How can team members better understand a company's strategy?

In addition to the methods outlined on the left side, the following approaches can help team members better understand the strategy: Regular Strategy Sessions: Hold regular meetings to review the company's strategy. This ensures continuous engagement and understanding. Access to Strategic Documents: Ascertain that important strategy documents, plans, and updates are accessible to every member of the team. Transparency is key Involve in Decision-Making: Engage team members in the process of making strategic decisions. Deeper commitment and understanding are fostered by this inclusion.

The easiest way for an employee to understand the company's strategy is to associate their actions with it. Employees are the link between the world of ideas, theory and strategy, and the empirical world in which they all work. The real secret is to always associate information with action. Nothing is more powerful than simplicity to generate understanding, and further, adoption. In short, strategy must be presented as the sum of actions that can be carried out and realized by all employees. To understand a strategy is to understand that we are contributing to it, and to do so through clear and precise examples.

Make Powerful Strategic Conversation a way of life. Involve as many of your people as often as possible from the start and all the way. Give them more information than you think they need— and don’t assume they won’t understand it. Practise empathic candour.

If there’s one thing many of the leaders I’ve spoken with lately have in common, it’s that they feel pressured to roll out new strategies more quickly, with more impact. Whilst leaderships recognise the importance of communication — of getting the message out to employees about where the organisation is headed and why, too often there is a reliance on the “cascade” approach: holding high-energy town hall meetings, posting on internal social media, writing executive blog posts, hosting lunch-and-learn sessions. The problem with this approach is, for the most part, one way. Once a strategic direction has been communicated, it needs time to evolve and permeate each role. As leaders, we need to embrace change, and encourage open dialogue.

An open and inclusive strategizing process helps easing the understanding. A strategy needs to be concise and clear. Ideally, each year's strategy builds on previous plans. Senior executive engagement in the preparation increases buy-in at the level where implementation is organized. Management open hours can be a platform to clarify questions from everyone in the organization. Explaining the importance of everyone in the implementation and discussing strategy and implementation plans in (weekly) team meetings across the organization provides a good opportunity for colleagues to contribute feedback. Digital fora can facilitate the strategic dialog. Linking individual objectives to an overall plan ensures understanding, alignment, and focus.

A strong SWOT and PESTLE analysis is still an invaluable tool for the relevant and evolving business. The danger though, is that SWOT analyses should not be relegated to a tool for one annual exercise. Strategy is a living organism and therefore, as nuances in the industry and organization change, keeping a finger on the pulse of what makes a difference is key, both internally and externally. I also find the SSC or Start Stop Continue framework to be a great tool!

In understanding a company's strategy, simplicity reigns supreme. Move away from complex, traditional frameworks and focus on clear, straightforward communication. The essence of a good strategy lies in its ease of understanding and execution. Enhance this with structured onboarding and continuous training, complemented by accessible resources like an employee wiki. This approach ensures that every team member, regardless of their role, can easily grasp and contribute to the strategic direction, making the strategy a living, breathing part of the organisational culture.

One of the frameworks that I like is the GROW model. What is the overall goal? What is the current reality? What are the obstacles and what are the possible options we can pursue? What are we willing to do based on the resources that we have? This model is a coaching model that helps us to explore the company's strategy and then take intentional actions to realize it.

In addition to these terrific common frameworks, it might be advantageous to think about a DNA of strategy. Perhaps something like this: 1. Building from mission, vision, and culture, 2. Thinking the unthinkable, 3. Carefully betting your resources, 4. Abandoning the old, 5. Leveraging marketplace trends, 6. Maximizing differentiation, 7. Outsmarting the competition, 8. Creating key allies, 9. Accentuating your features, advantages, and benefits, 10. Executing based on measurable results, key relationships, and effective process.

Drawing from military precision, connecting the dots in corporate strategy involves understanding both the macro and micro aspects. Like a captain who comprehends the broader battle space and the specific mission, employees must see how their roles fit into the larger company vision. This clarity in roles and objectives, mirroring the military's structured approach, ensures that each team member not only knows their 'lane' but also how their contributions impact the overall strategy. Such alignment is crucial for cohesive and effective execution.

Connecting the dots, for me, is one of the most important aspects of strategy. How is the mission leading to the vision? How do organizational values connect with the mission? What are the competencies (Knowledge, skills and behaviours) needed to ensure that the values are demonstrated internally and externally? and how can we incorporate these into the actions we take? When leaders make everyone feel like they are part of this process, we are on the right track.

I think connecting the dots is one of the strongest contributors to strategy filtration throughout the organization. Important to note though, that leadership plays a key role in creating space for teams who can often operation in strict functional silos to cross-fertilize ideas, perspectives and experience. This allows the broader perspective required to see how the strategy really plays out across the organization and how the various functional areas and BUs interconnect.

My experience working on two MNCs' strategic implementation of Corporatization, Digitalization, and Globalization led to this conclusion - CLARITY LEADS TO POWER. First things first: What do we want to achieve ultimately? Long-term, mid-term, and short-term. Expectation, Reality Check, Gap Closing. Quantifiable and measurable key performance indexes bring clarity, which leads to power in execution. Just like a map to a traveler, the more precise the map is, the easier to find the path through the map toward the destination. Identifying the resources, the checkpoints, the milestones, and the ultimate goal will increase the organization's overall efficiency. Do what we can, with what we have, where we are, towards where we want to be.

In today's hybrid work environment, sharing insights is both a challenge and an opportunity. Companies should leverage technology to create dedicated spaces for strategy communication. These platforms can serve as hubs for updates, missions, and collaborative discussions, ensuring that every team member, irrespective of their location, remains in the strategic loop. This approach fosters a culture of shared understanding and collective intelligence, where insights from diverse perspectives enrich the strategic narrative and drive alignment.

Adopting the military's After Action Review (AAR) approach in business can transform how teams engage with strategy. This method involves openly discussing successes, failures, and areas for improvement, fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation. By reflecting on actions and outcomes, teams can adapt and evolve in alignment with the strategic direction. Such a learning-oriented approach not only enhances performance but also ensures that the strategy remains relevant and responsive to changing conditions.

Percolating the strategy is completely a leadership function. Progressive organizations and leaderships have shown that sharing of corporate strategy with team members help them to get everyone on the same page. Townhalls and conferences can be good mass platforms to communicate strategic directions the leadership intends to take. But the effective way to communicate strategies is to make team members be the micro planners to achieve strategic goals and this inclusion brings alignment and clarity of what needs to be done.

Improve team understanding of the company's strategy through clear communication from leadership, stating a compelling vision and mission. Conduct regular strategic planning sessions, provide updates on progress, and host interactive workshops for questions and discussions. Use visual tools like infographics to simplify complex concepts, align roles with the strategy, and maintain an open-door policy for transparency. Implement training programs, distribute a documented strategy document, and encourage cross-functional collaboration for a holistic view. Establish feedback mechanisms, and use real-life examples or case studies to make abstract concepts more relatable. These strategies create an informed and engaged workforce.

Corporate strategy is, in its essence, a focus on enhancing the firm's competitive strengths. This means understanding those strengths and the actions to deepen them. Equally important is to clearly understand what will not advance those strengths and what should not be done. Focusing limited resources on success drivers is the key to good corporate strategy.