How To Set And Execute Strategic Priorities

Are your teams concentrating intently on strategic goals now? This question is a daily reminder of the difficulty in focusing on strategic goals for strategy officers and leadership teams.

Setting strategic goals may seem simple, but the actual challenge is getting teams to work together and advancing projects against the flow of everyday tasks. There’s no denying the difficulty.

We’ll look at useful methods in this book for establishing and carrying out strategic priorities, such as:

How to match strategic priorities with teams
How to position things vertically and horizontally
Ways to monitor the advancement of strategic priorities

How Should Strategic Priorities Be Set?

Strategic priorities are essential to allocate resources effectively, plan for the upcoming year, make decisions, and evaluate performance concerning objectives. Organisations have different priorities, but to have a good impact on shareholder value and company success, these priorities must align with long-term goals and direction.

We go over many important stages for establishing strategic priorities in this section.

1. Examine the business climate

Netflix’s transition from renting out DVDs to offering streaming services is a prime example of the value of strategic agility and the necessity of establishing the correct objectives in response to changes in customer behaviour and technology improvements.

Think about how your company could need to change course to satisfy changing consumer needs, just as Netflix had to adapt its service offerings to stay competitive.

To understand corporate performance and capabilities, first, do an internal study. Next, evaluate what needs to be improved. Analyse the external elements affecting your firm, such as the regulatory environment, market competition, etc.

Examine these questions in detail:

Which operational skills does your company excel in?
What improvements can you make to your value offer to attract more customers?
Do any unfulfilled market demands that can inspire the creation of novel products?
What impressions do external and internal stakeholders have of your company?
Exist any fresh rivals that might threaten your market share?

These are but a handful of the instances. It would be best if you employed strategic frameworks such as Porter’s Five Forces or the SWOT Analysis to determine the most advantageous course of action and crucial weaknesses. Combine these frameworks if necessary to have the most thorough understanding of the operation of your company.

Make sure the leadership team and managers are involved in this step. They’re not just decision-makers but also insight-gatherers. Their involvement guarantees a better understanding of the problem and stronger buy-in when the strategic priorities are set.

2. Keep the number of strategic priorities between three and five main categories.

A balance between ambition and resources is ensured by limiting strategic priorities to three to five focal areas following an analysis of possibilities and weaknesses. Using this strategy may reduce the chances of underachieving by having too few objectives or diluting too many.

Determine your strategic goals and arrange them into three categories:

Critical priority
Important priority
Desirable priority

Give top attention to areas that show promise for profitability, corporate development, and innovation promotion.

Establish specific, measurable goals for your emphasis areas, such as introducing new, superior goods, raising customer happiness and retention rates, improving environmental sustainability, cutting down on delivery times, and growing your international business network and alliances.

Ensure your focus areas are straightforward and motivational, empowering your teams to excel and deliver on strategic objectives underneath each focus area.

3. Establish precise deadlines

Set attainable timelines for strategic goals to encourage stakeholder responsibility. Establishing them within a 3- to 5-year span is a reasonable general rule of thumb.

But be flexible with these deadlines; be prepared to quickly reassess and adjust to new external difficulties.

You and your teams should be able to create action plans and map regular milestones to assess performance after establishing defined timeframes.

4. Use the framework of the balanced scorecard

To methodically classify your strategic goals across the four major viewpoints of customers, finances, internal processes, and learning and growth, use the Balanced Scorecard Framework.

Organise your goals into four focus areas and provide clear key performance indicators (KPIs) for each using our Balanced Scorecard Template to streamline your workflow.

How Can Team Objectives Be in Line With Strategic Priorities?

Imagine this: While working on Project X, Team B needs to be made aware of how their respective projects fit into the overall scheme of things. Pandemonium, yes?

A startling 51% of 230 strategy executives cited alignment as their biggest obstacle in our latest World Strategy Day study, highlighting the difficulty in converting strategic goals into collaborative actions.

It makes sense that there needs to be more alignment and visibility into each team’s strategic contribution given that the average firm manages 30 to 40 different teams in addition to an equal number of technological systems.

To address this, companies require a productive way to coordinate efforts throughout their numerous teams and tools to realign with strategic aims. GGP offers two options for assistance:

Horizontally Alignment

When teams from different departments or business units actively coordinate their efforts within common target areas, this is known as horizontal alignment. The idea of alignment dismantles the custom of individual departments working towards their own goals independently rather than in tandem with other departments.

A survey conducted by Accenture found that 93% of leaders think that the largest barrier to development is functional silos. This highlights how important strategic alignment is.

Recommended reading: Aligning strategies horizontally and vertically

Vertical alignment

Vertical alignment occurs When departmental aims align with the larger organisational strategy objectives. To achieve this, a top-down and bottom-up strategy must be used, with departments setting their goals per the organization’s strategic objectives.

This clarity is essential to:

Recognise how departments affect overarching goals.
Establish a link between strategic objectives and operational goals.
As the plan develops, revise and adjust the goals.
Boost decision-making by providing more context and visibility.

How Do You Monitor Your Strategic Priorities’ Development?

Time-consuming and error-prone data consolidation and team updating processes frequently impede quick decision-making and real-time performance visibility. Conventional manual methods and unconnected systems are usually the culprits.

Organisations should begin by setting up a centralised strategy execution hub to design, carry out, and monitor their strategies to track progress more effectively. This facilitates the search for real-time information, particularly in situations when several cross-functional teams are collaborating to achieve common objectives.

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