How to build and embed a business strategy that fuels growth through uncertain times
Communicating strategy is an absolute must!
At Cultures That Pop, we spend most of our time designing engagement strategies for the workforces of PE-backed companies. With that type of company comes a lot of change, which can happen quickly.
So, when a significant change is on the horizon, we help keep teams aligned, motivated and working towards the same goal. Here, Cat Lewis, founder of Cultures That POP, shares a little about our method and why ‘hoping it’ll be alright’ doesn’t cut it.
I want to share a story with you. It contains advice I wish I’d known a long time ago because it helped me shape our business and align many workforces to ambitious growth strategies.
Working with clients that are growing. In value. In client numbers. In size.
How can we build an effective strategy to inspire and drive teams towards the same goals as the business?
Where can we begin in sharing the plans that lay ahead?
What would be the best way to present this to teams?
Successfully embedding future strategies is absolutely essential to the success of growth plans. In previous years, I’ve seen strategies delivered at an all-hands event and then forgotten about the week after. Leaders need something substantial that lands with impact, engages an entire workforce and is spoken about, used and referred to repeatedly… beyond the All Hands session.
Writing your strategy
To learn more, I turned to some of the best strategists in the world. I have friends in the Brazilian Navy Marines Corps, or Corpo de Fuzileiros Navais, as they are known.
The Captain spent four years in the Amazon. He’s one of the world's top jungle combat specialists and shared that the most significant strategic strength he has to hand is always to focus on your team's individual strengths.
Let them specialise in an area. You can do it all, but you cannot master it all.
I found this advice so relevant, especially for start-up businesses and those on the brink of expansion. It could be so easy to keep costs low by having individual employees responsible for far broader remits than the job design should ideally allow for. I speak to HR Managers running Internal Comms and Recruitment and Learning and Development and Office Management, and you wonder, how on earth can they manage it all?
I see Client Account Managers owning Implementation, Client Relations, Client Support, Contract Renewal, and Technical Support. You have to think, how can they focus and retain all this information to deliver excellent results in any one area? Is it fair to hope that they’ll keep all these plates spinning?
The Officer, whose role is tactical and he spends the majority of his time in helicopters and diving, shared this; it’s so simple but so true – “Hope is not a strategy”, and he’s not the only strategist to say this.
Dr Akande said the same thing in a letter to Obama following his acceptance speech on the evening of 4th November 2008, where Obama said, “While we breathe, we hope.” This message was powerful. The country was falling apart. But, as a new President of the USA, facing a hugely challenging landscape and needing to get an entire country behind him, hope would not cut it.
“Hope will not stop a recession. Hope will not create jobs. Hope will not prevent catastrophic bank failures.”
That letter made it clear.
Hope is not a strategy, and it is not a tactic that you should be relying on in the uncertain times we face.
The same rules apply to your employees. They need more than hope from you. They need to be provided with a solid, written strategy that they can refer to and reference when making their own decisions for the business. They need a place where they can align themselves and know they are on the right path. You cannot be in every meeting to make sure decisions are right, but you can provide the insight and guidance to ensure your teams are making the same decisions you would if you were there.
Once Leadership teams understand this, it’s easy to move forward; rather than pure positivity and promise of a better future, we create clearly defined growth strategy plans and campaigns that every team, in every role, can align to.
Communicating your strategy
With the strategy design done, time to launch and engage. We love this as we get to use our super creative thinking skills and create customised campaigns tuned to your workforce to best embed and share it. The goal is for strategy to become part of your daily narrative within your business and not a document that will soon be forgotten when the next big news item comes along.
There’s a variety of ways you can choose to do this. Clients love us helping them with :
All-hands meeting – You can use an event like this to launch your new strategy and ensure you discuss it in detail with an open Q&A afterwards. We love making stand-out events that your employees are totally buzzed to be part of.
Regular CEO Updates – Enabling you to talk about it often and refer to the goals and progress in every update. We coach, advise and co-write with CEOs to make sure their message lands right.
Recognition – Encourage your employees to recognise people in your business who are helping to reach their goals. Whether it’s an end-of-week shout-out, employee of the week article or embracing technology such as eCards, this is a great way to make the strategy come alive and see that your teams are acting upon it. We love designing these programmes and crafting unique programmes that stand out from the crowd.
And that’s not all. Drop us a message if you like to hear more on this.
Connecting employees to your strategy
Having the strategy delivered and embedded at a company level has other benefits. I often use strategy to show teams the purpose, meaning and impact of their tasks and responsibilities. It also has other benefits, such as demonstrating how everyone plays their part in the business and has equal value in delivering on our goals. By this, I mean that it’s easy to link specific roles with company success. Sales and Service roles, for instance, can be directly linked to profit, growth and churn, which correlates easily with the financial reports at the end of the financial year. But what about the roles that are less easy to correlate? The roles that aren’t driven by KPIs or metrics?
I once worked with an employee on my team tasked with data entry. Something that could be deemed a tedious task but made meaningful by explaining in our 1-2-1s, “Can you see how this hits on helping us to achieve this strategic goal?”.
A slight nod to how an employee interacts with the business’ overall goals can go a long way in making the tasks more meaningful and empowering.
Communicating strategic goals to the business effectively helps businesses transition with minimum disruption through periods of significant change. The advice I’ve shared has helped shape businesses and align workforces to future growth strategies.
I hope it will help you too 😊
