deliver it