There are several common barriers to businesses successfully implementing strategy, and the adapt HQ platform helps overcome each of the barriers.  

“67% of well-formulated strategies failed due to poor execution.”

Quoted in HBR 2017 article and references Bridges 2016 study

Our work with small to medium-sized businesses suggests this figure may be considerably higher. It appears to be an almost universal weakness in business.

1.   Poor communication and misalignment 

The number one reason is a lack of clear communication from the leadership team to the rest of the business. Poor communication means misalignment and a lack of understanding for those who need to execute the strategy – not a good start!

How adapt supports communication of strategy:

• Capturing strategy in the platform
• Leadership and strategy sessions
  • At the end of each, the Leadership team decide: ‘What are the important things to communicate to the business?’.
• Communicate objectives  
  It’s good practice for the leadership team to have a session with the rest of the organisation after every quarterly meeting to communicate their objectives.

2.   Lack of focus

If there are too many objectives generated in the strategic planning process, people feel overwhelmed, and nothing gets completed. The leadership team must make tough choices to eliminate non-critical actions and provide a focus for all teams and individuals on what is important NOW. 

Most businesses we work with have limited resources. Having too many objectives will almost certainly result in failure to implement. A good rule of thumb is no more than six objectives at one time. If they can focus on less, that’s even better. When businesses first start formulating objectives, the tendency is to overdo it and end up with dozens of things they want to achieve. You will need to work to get them to pull it back to four or five. It’s much better for our customers to achieve three or four objectives than to start and fail on 12!

3. Lack of accountability

Clear accountability is essential for driving strategy implementation. Leaders, teams, and individuals need to be clear in their roles and held accountable for the delivery.

We have assessments that measure individuals, teams, and the whole business and accountability is often the lowest score. 

• Are they coming to leadership meetings prepared?
• Are they actioning their work tickets?
  • If they are not delivering on their work tickets, this will be clear to all in the team as this is an agenda item for each leadership meeting.
• Are they updating their objectives?
  • It will be apparent to everyone if they are not as they are standard agenda items in the leadership meetings.
• Are they behaving in a way aligned to the culture?
• Are they doing what they said they would do?
  • Work tickets will highlight whether they are

4. Poor meeting discipline

Often leadership teams meet, and strategy execution gets mixed up with day-to-day tactical operational issues. There needs to be a cadence and discipline to holding strategic meetings, ensuring that strategy is reviewed and on track.

5. Failure to adapt

The strategy should provide direction, focus and guidance, but should also be adaptable. In an ever-changing world, if a business fails to respond to changing market conditions, it can quickly become irrelevant. By following the cadence of leadership and strategy meetings, you have the process to ensure your customer keeps ‘listening’ to the system and adapting as required.

6. No measurable results

Clear and measurable results provide meaning, motivation, and accountability; key elements to keeping strategy on track. The way we use objectives and key results to implement strategy provides you with meaningful results.

These are just some of the barriers your customer will need to overcome to successfully implement their strategy. They are not trivial, nor is there a quick fix, but with your support, they can overcome these barriers and make successfully implementing strategy a healthy organisation habit.

Building organisational habits to implement your strategy successfully will give your business a huge lift.