Accounting Article

Train Your Enterprise to Execute Strategy: Creating a Strategic "Line of Sight"

by Mario Bognanno | Published on 8/19/2003

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The success of organizations that effectively implement strategy and get breakthrough results using the Balanced Scorecard demonstrates the critical importance of executing strategy throughout the organization. Executives must find a way to translate the strategy in a way that motivates individuals throughout the organization to make strategy everyone's everyday job.

Creating a Line of Sight
Organizations create individual awareness and commitment using training as an organizational change intervention. In effect, they create a ‘line of sight’ from the executive suite to the front line.

The leaders of an organization may have the best high-level vision and strategy in the world. But if they cannot find a way to communicate that vision, and more importantly translate the vision into how it impacts and affects the individual employees, these leaders will be unable to implement their strategy and achieve their vision.

Communicating Through Training
Before employees can help implement their organization’s strategy, they need to know about it and understand it. Our experience shows that the most effective way of communicating what the strategy means and how it impacts employees is to educate the employees on the strategy and what it means to them. Successful organizations have rolled out a well-defined and carefully integrated training program, focused on how to execute the strategy through use of Strategy-Focused Organization (SFO) principles.

Approach Your Training Program to Drive Success
Our research and experience with a wide range of organizations has uncovered a range of approaches to communicate strategy using training. Organizations use training to communicate the vision, describe the strategy, reorient their business process and set the stage for motivating individual commitment.

These organizations that have successfully communicated their strategy through training have learned that there are several critical factors in developing an effective training program.  Important elements to drive a successful training program that improves organizational alignment include:

• Formal classroom training
  • Content that explains SFO principles:
    • Translating the strategy using the BSC
    • Aligning the organization through cascading BSCs
    • Making strategy everyone’s job
    • Seeing strategy execution as a continual process
    • Setting the strategic leadership agenda
• Online Training
  • Web-based training to explain the concept and background
  • Case materials to communicate how others have done it
  • Virtual Resource to answer questions
• Targeted Functional Training
  • Linking management processes and subject matter experts to strategy

These are a few of the high level elements that drive a successful training program. Use these as a guidepost as you build your training program to ensure that you implement your strategy and accelerate time to results.

Why Training is an Effective Tool to Align Your Organization
Executing strategy ultimately requires that organizations build the internal capability to carry out strategy execution. We call this a “Center of Excellence”. Companies that successfully build this internal capability to execute strategy have used training to introduce and build capabilities in the following three areas:

1. The People They have created a pool of internal experts to ensure that they have the skills and experience necessary to take the organization from creating a Balanced Scorecard all the way through making it a new way of managing.

2. The Process They have created shared and trained internal staff on proven methodologies to ensure that their strategy implementation program (SFO) becomes the basis on which to execute their strategy.

3. The Tools They have developed, shared and trained individuals to use a set of tools to enable and empower the organization to implement the processes, share the knowledge, and truly make strategy execution a core competency.

Training provides the vehicle to share and imbed skills, methodologies and tools into the every day jobs of your organization’s employees. Ensure that you leverage this vehicle for maximum benefit for your organization.

Mario Bognanno is the Vice President of Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Inc.
Article provided courtesy of Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Inc. © 2003 Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

Article courtesy of Mario Bognanno

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