Is your strategy adopted?

Your strategy can be said to be effectively adopted if there is:

• Active engagement of all stakeholders AND
• Their willing commitment to the achievement of strategic goals.

Discover below:

• Key advice and actions to improve the adoption of your strategy.
  
• Questions to ask to prompt deeper conversations on strategy adoption across your organisation.
• Strategy models relating to adoption.
• Strategy workshops.
• Links to our full range of resources, including ‘The Strategy Manual’, our Strategy Glossary and links to articles and posts by Mike Baxter.
• We also offer consultancy and advice on all aspects of strategy.

Key advice and actions

Your strategy will be adopted if it is well communicated and actively discussed, if your strategic goals are meaningfully assigned, effectively owned and conducive to collaboration, and if participants in strategy conversations feel psychologically safe.

1. A culture for strategy adoption

Focusing on strategy adoption is important in order to foster an organisational culture conducive to strategic success. As a result, your strategy will have less chance of becoming one of the 44% of strategies that fail. Engagement and commitment can be secured by ensuring employees:

1. find their work purposeful.
2. make ‘tangible progress towards meaningful goals’ (the ‘Progress Principle’)
3. have ownership of their goals and understand the connections between their goals and the goals of others.

Research suggests that the engagement and commitment of middle managers is particularly critical to strategic success.

2. Assignment and ownership of strategic goals

For strategy to be adopted, authority for strategic change moves from senior leaders to change-makers across the organisation. This involves the assignment of strategic goals to those change-makers. The following list shows how strategic goals can be supported in order to ensure effective adoption by goal owners across your organisation:

1. Authority – are the lines of authority clear?
2. Policies and standards – are their goals supported by policies and standards?
3. Resources – are the necessary resources in place?
4. Goal ownership – do goal owners understand the details of their goals and what is required of them to achieve them?
5. Goal connections – do they understand the interdependencies of their goals with others across the organisation?
6. Strategic purpose – do they understand how their goals contributes to strategic success?
7. Meaningful progress – are they confident that progress on their goal will be meaningful?
8. Performance targets – do they have relevant, specific and achievable performance targets for each goal?

These eight elements form the basis of the Goal Adoption Support Model. This translates into a checklist that can be ticked off by individuals for their own strategic goals, with prompts of what to consider for each of the elements that support each strategic goal.

Explaining the interconnections between goals makes them more conducive to collaboration. Elaboration of strategic goals to demonstrate strategic purpose and goal connections can, therefore, be a key enabler of successful strategy adoption. This can be achieved with strategy mapping, which presents strategic goals in a prioritised, validated logic diagram. Strategy maps can be used to manage and track the performance of strategy, assess strategic risks and clarify goal interdependencies, such as a common strategic purpose.

3. Strategy adoption conversations

Conversations about strategy can be difficult, so giving careful thought about how to handle them is important. The following rules can help:

1. Have explicit rules for adoption conversations;
2. Be clear from the start about intentions, purpose and outcomes;
   
3. Make time for the conversation;
4. Choose an appropriate group size. 5-7 participants is ideal;
5. Ensure the ‘psychological safety’ of participants;
6. Appoint a leader to guide and facilitate adoption conversations.

Find out more about the rules for strategy adoption conversations (pdf download).

Let’s talk about… strategy adoption

Use these questions to prompt deeper conversations* on strategy adoption across your organisation:

• How engaged in the roll out of strategy have your middle managers and front-line teams been in the past? Did that work okay? Would you want to do things differently next time around?
• How systematic would you want to be in elaborating your strategic goals? Could you map your core strategic goals out all the way to front-line teams and then validate the logic of all the goal connections?
• Do all of your major strategic goals have clear owners? Do the owners know they are strategic goal owners? Do they act like strategic goal owners? In general, are you good enough at managing the ownership of strategic goals?
• How much ‘psychological safety’ do you offer as an organisation? Does everyone feel they can speak truth to power? Is everyone confident enough to take risks in their work? Are you tolerant of failure? Are you comfortable with the culture surrounding strategy?

*Download a pdf with some helpful rules (suggested by Ed Morrison and colleagues in their book Strategic Doing) to ensure successful conversations about strategy.

Want to know more?

Discover below the strategy models and workshops that can improve strategy adoption, or see our full range of resources, including ‘The Strategy Manual‘, our Strategy Glossary and links to articles and posts by Mike Baxter.

We also offer consultancy and advice on all aspects of strategy – find out more about how we work.

Our strategy workshops and models are colour-coded  under the following themes:

Strategy models to ensure your strategy is adopted:

Strategy workshops to ensure your strategy is adopted:

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