Business strategy execution is a planned process that ensures employees follow and successfully execute business strategies to achieve the goals you have set. The long-term success of every business depends on improving the business execution of its strategy. Yet, up to 90% of business executions fail.
Here are seven ways to improve business execution:
1. Focus on wellbeing and happiness
Happy workers are more likely to be more productive. It may sound obvious, but companies risk achieving successful outcomes by underplaying the importance of wellbeing.
Research shows the positive impact of employee happiness: an Oxford University study found that happier workers are more enjoyable to work with and more productive. The study found that employees who claimed to be satisfied also made 13% more business calls than those who did not.
Even though this correlation may seem casual, it raises an important question about how businesses can encourage a happier and more productive work environment for effective business strategy execution.
Here are some useful tips to boost employee happiness:
Develop a culture of accountability
Every employee should take ownership of their tasks and never blame others for their failures. Happy employees take responsibility for, and are proud of, their work. This can improve productivity and business strategy execution for employers.
Help your staff to achieve more
Not surprisingly, employees who think they’ll be doing the same job forever may get discouraged. A lack of upward mobility can disenchant people who only go through the motions in the workplace. While they may meet the minimum standards expected of them, they may also have low job satisfaction, resulting in higher staff turnover.
How to focus on wellbeing and happiness
- Provide employees with a customised professional development plan from the day they join
- Hold regular performance reviews to discuss their progress and any issues they may have
- Ask for their input on what they want to accomplish. They may follow a different path than peers in their department, so be open to possibilities
- Constantly improve and personalise you company’s professional development activities
2. Nurture your stakeholders: planet, family and society
As a leader, developing a solid relationship with your stakeholders is essential. As well as employees and shareholders, stakeholders can include employees’ families, society and local communities where you operate, as well as the planet. Your stakeholders have the power to influence and support significant decisions and activities in your business.
As a leader, you should be creating a work environment where employees can build positive relationships with their families, society and the planet.
How to nurture your Stakeholders
- Set rules that foster gender equality, a platform for team ideas, group conversations, creativity, transparency, and clear communication
- Establish sustainable projects rather than over-exploiting natural resources and further adding to the dangerous effects. After all, a world of good health is everyone’s responsibility
3. Increase leaders’ awareness
Managers and other supervisors are often the most significant people who influence an employee’s happiness at work. A good leader has a high degree of self-awareness in terms of how they display their emotions, their professional conduct in the workplace and their empathy.
Strong leadership can be enhanced by cultivating self-awareness. A leader’s self-awareness is essential for the following reasons:
Making better decisions
Self-awareness is essential to managing one’s behaviour and relationships. Leaders can better compensate for their natural tendencies and abilities by developing self-knowledge.
Improving a company’s finances
Self-aware leaders may be the key to a company’s success. A company’s financial standing can also improve as a result of greater success.
Understanding what to bring to their role
An organisation’s leaders can better fulfil their responsibilities when they understand their strengths, both in terms of industry knowledge and their personal characteristics.
Setting realistic expectations
Leading effectively means inspiring teams of colleagues to meet goals and work toward growth. Leaders with self-awareness know how to balance what they want their team to accomplish with their creative vision.
It is equally important to create awareness within your team. Self-aware teams make better decisions and interact better. They can also handle tensions and conflicts more effectively.
Playing by the same rules levels the playing field for everyone. In contrast, team members who have high self-awareness are more likely to suffer if others lack it.
How to increase leaders awareness
- Make sure your whole team experiences transformation together with self-awareness
- Engage your team in self-awareness rituals every day – from having a stretch to visualising how to overcome obstacles
- Give continuous feedback – don’t leave everything to annual reviews
- Offer feedback whenever appropriate – it fuels continuous improvement
4. Improve communications
Having a vision without communicating it is pointless. Communication is a vital element of the famed execution framework for high-growth companies, the Rockefeller Habits. With good communication, everyone in your organisation should be able to talk knowledgeably without hesitation about your vision.
When a leader fails to communicate their intentions effectively, communication can quickly break down in the team or organisation. As a result, members lose sight of the big picture and operate in silos.
Effective workplace communication promotes employee morale, engagement, productivity and satisfaction. Good communication with staff can be the difference between profit and loss.
Think before you speak
Improve your communication skills by considering these five questions every time you communicate:
- Who is the audience?
- What is your objective or goal?
- How would you like the recipient to respond to the communication?
- How can you achieve your goal most effectively?
If you find it difficult to answer these five questions, consider how and why you are communicating.
Don’t rush it
Plan what you want to say and review your communication thoroughly in advance to ensure it works and makes sense. Particularly for written communication: revise, revise, revise. Don’t forget that excellent communication is rarely effortless.
Don’t make it difficult
Most workplace communications have a broader purpose. It’s a busy world. Don’t make it too hard for your team to understand what you are saying. Your audience should know where you’re going from the beginning of a presentation or written communication. Fill in the details next.
5. Increase transparency
Truth always wins over artificial harmony. With each iteration, your team can transfer lessons learned and achieve increasingly greater success rates if they focus on what’s right rather than who’s right.
Team tensions are usually caused by miscommunication. The inability to discuss conflict openly – conflict hinders rather than facilitates growth. Team members can interact more effectively when they know each other better.
You can create greater transparency at work in these ways:
Deconstruct silos
Promote workplace transparency by breaking down silos and fostering open communication. Information and knowledge should be available across all organisational streams to achieve clarity.
You can create a transparent working environment by prioritising an open-door strategy and using tools, such as town hall meetings and open-floor plans. As a result, hierarchies, bureaucracy and a political working environment are avoided.
Share mistakes and learnings
Build transparency by sharing your mistakes, learnings and victories. It’s much easier to share wins, but the most valuable lessons are learned when you admit when things didn’t go as planned, that they fell short or when you made a mistake that impacted the business. Your employees will be reminded that you are human and that there is always room for improvement. To achieve great success, any leader must undergo many failed experiments.
Show and tell your results
Discuss both your plans and the results – whether or not they were successful. Leaders who speak honestly about the results of the company’s efforts gain the trust and respect of their employees. Team members’ confidence in their leadership team can be better maintained when managers keep them informed throughout each project phase. During times of change, such as periods of growth or struggle, showing and telling your results is especially important.
Establish effective communication channels
Transparency at work relies on good communication channels. Employees in the organisation should know where to go for information when they need it. Management technologies make communication more seamless, especially across departments, so all messages, announcements and news can be shared easily. Schedule regular team and townhall meetings to keep your communication channels open and effective.
6. Develop a growth mindset
There are usually two different types of leaders and managers: the one who believes in fixed abilities and promotes a fixed mindset, who thinks “those who don’t perform well can never get better”. The other one believes in growing those abilities and promotes a growth mindset, where “people can improve their abilities through coaching”.
How does a growth mindset affect employees?
Learning and growth are highly valued in growth mindset organisations, as they lead to a greater sense of empowerment and ownership among employees. They are more dedicated to their companies and willing to go the extra mile. Through challenges, hard work and perseverance, they become more successful learners and better contributors to their organisations.
Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck found that growth mindset companies attract employees where:
- 47% believe their colleagues are trustworthy
- 34% feel strongly committed to the company and own it
- 65% believe the company encourages risk-taking
- 49% say the company fosters innovation
The main characteristics of a growth mindset workplace
People can thrive in an environment that encourages growth mindsets if they:
- Prioritise hard work, determination, and perseverance over talent
- Enhance employee skills by providing training
- Develop critical thinking skills to navigate challenges
- Try new ideas by experimenting
- Embrace failure as a learning opportunity
- Own up to mistakes and take responsibility
- Embrace diversity and speak up
- Encourage learning through feedback
If you apply the right strategies, work hard and ask for help when you need it, you can succeed in a growth mindset environment. The effort is what builds skills and turns those skills into accomplishments.
7. Improve time management and focus
Good time management enables businesses to deliver their products and services on time consistently. Solving problems without affecting day-to-day operations also shows good time management.
A planned, structured schedule offers extra time for problem-solving or unforeseen circumstances for businesses that depend on constant output to increase return on investment.
As well as good time management, setting business priorities (such as attainable goals and tasks) can help your company achieve its objectives. Focus on the right things to perform a specific task. This can include time, money, business practices or obtaining outside assistance. By setting business goals, you can also identify and implement business practices that need improvement.
Conclusion
- In today’s world of extreme change, transformation and disruption, a leader’s ability to translate strategy into action is paramount.
- Business leaders who execute strategies effectively differentiate themselves from underperformers.
- If a company fails to execute its strategy, it may be doomed to failure.
- When leaders execute strategy well, their companies outperform their competitors, bring new products to market faster and delight their customers.
