All of the other elements that I have already discussed in previous blogs—leadership, making the case for change, accountability, and sharing a vision—are absolutely critical to effective strategy execution.  In my experience, however, they are worthless unless the organization sets aside dedicated resources to implement the strategy initiative.

By resources, I mean people, time, and a little bit of money.  The people do not need to be dedicated to the project full time.  However, they need to be told that something like one-quarter to one-half of their daily work time should be dedicated to the project. 

People

The project leader should be fairly high up, at least an assistant vice president or equivalent.  He should be given a “core team” of two to three additional individuals who will be the organization’s strategy evangelists in charge of driving the project across the enterprise.  This team should also have one-quarter to one-half of their time dedicated to the project.

If some of their normal workload needs to be transferred to someone else, do it.  This sends the message that strategy is important.  I’ve seen too many strategy development projects fail because the project leaders can’t get away from their “day jobs” to dedicate the time.  Therefore, the project lingers on and on—the days that should elapse between meetings turn into weeks or even months and before you know it, a three-month project has gone nowhere in a year.

Time

As my discussion has already revealed, the time aspect is closely intertwined with the people part.  However, other people whose participation is required at a much lower rate also must be given permission to dedicate the time to the project, when called upon.  That means that when they get an invite to a strategy meeting, “I have another meeting” is not an excuse for not participating. 

The invite to participate in strategy development and execution is the excuse everyone has been looking for to get out of the daily grind and do something different and more meaningful.  The strategy cannot be developed and implemented solely by a small team of strategists.  Input is needed from across the organization.

Money

Finally, the strategy development team needs some funding—not much, but some.  No one ever wants to part with their own budget to fund an outside project.  Therefore, a small “strategy tax” should be levied on all departments to help fund the team. 

The strategy team will need to create posters and other communications collateral to help spread the word.  They will probably have to pay for IT resources to build the company strategy intranet site.  They will even need to pay for the bagels, muffins, and coffee they serve at their meetings.

This vision needs to be set by leadership.  After all, that is a big part of what leadership is all about, right?  And, we always hear talk in the press about so and so’s “visionary leadership.” 

The Vision Should Be Long Term

The vision should not be a state that is attainable in the near future.  It should be a statement about what the organization believes is possible in the long term if everyone works together.  It should be galvanizing and motivating.  The classic example is President Kennedy’s 1961 speech before a joint session of Congress setting the vision for U.S. space exploration:

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

In these two sentences, Kennedy expertly set out his vision for U.S. space exploration:

• He set a longer-term timeframe—nine years in this case. 
• He set a clear vision so everyone understood it—land a man on the moon and return him safely.
• He didn’t sugar-coat it: No project “will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish,” he said.
• He made sure everyone knew about it.
• It is measurable, meaning we will know whether we achieve it or not.

So, like Kennedy’s, your organization’s vision should be a long-term goal that your strategy will help achieve.  A key here is to remember that a vision is not a strategy and a strategy is not a vision.  Your strategy is a means to achieving your vision.

Make sure everyone clearly understands your vision.  Kennedy’s is pretty straightforward: Get man on moon, bring back safely. 

Your Vision Can Be Bigger Than Your Organization

One other aspect of an organizational vision is that it can paint a picture of how your organization creates a better world.  Kennedy’s was about catching up to and passing the Soviets to give the American people confidence that we were stronger than them.

Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick’s vision is similar: “Imagine a city where traffic speeds along smoothly and quietly, even at rush hour – this is my dream.”  It is a vision to which Uber can be a major contributor, if not the sole contributor, even though it is bigger than the organization itself.

Finally, stick to your vision. Since it is long term, your organization can’t be changing your vision every few years if it looks like you won’t achieve it.  It is hard to stay focused on a moving target.

In the past week, I’ve already discussed what I believe to be two of the most important factors in ensuring successful strategy execution—having an active leadership champion and making the case for change.  In this blog, I want to discuss a third critical success factor—accountability.

While I don’t think it is earth shattering to say that making sure the people who are leading and implementing your strategy execution project are held accountable for it, in my experience, it is definitely worth emphasizing this point. 

Strategy projects are often tasks that are assigned above and beyond an individual’s “day job,” and, therefore, they often take a back seat to their regular work because they are not what people’s job performance will be rated on or worse, they are seen as “extra” work.  Allowing these misconceptions to exist will not help advance the strategy execution ball.

Carefully Select a High-Performing Project Manager

The most effective strategy execution efforts I have seen have all been led by carefully-selected, high-performing managers at the director or vice president level who were held responsible for implementation.  They were held responsible by having the successful execution of the strategy project as one of the success criteria on their annual performance review. 

In fact, not only were these project managers held to account through performance reviews, but their supervisors—senior vice presidents and above—were as well.  As a result, strategy execution never took a backseat to other duties.

Strategy Execution Can't Be Seen as "Extra" Work

On the other hand, I have seen organizations struggle to both develop and execute their strategies when strategic planning and execution were seen as “extra” projects outside of the participants’ usual scope of work.  This inevitably leads people to shirk their responsibilities related to the project because they feel their “regular” work is more important.

So, the key to successful execution is to select high-performing managers to lead the project, hold them accountable by making the successful execution of the project part of their annual performance evaluation, and, finally, reward them for their success. 

In my opinion, holding individuals accountable is a really simple way to help ensure your success.  Good luck!

Executing a new strategy is a big change for an organization and, by the way, change is hard.  So successful execution is really hard.  Therefore, to get one step closer to successful strategy execution, it is essential that your organization’s leadership set out the case for change that everyone understands and can rally around.

A good way to start making this case for change is to define your organization’s “as is” state and the “to be” state your strategy is designed to move you toward.  A rather simple way to do this is to think of the top five to seven areas of key importance for your organization, where you are in each of them and where you need to be to succeed. 

Strategic Change Agenda

By doing this, you will create a “strategic change agenda” for your organization that will help communicate the case for change.  An example of strategic change agenda is provided in the figure below.

The change agenda comes in a pretty simple format.  It usually has about 7 to 10 business areas (middle column) in which your organization believes it must change.  The left column describes either the “as is” or past state of your organization in the business area.  The right column describes the state to which your organization wants to move to—the “to be” state—in the indicated business are.  The strategy is how you will get there.

As you can see, the change agenda is a great tool for communicating the case for change.  It fits on one page, is easy to understand, and covers enough ground that everyone in your organization should be able to see how implementing the strategy will (positively) affect them. 

As long as the changes are articulated in a manner that won’t offend any particular department or function, the change agenda will be a helpful tool in gaining consensus around the need to implement your strategy.

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results,” Winston Churchill famously said.  And, you don’t get results without execution.  So, how do you ensure successful execution?  With leadership.

Your organization’s endeavor to execute its strategy will have a very slim chance of succeeding without a high-level leader to champion the process.  In this, the first of my six-part blog series on keys to successful strategy execution, I will discuss the keys to having a leadership champion who will enable your organization to achieve strategy execution success.

A High-Level Leadership Champion Is Absolutely Necessary

First, as I said earlier, the champion needs to be a high-level leader in your organization.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be the president, CEO, or executive director, but it should be one of her direct reports such as the COO, CFO, or a senior vice president.  The level at which the champion sits is important because it sends an immediate message to all stakeholders about how important the project is to the organization.

Second, the leadership champion of strategy execution has to continually demonstrate that he is the leadership champion of the strategy.  That means he must talk about it often to both internal and external stakeholders.  Your staff must understand that it is always part of the organization’s focus and external stakeholders such as shareholders, donors, or even regulators need to understand that you are consistently executing your strategy.  It cannot be something that leadership mentions at the beginning of the year and at the end.

Third, your champion must hand pick the individual (project manager) who will be responsible for leading execution of the strategy on a day-to-day basis.  They must have confidence that the individual will be effective and provide her with all of the support necessary (within reason) to execute.  In addition, the champion must have regular check-ins with the project manager to ensure the strategy is on track and help if any obstacles are encountered.

The Champion Must Communicate and Be Accessible

Fourth, the project champion must communicate to the strategy execution team what is expected of them with respect to time commitment and level of effort.  Being part of the team should be framed as an opportunity given by leadership to high achievers.

Finally, the strategy champion must be accessible to respond to questions about the strategy and address any issues that may arise.  In essence, he must own strategy execution, be accountable for it, and do everything he can as an executive to ensure its success.

Look for more keys on strategy execution in the coming days on this blog: www.edisonstrategy.com/blog/. 

According to an article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, a new report from MSCI found that the “best-paid CEOs tend to run some of the worst-performing companies and vice versa.”

This, of course, raises the question of the effectiveness of the movement over the past 30 years to compensate CEOs with equity pay such as stock options and restricted stock.  It has been thought that such CEO compensation properly aligns their incentives with those of their companies’ shareholders. 

However, the study provides contrary evidence.  In fact, some would argue that the recent rise of stock repurchases has been designed by executives to temporarily boost stock prices and line their own pockets.

Align Incentives with Desired Outcomes

Regardless, shareholders and boards, especially, need to take a long, hard look at the incentives they are trying to create for their executives and determine if, and how, they are being gamed.  While establishing the right incentives for any corporate behavior can be difficult, this study plainly shows that equity incentives in CEO pay just aren’t working.

When setting up an incentive award system in any organization, it is critical to consider both if and how the system can be gamed as well as whether you may be potentially rewarding unintended behaviors rather than desired outcomes.

A few weeks ago, I taught an introductory Balanced Scorecard (BSC) course to a group of individuals from small nonprofits at Washington, DC’s, Center for Nonprofit Advancement.  As part of the class, I walk through a case study of a nonprofit that successfully implemented the BSC and I stop along the way and give participants exercises to work on so they get a feel for developing a strategy map and scorecard.

Well, I had just gone over the strategy map and asked the students to take some time to develop their own “quick and dirty” strategy map.  The idea was to get them thinking about the limited number of strategic objectives for their organizations over the next three to five years. 

The case study I used was of a fairly decent sized pediatric hospital whose strategy map had 12 strategic objectives.  I provided a template containing each of the four standard BSC perspectives—financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth—and 12 empty boxes for the strategic objectives and I think this threw them a little. 

I received questions about the right number of objectives for a strategy.  Because all of the participants were from pretty small nonprofit organizations, coming up with 12 strategic objectives was a lot for them.  My bad—the template needs to be updated.  Some of the participants could only come up with four or five objectives.  I told them this is fine, especially for small organizations where there may only be five people at most—and sometimes only one—working to execute the strategy. 

Five Strategic Objectives May Work Best

In fact, I would argue that five strategic objectives may be ideal for really small nonprofits.  One—at most—in the Learning & Growth perspective; two in Internal Processes—one regarding advocacy, another on program management; one in the Customer/Client perspective; and one in the Financial perspective.  This very simple format may be enough to help keep a small nonprofit focused on executing its strategy.

In my experience, nonprofits run into trouble executing their strategy when they try to do everything.  They often have a hard time saying, “No.”  The most focused ones keep their strategies simple and use the strategy as a filter by which they can decide what is strategically important to the organization and, therefore, what they should and should not do.

If you’re the leader of a small nonprofit, you probably have a pretty good idea what your strategic goals are for the next three to five years for your organization, but does anyone else?  I find that leaders of small nonprofits—who are often the founders—sometimes have a difficult time articulating their strategic vision in a manner that staff, board members, clients, and other stakeholders understand it.

That’s why I suggest building a strategy map—a one-page view of your strategic objectives—to help communicate that strategic vision.  The following is a pretty simple six-step approach to putting your strategy on paper in the format of a strategy map.

Create a Strategy Map Template

First, create a template.  Divide a blank sheet of paper into 4 horizontal levels.  Label the top level “Mission.”  The next level down will be split in half—make the left side “Clients/Customers” and the right side “Finances.”  Label the third level “Internal Processes” and the fourth “Learning & Growth”.   The following picture illustrates the template.

You now have a strategy map template of the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives with your mission on top.

The second step is easy … just write your organization’s mission down in the mission box.  Your mission goes on the top because everything your organization does must help you achieve your mission.

Third, think about what success looks like to your clients if you are achieving your mission.  Are you filling a previously unprovided for need?  Are you giving the best service?  What will keep them satisfied? Or, better yet, amaze them?  Those two or three things are your client perspective strategic objectives.  Write them each in a box in the Client/Customer perspective.

Fourth, to achieve your mission, how must your finances look?  What do your donors and/or board expect of you financially?  Add those finance perspective strategic objectives.

Fifth, think about your internal process—the work your organization does to make your clients happy and achieve your mission.  What are those?  Also, what strategic objectives must you set for yourself to help achieve your financial goals?  This could be fundraising or process improvement.  Write these in the internal processes perspective.

A small nonprofit could have anywhere from as little as three internal processes objectives to as many as eight or nine.  However, there is no right number.

Learning & Growth is Your Foundation

Finally, looking at the bottom level of the strategy map—learning and growth, which is your foundation—what key capabilities must your organization and staff have?  What kind of people do you need to hire?  What kind of culture do you need to establish?  These are your Learning & Growth objectives.  Add them to your strategy map.

There you have it.  A first draft of your organization’s strategy in a simple, one-page strategy map.  Read it from top to bottom and then from bottom to top.  Does it make logical sense?  Can you see the cause-and-effect linkages of how your Learning & Growth objectives will help you excel at your Internal Processes, thus making your clients and your donors and board happy and help you achieve your mission? 

Share it with your staff to see if it makes sense with them because it has to—they are the team helping you execute.  Get their feedback and use it to make it better.

An article and briefing in The Economist this week examines the issue in detail, hoping to dispel the myth that great teachers are born and cannot be made.  The article argues that “the myth of the natural-born teacher” causes schools to focus more on hiring and firing teachers rather than development.  And, surprise, research finds that “a blend of subject knowledge and teaching craft” is really the most important aspect of teaching.

After all, successful teachers are good at four main things: (1) setting clear goals; (2) enforcing high standards; (3) managing their time wisely; and (4) using best practices.  My guess is that any successful professional is probably pretty good at these four things.

Teaching Can Be Taught

The upside, according to The Economist, is that the “premise that teaching ability is something you either have or don’t is mistaken.”  People can be taught to be good teachers.  And, not surprisingly, there’s no secret formula to training them.  In fact, training teachers looks remarkably similar to training any professional.

First, start with intense, guided practices and ensure subject matter knowledge.  Teach pedagogical methods and provide trainees with plenty of on-the-job training—make sure they spend time in the classroom.

Finally, provide coaching and feedback to teachers. Presently, this is sorely lacking.  Teachers need to be observed on-the-job and given feedback to help improve.  And, of course, the teachers must be accepting of critical feedback.

Rigorous On-Boarding and Professional Development Programs

To me, the lessons I take from this based on my experience working with education organizations are twofold.  First, teachers would benefit from participating in a rigorous on-boarding program that helps ensure they have the baseline of knowledge and skills to be a good teacher.

Second, a rigorous professional development program is required.  A lot of organizations merely pay lip service to the idea of professional development, so employees never get the required ongoing training.  In others, funding and other resources are dedicated to it, but it is a low priority that people aren’t held accountable for and never get around to.

To solve this problem, I subscribe to the theory of what gets measured, gets done.  Therefore, do what a (non-education industry) client of mine did and use “training dollars expended” as a strategic measure, or key performance indicator, for your organization.  It sends the message that training is important and enables all staff to contribute to your organization’s strategy execution.

And occasionally, I burst their bubble when I ask:  How will you know your strategy is successful?

Sometimes, the response is something like, “Well, we will know when we are the industry leader in five years.” 

Other times, I get the embarrassed answer, “Umm … good question.  I’m not sure.”

Five Years Is Too Long to Wait to Know If You Are Succeeding

To me, those two answers are not much different because not knowing if you are executing your strategy successfully and knowing in five years is pretty much the same thing.  I guess if you are successful and your organization is the industry leader in five years, then I’m wrong.  However, if you aren’t the industry leader in five years, you have spent five years’ worth of time and money and failed.

On the other hand, if you had identified the measures you wanted to use to track your strategic progress and reviewed them on a quarterly basis, you would have known a lot sooner than five years down the road that things were not going so well and you would have had the opportunity to adapt your strategy so you would have a better chance of succeeding.

So, even if you have a strategy, but don’t yet have strategic measures, you should invest in developing them now because it is never too late to find out how you are doing on executing your strategy – unless it is already five years down the road.

Four Reasons Measures Can Help

Identifying and developing your strategic measures can have several benefits.

1. As everyone knows: What gets measured, gets done.  Having measures and tracking them sends a message to everyone in the organization about what’s important.
2. Measures provide clarity.  In large organizations strategic priorities or strategic goals can be vague—sometimes deliberately to try ensure everyone fits in. However, the flip side to that is that either no one understands what the goals or priorities mean and, therefore, can’t figure out what they should be doing to advance the strategy.  Measures say, “We are going to measure X” so either do X or do something that will help us achieve X.
3. Measures enable good decision making.  Without a regular stream of data about your strategy, how can you possibly make good decisions?  Without data your decisions are just hunches and guesswork.  Measure data gives you a solid footing on which to base your strategic decisions.
4. Regularly collecting and reviewing measure data enables organizational strategic learning.  The best thing about failing is learning from our mistakes.  However, if we don’t have measure data to review and discuss, it becomes a lot harder to figure out why we failed and to avoid the mistakes of the past.

So, even if you organization has developed a great strategy, has started executing your key initiatives, but forgot to identify the key measures of success, it’s not too late. Identify those measures and start tracking them now.  It will help clarify the strategy and keep you on track.

The missions of nonprofits tend to be hard to measure.  Things like increasing social justice or even improving development in impoverished neighborhoods or countries aren’t easy to quantify at all, never mind at regular, (non-glacial) frequencies.  Plus, there are usually multiple actors in any of the spaces in which they operate, so the problem of attribution arises:  Whose activities are causing the results?

This makes it difficult—at best—for nonprofits who want to manage their strategies with the Balanced Scorecard or any other strategy management system that uses strategic measures or key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and demonstrate results.

How Do Foundations Hold Grantees Accountable?

For foundations, or grant makers, it makes it even more difficult to determine whether the programs they fund are achieving the intended, beneficial outcomes.  In Jan. 4, 2016, issue of The New Yorker, Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a terrific profile of the president of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker—“What Money Can Buy”—in which she touched on this issue.

MacFarquhar framed the issue as “accountability”—how can grantees be held accountable by grant makers if there is no way to determine whether they are achieving results?  According to her, once money was spent at the Ford Foundation, they didn’t always assess whether projects were successful.  This was partially due to “a rule of thumb at Ford that program officers should stay in their jobs no more than eight years, lest they become complacent. Thus, by the time a project was established enough to be evaluated, its progenitor had moved on, and the replacement was not usually sufficiently interested in his predecessor’s enterprises to spend time and money figuring out whether they had succeeded.”

“Strategic Philanthropy” Tracks Returns

Some began to promote “strategic philanthropy,” MacFarquhar said.  The concept that “[d]onors ought to behave more like investors” and instead of just leaving his their money with one organization, an “investor” should “track his returns, and if they did not meet his expectations he would withdraw his funds and invest them somewhere else.”

Of course, following this logic leads to the requirement of measuring results—because, after all, what gets measured, gets done.  However, that might lead donors and nonprofits “to focus on limited sorts of things that could be measured precisely: administering vaccines, for instance, rather than attempting to improve overall health; or counting missed days of school rather than evaluating student achievement,” according to MacFarquhar.

I would argue, however, that these two—focusing on smaller, measurable things, in lieu of the grander idea—do not have to be mutually exclusive.  Yes, administering vaccines (a good thing to measure) or missed days of school (a bad thing to measure, in my opinion) do not necessarily lead to improving overall health or increased student achievement.  However, administering vaccines is a good first step. 

In the school case, I think she was being a little disingenuous with her example because you could use student grades or test scores as an initial measure of achievement (acknowledging the flaws in these metrics, they are still better than absenteeism)—though certainly not the final metric.

Four Levels of Measures

1. In fact, in my experience, measuring things like vaccines administered—or miles of roads built—is exactly the first step an organization needs to take on its way to determining the success of a long-range development or social justice program.  The key is organization-wide awareness that these are not the final measures of success.  This first level of measures, let’s call them “action” measures, helps an organization know that it is incentivizing the behaviors required to achieve the overall, grander result.
2. As the program or organization matures you can move to second level “learning” measures.  In the health example, one such measure might be the decrease in occurrence of the disease for which the vaccination was given. 
3. A third level measure would attempt to observe behavior, which in the health example could be how often people wash their hands after performing particular unsanitary activities.  Again, it is a measure that while takes some effort to track, it can be tracked in the short term.
4. Finally, once success at each of these levels has been measured and achieved and an appropriate amount of time has elapsed (probably years), you can measure actual results.  In the health example, the result level measure might be “increase in life expectancy” or “decrease in infant mortality rate”.

So, I think I have illustrated how organizations can use these rather simple, or first level “action” metrics, to start to measure their progress toward achieving hard to measure results. 

In my experience, it is very difficult for nonprofit organizations to come up with that one, silver-bullet measure that they can use to track results.  When they try for that, they often get frustrated and conclude that they just can’t measure what they are trying to achieve, so why bother?

Instead, you should use an integrated system of measures that build upon one another.  Track them one level at a time while managing expectations and your organization will be able to demonstrate that it is on its way to achieving its mission.

The tricky part is that most individual organizations—and their strategies—have a lot in common with those generic organizations, it is just the way it is.  There are steps, however, that you can take so that when your staff and other stakeholders view your strategy map, they see your organization. The top three steps, in my opinion, are what I’ll call branding, description, and customization.  I will discuss the last one first.

Step 1: Customization

Sometimes, I work with clients who are so intent on implementing the Balanced Scorecard “by the book” that they are afraid to really make their strategy map their own.  By this I mean that they build their map with the typical Kaplan-Norton strategy map perspectives—Customer/Client, Financial, Internal Processes, and Learning and Growth—and themes—Operational Excellence, Program Management, and Advocacy/Communications—which is all good.  However, they are afraid of changing the words to better fit their organization for fear of not following the Balanced Scorecard methodology.  This is a big mistake.

Your staff, clients, and other stakeholders who you share the strategy map with need to look at it and see your organization in it, so you need to use the language your organizations speaks.  Very simple, basic customization of the language can make a big difference when communicating the strategy map.

For example, I’ve worked with an educational organization that changed its Customer perspective to “Students” and the Internal Processes perspective to “Organizational Excellence”—two phrases that have a lot more meaning to its stakeholders.  A nonprofit membership organization I worked with used the “Member” perspective instead of Customers and “Organizational Capacity” instead of Learning and Growth.  Again, because these terms have an agreed-to meaning within the organization.

With respect to themes in the Internal Processes perspective, one client used “Invested Stakeholders & Community” (Advocacy), “Excellence in Every Classroom” (Program Management), and “Highest-Performing Network” (Operational Excellence).  The themes on the other’s strategy map were: “Knowledge” (Communication), “Access and Service Delivery” (Program Management), and “Operational Excellence.”  When I asked the latter client about the customizing the third theme, their answer was “No, the term ‘operational excellence’ has a specific meaning within our organization and that’s what we are talking about here.”

The customization of themes is also helpful for organizations that seek alignment by cascading the strategy because the lower level strategy maps can use the same themes, but customize the individual objectives to the unique parts of their business.

Step 2: Description

When I say description, I mean objective description.  This step involves taking a simple objective such as “Improve fundraising” and describing it better so it means something more to both your organization and its stakeholders. 

The strategic objective “improve fundraising” may be important, but it doesn’t tell anyone much.  However, if you use the suggested objective structure of verb-adjective-noun, you can come up with more specific and meaningful objectives, such as “Increase event-driven fundraising” or “Develop annual giving programs” or “Drive website donations”.  All of these objectives aim to improve fundraising, but are very specific in how they intend to do it.

Step 3: Branding

Finally the third easy step is to brand your strategy map.  Do you have a company logo with a specific font and colors?  Of course you do.  Use them on your strategy map.  Is there a particular “look and feel” that permeates all of the documents your organization produces?  Use it.  Make it look like the strategy map is coming from your organization, not from the same consultant as every other strategy map.

Your organization’s strategy map is a key tool for helping communicate your strategy so it is important to make it your own and be sure everyone knows it is.  I believe these three steps I’ve described should help you get there.

I say it to just about every client I work with—coming up with your strategy is the easy part, ensuring successful strategy execution, that’s the challenge.

Whether your organization executes its strategy using the Balanced Scorecard or some other strategy management framework, here are five New Years’ resolutions you should keep to ensure your strategy execution success.

1. Identify just one measure per strategic objective that will enable you to track how you are doing on that objective.  If you try to track your progress with multiple measures for each objective, reviewing progress can become over burdensome very quickly.  If you have 15 objectives, that all of a sudden is 30 measures instead of 15.  We want reviewing execution to be about having strategic discussions, not creating headcount, in an organization
2. Set stretch, not easy to achieve, targets for your measures.  While you may not be able to do this for every measure, you should try to do it for most.  After all, you are executing and reviewing strategy to improve your organization’s overall performance.  Setting easy to achieve targets is inconsistent with this mindset.  If people are protesting about the targets being set, you are probably on the right track—it will light a fire under them.
3. Agree to review your progress at least four times per year.  While conducting strategy review meetings monthly is an even better practice, it can be a little too much for some organizations.  Do it any less than quarterly and you won’t be able to make course corrections as quickly as you may need to.  Your strategy, after all, is a hypothesis that if you do A, B, and C, you will get results X, Y, and Z.  As soon as you learn it isn’t working as you had predicted, you need to make changes.
4. Get your president/CEO/executive director to talk strategy at a town hall or all hands meeting.  Communications always gets short shrift when it comes to executing strategy and I have a theory or two why this is.  First, leaders often believe that they just have to tell their team to do something once and it will get done.  Really?  Second, the team that developed the strategy knows it inside and out and therefore it feels redundant to have to communicate it out over and over again.  But this is just plain wrong.  You can never talk about strategy execution too much with the troops--just change it up a little to keep it interesting.  Get your organization’s leader to talk about strategy every chance he or she gets.  It helps drive home the importance of it as well as helping people remember the strategy.

I don’t want my suggested resolutions to be impractical because there is no better way to ensure you will be ignored.  So, if you can resolve to do just these four things in the coming year, it will go a long way to helping your organization successfully implement its strategy.

No matter how good your organization may be at managing and executing your strategy, there is always a few individuals who will try to lead a group of strategy execution Jedis down the path to the Dark Side.  Here’s a list of what to look out for:

Sign #1 – This isn’t the data we are looking for.  Do not let denizens of the Dark Side use Jedi mind tricks to convince you that the data they are providing is the data you need, when it isn’t.  Early on in strategy execution, you have to make do with the best data you can get, but as your organization becomes more mature, you should know what’s available and insist it is delivered.  

Sign #2 – I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further.  When Lando protested to Darth Vader that he was changing their original deal to lure Luke to Cloud City, Vader responded with this classic line.  Don’t allow the Sith Lords in your organization to constantly change measures and/or targets.  You cannot consistently track your strategy execution if you are constantly changing them—hitting a moving target is a lot harder than bullseye-ing womp rats with your T-16 back home.

Sign #3 – I find your lack of faith disturbing.  It is one of the surest signs you are heading down the path to the Dark Side when people are telling you they don’t have the measure data, but just trust them that everything is OK and if you don’t trust them, you are the problem.  Blind faith in the Force is one thing, blind faith that your organization is executing its strategy without hard data to back it up, is another.

Sign #4 – Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.  Strategy-focused organizations cannot be successful if they are too dependent on their one or two Jedi Masters, as Leia was at first for help to defeat the Empire.  Everyone has to own the strategy and its execution, if you are too reliant on a Jedi council.

Sign #5 – Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.  A critical part of executing any strategy is to collect measure data, review it, and make data based strategic decisions.  However, when reviewing and interpreting the data, you have to be as objective as possible.  When organizations begin to resort to rationalizations for what the numbers are telling them, the Dark Side isn’t that far off.

Sign #6 – Never tell me the odds.  Unfortunately, most organizations don’t—and shouldn’t—operate like Han Solo—a smarty-alec-y swashbuckling Starfighter pilot—so knowing the odds, or having historical data to base your strategic decisions on, is critical to successfully implementing your strategy.  In some cases, there may not be any historical data or benchmarks that you can use, but having no frame of reference will put you at a disadvantage.

Sign #7 – Patience you must have.  One of the many wise statements from the Jedi Master Yoda.  Remember, you aren’t going to see results from strategy execution immediately, it takes some time for initiatives to start to have impact.  Patience is critical.  Abandoning your strategy before it even has time to take root and make an impact is exactly what the First Order wants you to do.

Sign #8 – I have a bad feeling about this.  You can attribute this quote to one of several figures in the original Star Wars trilogy—Obi-Wan, Han, Luke, or Leia—but the truth of the matter is that hand-in-hand with Sign #7 above, you can’t jump ship when things may be looking bad.  If you are executing the right way, you aren’t just putting your faith in the Force.  You can implement new initiatives to help improve your performance.

Sign #9 – Perhaps I can find new ways to motivate them.  This is what implementing the Balanced Scorecard or any strategy management framework should be all about—measurement motivates.  However, if you choose to follow the Darth Vader playbook and motivate out of fear, you probably aren’t going to get the results you want.

Sign #10 – The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.  I think it is a general rule of thumb that when you want to sound wise, you can never quote Yoda too much.  Your people must believe that they have a hand in their success and not be resigned to a system forced upon them.  To reinforce Sign #9, if they operate in fear of being fired, you’ve already given in to the Dark Side.

Remember, joining the Dark Side isn’t necessarily a conscious decision and it may be a long steady journey rather than a sudden, impulse.  Throughout your strategy execution journey, be on the lookout for some of the signs I’ve highlighted above and may the Force be with you.

If you are interested in implementing the Balanced Scorecard or any framework that will help you manage your strategy with measures (or metrics or KPIs) and strategic initiatives, then I urge you to visit the ClearPoint Strategy blog where you can read a story based on an interview with me and my client at the United Nations Federal Credit Union.

The blog article breaks our Balanced Scorecard (BSC) implementation down into 7 hints to help ensure success:

1. You can use your current strategy or create one while you are beginning the BSC project
2. Get buy-in from senior leadership right away
3. Emphasize strategic alignment throughout the organization
4. Keep your measures simple at first
5. Tying in your incentive plan will aid alignment and buy-in
6. You can never communicate too much
7. The right software can really help manage multiple scorecards

The first thing to remember is that the Balanced Scorecard is just a helpful framework.  You don’t have to be a slave to it, but rather, bend it to your needs.  Therefore, you can start to use it if you already have a strategy in place—just adapt it to the BSC format—or you can develop your strategy as the first step in implementing the BSC.

Buy-In of Senior Leadership Is Critical

Of course, the success of any important initiative in any organization is largely dependent on the support and buy-in of senior leadership.  Make sure you have that before you get started.  They have to believe in the BSC so that they can ensure staff throughout the organization will believe in it.

This leads to the next hint—emphasize strategic alignment throughout your organization.  While senior leadership may develop the strategy—hopefully with the help of staff—it will be implemented by everyone across the organization.  Therefore, you need to make sure everyone understands how they align to and contribute to the strategy.

With regard to identifying strategic measures, keep it simple at first.  When an organization first begins to implement the BSC, it doesn’t need to have all of the perfect measures in place.  Find ones that are pretty good and you will grow into better ones as your organization becomes more comfortable with the BSC.

Want Everyone’s Attention? Tie In the Incentive Plan

I cannot emphasize Hint #6 enough—if you want to get people paying attention to your Balanced Scorecard program, tie it to their incentive bonuses.  While this may not be for everyone, and some organizations can pull it off more quickly than others, people won’t ignore you if their bonus is on the line.

Another key aspect for successful implementation that often is given short shrift is communication.  You must communicate about the program as much as possible and in as many ways as possible.  It may seem to you that you are over-communicating, but you aren’t because not everyone receives every communication.

Finally, if you are developing more than just one enterprise scorecard—UNFCU created 13—using software designed to manage scorecards is a must.  Just using Excel and PowerPoint will be unmanageable.