Aligning Your Tactics with Strategy

To take Advantage of opportunity when you find them, your organization needs to align its strategy and tactics. Strategy is the what you want to achieve, and tactics are the how you will achieve it. Many organizations develop a great strategy but fail at the tactical execution stage, often because the activities the organization performs are not aligned with its strategy. In other words, how the organization tries to execute its strategy is not aligned with what it is trying to achieve.

Organizations need to tie their mission to their strategy, and then execute their strategy in their tactical operations.

Strategy is the starting point for corporate behavior. It expresses an organization’s ambitions, sets out its chosen direction and describes the principal initiatives and projects necessary to achieve its mission. Business schools, management gurus and strategy boutiques regularly develop new approaches and methodologies for strategy formulation and all acknowledge its overwhelming importance in setting the tone for the organization and its prospects for success.

Despite its significance, aligning an organization to its strategy remains one of the most elusive and unsatisfactory areas of management endeavour. Indeed, research has shown that 85% of executive teams spend less than 1 hour per month discussing strategy and only 5% of the workforce understands strategy.

The difference between strategy and tactics is often described as “strategy is long-term and tactics are short-term.” Strategy and tactics are both how you will achieve your goals and objectives. Strategy is our path or bridge for going from where we are today to our goal. It's our general resource allocation plan.

The tactics then are how specifically or tangibly we will do that. They might include items such direct marketing letters, face-to-face meetings, key talking point scripts and an iPad, Android App etc .

Here’s why it is essential to align your organization’s strategy

Understand your organizations strategy

The WHY, the WHAT and the high level HOW. There can be no room for misunderstanding here. Any misunderstanding at this level will be amplified many times as you translate the strategy into tactics. So, go over it with your manager, and get answers to all the questions you have. Relay the answers to your team. Where there is no answer, relay that to your team also.

Make sure you list out and understand the assumptions used in the high-level strategy, such as the economic forecasts, and the direction that the industry/sector is expected to head in over the next 3 – 5 years. What if these assumptions prove false? What contingencies have been built into the plan?

Strip away the verbage and work with your manager to explain the Strategic Plan in plain, simple language.

If you MUST relay the exact words given to you, do so but accompany them wherever necessary with simply worded translations and examples…the “in other words…” piece – provide illustrative examples wherever possible.

Play ‘catchball’ with the developing Tactical Plans

In other words, pass them back and forwards quickly between you, your team members and your manager as you develop your plan. Each pass should add meaning, clear up any misunderstandings that may arise, and add another layer of detail. Make tactical planning an iterative and cross-functional process…don’t get siloed!

Develop a team scorecard to accompany your team tactics

Make the scorekeeping fun and try to make sure that the measures you use are such that you can track progress at the very least on a weekly basis. Any longer timeframe than that and it will go stale on you very quickly.

Use visual tools that you can post on walls, bulletin boards, etc.

To show your team’s plan, its linkage to other tactical plans and to the Strategic Plan. Show and illustrate progress to plan. The larger and more colorful the better. This is sometimes referred to as Visual Management or Open Book Management, and it creates tremendous energy in your team.

Build project management skills within your team

These skills allow people to break the tactics down into action steps and schedules to get the job done. This is absolutely critical to departmental and cross-functional team success…and to help team members avoid burnout from key initiatives/projects that they must contribute to in addition to doing their regular job.

Develop the personal skill of listening

One of the pioneers of quality improvement, W. Edwards Deming used to say “In God we trust, all others bring data”, but he also said “Data will provide you with about 3% of what you really need to know!” So you need to listen carefully for feedback on how the plan is progressing and not rely solely on the numbers.

Stay flexible

Strategies change, and tactical plans need to change with them. Always stress alignment with the higher-level Strategic Plan.

Recognize effort AND results

This gives people a real reason to believe in the strategy and tactics, as well as believing in you and in each other.

November 19, 2018