Five ideas for cascading strategy to your staff

Cascading strategy throughout your organisation is a key ingredient in successful strategy execution. Ensuring your organisation’s strategic objectives are clearly reflected in functional, geographic, and business-unit strategies, and explicitly linked to budgetary and performance is critical.

‘Less than a third of direct reports to senior executives clearly understand the connections between corporate priorities; and this plummets to 16% of their direct reports.’​

Execution excellence requires ​cross functional commitment and coordination across units. By engaging all your staff you increase engagement and alignment, and reduce the risk of the strategy being left for too few or worse ‘put in the bottom drawer’.

Strategic Facilitators helps staff to engage with their organisation’s strategy and better understand the link between the organisation’s strategy and teams and individuals initiatives and activities​.

Here we outline five approaches we have used to successfully cascade strategy to staff.

1. Strategy launch

• Present your strategy – share your compelling strategic narrative and why it is important
• Create connections to the strategy – agree what the strategy means for each department/division. What is the unique role and purpose of each department/division? What is the value each department/division creates for the organisation? How will each department/division make a contribution to the strategy?
• Include commitments for each department to ensure the overall success of your strategy – What will success look like? What will you need to do – who and by when? What lessons from the past will help you execute these initiatives? What collaboration will be necessary? What challenges will you face?

2. Mini team strategy cascade workshop/s

• Discuss what the strategy means for your team – What is your team’s role in the success of the strategy? What does the team need to do for the strategy to be successful? What is the individual role/personal contribution of each team member to the delivery of the strategy? How will the team monitor progress and keep the strategy top of mind?

3. Weekly standup meetings within teams

• Review your team’s progress against the strategic initiatives – How is your team progressing against what they said they would do? What should they start/stop/continue/change? What do you need to push harder on? Is a resource allocation change required? What learnings can we share?

4. Monthly ‘brown bag’ lunches

• Brown bag lunches are a great way to improve communication to staff, break down silos between teams, and encourage knowledge sharing –  What is going well? And which areas might need rethinking? Share feedback from clients, acknowledge behaviours aligned with our values, and celebrate the wins!

5. Use a visual metrics or ‘strategy wall’ display

• Create a visual display of the strategy that staff can engage with – This gives a quick visual snapshot for all staff of how your are progressing. Items to include in the display might include: the measures that matter most in your organisation; the priorities that should be top of mind; up-to-date progress against the strategic objectives and priorities; what’s working (ie. the wins!); what needs to be fixed and by when; who is responsible for actioning.

The above options have different outputs all stemming from the same fundamental goal – to share your organisation’s strategy so everyone knows what it is, why it has been put in place, how it will be measured and by when, and most importantly what their team and individual roles will be to ensure it is a success.

Want to know more? 

For more information please contact us below or call the office on 03 9428 8817.