How to get all your executive team on the same page with your strategy
Developing and revisiting your company’s strategy is an important part of your business. Shawn Callahan explains how strategies can elvolve even after they have been finalised.
Have you ever had that feeling that your executive team is all saying they understand and support the strategy but you sense that they are not really on the same page?
This is a common occurrence and it becomes starkly apparent when we are helping a company translate their strategy to a story everyone can tell. And if you’re aware that this is likely to happen, the story process can really help your executives, in their gut, understand what the strategy really means.
Here’s what I think is happening. The strategy gets developed as an analytical and rational process (and quite rightly so) and the end result is a document. The document gets passed around the executive team for comments. It’s duly read and commented on and at that point those running the strategy process believe everyone understands and is on board with the strategy.
But something quite interesting happens when they have to tell the story of the strategy. Firstly, by telling the story of the strategy they feel what the strategy sounds like. And you can literally see executives squirm with aspects of the strategy as they say it. University of Michigan Professor, Karl Weick, says that we really don’t know what we know until we hear ourselves say it. He calls this sensemaking. Our executives are making sense of their strategy.
Also by telling the story the ownership of the strategy shifts from the strategy group or the CEO to the executive telling the story. It’s now their story and all of a sudden they want to make sure it aligns to what they truly believe.
Now, as they go through this process a crucial conversation happens, one which we are ready for and help facilitate, where they voice their concerns and more often than not the strategy evolves slightly. The outcome is a strategy everyone believes in, one that’s consistent across the executive team, one they can share in their own words and one they are enthusiastic to tell.
This story was first published at Anecdote and is republished here with kind permission of the author.
Shawn Callahan is a pioneer in the application of story methods to business and has helped some of the world’s top companies, including IBM, Shell, AMP and KPMG, to inspire lasting change and make sure their company values really stick. He regularly publishes his world-leading ideas on Anecdote, one of Australia’s most visited blogs.
