A massive headache… Or to be more accurate, a series of excruciating headaches that flare up frequently and often combine to be 10 times as excruciating. So what do you need to look out for that might point to your strategy being crap?
Your business is shrinking,
Teams are not aligned/ arguing/ sworn enemies
Team & individuals don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing and/ or how they’re supposed to be doing it,
Projects are regularly delivered late and are over-budget
General havoc and chaos ens
ues on a regular basis
If any of these seem familiar, then consider reviewing your strategy for the following points:
Is your strategy just a list of goals or ambitions that you’d like to achieve?
Is your strategy a list of values or behaviours you’d like your teams to deliver against?
Is your challenge clearly defined?
Is your challenge too ambitious? Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that…
Have you gone the opposite way, is your challenge too safe, are you and your teams working well within individual and collective comfort zones?
If you have defined your challenge, do your strategic actions actually solve your challenge?
Have you defined how you are going to deliver against your challenge?
Does your strategy have a clear, concise and coherent set of actions?
Fluff, have you padded out your strategy with buzz words and nonsense?
The solution:
A clear challenge: what is the one thing that will have the biggest impact on the metrics that matter (usually revenue & profit). To use the analogy of a journey, this is your start and end point.
TOP TIP: be clinical, but don’t be too quick to define your challenge, explore potential ways of articulating your challenge or even pit two challenges against each other to see which can have the biggest impact.
A guiding policy: how are you going to go about solving your challenge? Continuing the analogy, this defines the route you’re going to take.
TOPTIP: engage your teams in how you're going to get there, give teams and individuals a sense of ownership of the outputs, rather than just being on the receiving end.
Coherent Actions: what are you actually going to do to get to your destination? This should be specific enough to give comfort to your tea
ms that they know roughly what they need to do, but provides enough freedom to inspire creativity and motivation to deliver in their own way. To go overkill on the analogy, this is the vehicles you’re going to take at specific parts of the journey and who’s driving! Talk to Growth Marketing Group about your marketing challenge to see how they can set you on a pathway to growth.