How to Operationalize Strategic Plans in Your Business

In our experience, it’s all too common for businesses to design amazing strategies and plans that will lead to growth and success, only for these plans to fall by the wayside – never to be completed. Each business types can have its own issues in executing strategic plans, but the consequence is almost always unrealised growth potential and frustration among your team.

Whether you’re a start-up embarking on your first strategic implementation or a large enterprise who wants to roll out big changes across all your departments, we explore four key areas that will help you to implement strategic plans effectively in your business.

Execution rules

A focus on implementation needs to begin as soon as the strategic plan is created. This means when the leadership team finalises the concept and substance of any strategy. Rather than embellishing the outcome in an abstract sense, bring things back to earth with language and phrases that your whole team can understand.  Usereal and tangible actions and issueclear instructions to relevant individuals.

Individual and collective commitment

To push the strategy implementation forward, it is crucial that you have commitment from everybody in your team. Whether it is the leadership team who are initiaing the change, or employees who have certain responsibilities,  everyone needs to understand what will happen and how they will contribute to this change, at an individual level and also collectively as a team.

Focus on the outcome

Regular reinforcement of the strategic plan approach will keep everybody focussed on the outcome. For large organisations, the message can sometimes get lost among middle management or project teams, who do not prioritise the implementation among their other responsibilities and daily activities. A great way to reinforce your approach is to recognise small successes and celebrate progress towards the desired outcome.

Track your progress

Set goals and milestones to gauge your progress in implementating the strategy. This will confirm how well you are performing, identify areas for improvement, focus or correction and allow you to review whether any adjustments need to be made along the way.