The Strategy Implementation Challenge

The Importance of Strategy Implementation Skills

In this section, the speaker discusses how leaders need both the ability to craft the right strategy and the skills to implement it. However, there is a growing rate of strategy implementation failures due to a lack of focus on implementation skills.

Strategy Implementation Skills Gap

• Strategy implementation is a relatively new subject in business, and as such, current leaders have been taught how to plan but not how to implement.

• Leaders habitually repeat past mistakes despite knowing the high failure rate.

• A good practice for leaders is at the initial stage of their implementation to identify why it has failed in the past and then apply those lessons to the new implementation.

Lack of Discipline for Implementation

• Organizations lack discipline when implementing strategies.

• It takes discipline for employees to adopt new actions daily.

• Changing your strategy means changing the way your employees work. Identifying what should stop being done within an organization is essential so that you can stop taking actions that are distracting you from success.

Purposeful Abandonment

• Peter Drucker taught us that purposeful abandonment is necessary when implementing a new strategy.

Employees' Understanding of Organizational Strategy

• Only 5% of employees can define their own organizational strategy.

• If employees don't know what the strategy is, they cannot identify the right actions to take.

Framework for Implementation

• The Implementation Compass framework highlights eight areas where organizations need to focus on achieving their implementation journey.