One of the things many companies are guilty of is the lack of a proper commercial strategy for the business to follow, that can then be cascaded down to the rest of the workforce, so that everyone points in one direction and everyone knows what they are working towards as an organization and how their role within that organization is contributing.
The reason that this is not always well executed is not because of lack of ambition, or leadership or ability, it’s almost always because of time.
Particularly in SME’s the ability to spend time on this, as important as it is, is super difficult to find. Everyone’s “to do” list is ever evolving and changing due the priorities at that current moment in time, keeping the company operating and delivering day to day. It’s all very well and good to have a 2 hour strategy kick off meeting planned in months in advance, if on the morning of that day you have your biggest customer putting through an order that means all hands to the pump, or a major quality issue blows up plus any number of issues that occur on a typical day that need immediate focus, the reality is that the strategy meeting quickly moves back down the list of todays or even this weeks priorities and is put back another month.
The problem is that for all of the people in an organization to be properly motivated and engaged, you need this strategic direction in place. I have seen it time and time again, where employee feedback surveys cites one of the biggest concerns they have is a lack of direction of the company. Though the leaders of a company generally have a rough idea of where they want to go, its rarely cascaded down to the people that are supposed to be delivering that plan.
This is why it’s often much more effective to have short term external support to come in and take away the burden of this process, not to give the strategic direction, but to help draw it out from the stakeholders, consolidate it and provide vehicles to deliver it to and ingrain it into the workforce.
This enables you to do what you are good at and to run the company effectively in the now, whilst allowing companies like The Clay Partnership to take the burden of compiling the strategy and creating a tangible, real life project to deliver to the organization.
Get in touch with us for a free and no obligation consultation to see how we can help get you to refine and deliver your strategy to the rest of the business, ensuring everyone throughout the company is working towards the same ambition, as well as being fully motivated and effective.
As with all of the work we do at the clay partnership, this is not complicated, it should be simple, we work in the background, with our customers to make them the heroes, not us.
Get in touch to see how we can help you make the change.then
