Are You Working With a Broken Strategy?

The word ‘strategy’ gets thrown around a lot. From business to brand to marketing to communications, there’s no shortage of strategies within organizations. As strategists, we are here to tell you that the majority of people struggle to understand it all therefore implement it all — which means the majority of strategies are in fact at least a little broken.

Here are 10 questions to help you uncover the strength of your strategy. 

Process: 

1. Is your strategy clear and being used by everyone in the company?

2. Does your strategy come to fruition in external communications? Internal?

3. Are your channels and/or divisions working together to bring the strategy to life?

   People:

4. How confident is your marketing team on understanding strategy?

5. Does each person operating the strategy understand their role?

6. How clear are people on operating strategy within their day-to-day functions?

   Tools:

7. How consistent is the brand across communications? (sign of a good toolkit!) 

8. How cohesive is your toolkit to execute strategy across teams?

9. How much time do you dedicate to process and training on strategy?

BONUS: How has strategy helped you be successful in your role?

If you feel your strategy could use a bit of tightening or strengthening, here are a few ways to gets started: 

Interrogate your strategic structure and system. 

In order to understand how successful a strategy is, you have to look at its structure (what information it's made up of) and its system (how this information gets operationalized into communications). Evaluate these to see how strategy currently moves from business strategy, to brand strategy, to marketing strategy, to communications strategy. Find the hiccups, evaluate the gaps and see if you can adjust for a more effective strategy. 

Prioritize alignment.

Don’t let anyone minimize the importance of alignment. Because they will. No matter how short the timeline, you must take the time to align on any strategic initiative. Sometimes the alignment needs to be retroactive — taking a step back to understand how strong and successful the strategy is within the organization. Talk about it, collaborate on optimizing it. 

Make it a practice. 

Strategy is like a habit, the more often you do it, the more likely it will be to stick.  Oftentimes people give up on strategy early because it's too confusing or they are unsure how to do it. Take the time to understand what support people may need to successfully implement the strategy and help them find it. 

Still need support? We provide products and services that help leaders make sure that their strategy is functioning within their organization. We typically help teams add strategy to their process or enhance the strategy within their process. Please reach out for more information.