Turn The Company’s Executive Strategy Into Action
A corporate enterprise.
A countrywide management team of a pharmaceutical company was faced with very ambitious growth targets and decided to review its business strategy to recognize opportunities for growth in a completely flat market.
(Turn The Company’s Executive Strategy Into Action.)
There was some communal sense of strategic urgencies and what the key elements of the business’ value intention are. However, across functions, there was incongruity about what really created a distinguishing benefit for this company and where investments had to be made to build and support that edge.
Execution across functions wasn’t aligned and leaders openly expressed doubt that their current business approach could meet the high expectations placed upon them.
Outputs
To be able to align all the strategic plans with all the various functions of the company.
After a needs assessment with all team members, this process was premeditated as a series of three strategic execution workshops.
I introduced a practical framework to examine and describe the organizational strategy. An early sign of this process was to help leaders outline policy using a shared language and vocabulary. This would enable leaders to consistently communicate the strategy across functions to the rest of the organization.
Between sessions, I used task teams to gather more market and customer data and to explore the viability and acceptance of various alternatives that the leadership team saw.
Once a clear, differentiating and authentic strategy statement was decided upon, the team broke strategic priorities and capability building initiatives down to a tactical planning level in the various marketing, sales, R&D, and operational functions. The final session was used to align functional strategic planning by looking at crucial interdependencies.
The team defined its 3-year strategy in 30 words. The clarity of this statement and the willingness to take an unmistakable stand was very positively met by the organization and galvanized support.
The team built a consensus around what the key strategic priorities are. They gained the confidence to make difficult decisions that had been avoided in the past such as backing up their agreed-upon priorities with necessary investments, training initiatives, and structural changes.
My Approach through TA worked well.
