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Strategic Alignment for Growth
Cris Hagen, MS
How are you planning for growth?
As your company grows, how are you facing the challenges to achieve and sustain the following?
These and many more questions are faced by leaders who understand that while growth is positive for the business, there are many unforeseen challenges that accompany that growth. These challenges tend to “bubble up” in discussions behind closed doors before they become part of the formal boardroom agenda. And they are often put to rest in ways that fail to address the complex relationships between the organization’s various “elements”, including:
Instead, plans for growth often end up taking a “linear” approach where one problem after another gets identified and addressed. The result is a piece meal approach to change. For example, the first problem experienced might result in a need to make leadership changes. Next, some reporting relationships are changed and boxes and titles are re-arranged on the organization chart. Next, a task force is formed to address problems with cross-functional integration, and so on. Unfortunately, many of these “solutions” are reactive in nature rather than proactive. See a problem, fix it. See another problem, fix that one. When this happens, executives can easily lose sight of the big picture and fall short of defining a comprehensive, systematic approach to lay a more lasting foundation for growth. This systematic approach enables strategic alignment of all the elements described above, and helps ensure a successful implementation of your growth strategy.
Strategic Alignment: Building capability to see the forest instead of the trees
All companies go through growing pains as they move from one stage of growth to another. And whether their growth is through mergers, acquisitions, new product introduction, or ramp-up to meet growing demand for current products, the issues are usually similar regardless of industry affiliation. That being said, recognizing that each company has unique industry, organizational, and cultural issues to deal with makes the need for a systematic and comprehensive approach to change even more imperative.
The concept of strategic alignment starts with the point of view that because growth can present complex challenges, having a systematic and comprehensive roadmap for change can help prevent false starts and failed attempts. While the specific issues may be unique to a given company and industry, they can be mapped out and dealt with in ways that provide greater predictability as to the outcome.
“People” issues are often the most complex to address
“People” issues are often the most complex and challenging issues to deal with. What exactly are “people” issues? They include leadership changes, changes in roles and responsibilities, “turf” issues, communication issues, conflicts, and organizational politics. They include building buy-in and commitment to the growth strategy. This is the “sticky stuff” of change. Unaddressed, these issues can make, break, or severely dent a successful growth strategy. And while no growth strategy can confidently promise to leave everyone happy, a strategy that doesn’t address these problems head on will surely encounter unforeseen “land mines” during implementation.
The best laid plans…..
Many companies seek a growth strategy by looking to other, similar companies in order to see how they are addressing the problems associated with growth. Or, they pay large sums of money to strategy consulting firms to study the issues and formulate recommendations and leave the implementation up to the client. While benchmarking your company against others to identify best practices and industry trends is valuable, it fails to build internal capability to address the next stage of growth. Instead, it builds a reliance on consultants who are rarely around to be a part of the implementation process. It also falls short of achieve strategic alignment throughout all elements of the organization, resulting in what may be a great strategy but for the wrong company. Finally, using the “expert consultant” approach occasionally results in a critical lack of ownership for the strategy that is “bought”, leading to the demise of the executive(s) who wrote the check.
The roadmap Hagen & Associates uses for strategic alignment evaluates and addresses all of the organizational elements described above, resulting in a comprehensive plan for change. But more importantly, we teach our clients how to use the roadmap and ensure that they “own” the destination. Rather than gathering data, analyzing it offsite, and delivering the solution in a 3 inch thick report, we are onsite deeply involving our client in understanding the problem and developing the solution. This approach builds capability among the leadership and among employees to learn about how to face future growth challenges more effectively. It builds ownership to the solution and raises everyone’s perspective above the individual “trees” to enable a view of the entire landscape of change as it is evolving. The result is a more efficient and more effective growth strategy that builds commitment to the strategy as it is developed.
Summary
As competent as your executive team is in running your business day-to-day, tackling the complex and interrelated issues associated with growth requires that everyone be “on the same page” about how those issues will be addressed. Having a common roadmap that incorporates all the best thoughts and concerns of your leadership team into your growth strategy helps builds the essential consensus for, and commitment to that strategy in order to ensure a successful implementation. And while using consulting support is wise, any approach that fails to address your company’s unique cultural, organizational, and people issues will lead to problems in implementation. Using a systematic and comprehensive roadmap for change that focuses on building internal capability will result in a strategy that everyone can commit to.