How Can I Align My Team Around a Clear Strategy to Drive Growth?
Challenge
Developing a strategy can be daunting, time-consuming, and expensive. A common response is to delegate the process to outside consultants or mid-level managers. But what if there were a way to overcome these challenges without outsourcing your strategy, keeping both authorship and ownership solidly in the hands of your team?
How Strategic Offsites Can Help
At Strategic Offsites, we recognize that the senior team is often the only group with the perspective, skills, and knowledge to develop your organization’s strategy. You’ll achieve better buy-in and implementation if the team, not consultants or middle managers, creates the strategy. As consultants, we see our job as designing and managing a collaborative process for your team to build and align around a strategic plan.
We see our job as designing and managing a collaborative process for your team to build and align around a strategic plan.
A typical outcome of our projects is a Strategy-On-A-Page, or “SOAP” for short.
The SOAP is a one-page representation of a strategy. As your team builds your strategy, the SOAP serves as a focal point for debate. Afterward, it acts as a communication tool to share the strategy with key stakeholders.
The top level of the SOAP are Aspirations – Measures and Metrics that quantify the successful achievement of the strategy. Although individuals may have OKRs, KPIs and the like, these Aspirations represent what the group is collectively committing to achieve.
The tier below that represents a risk-balanced portfolio of Growth Opportunities. These provide a thoroughly discussed and agreed-upon response to the question, “Where will we focus the organization’s time, energy, and financial resources in order to best achieve our Aspirations?”
Lastly, the Enabler layer represents those specific capabilities that will have to be developed or augmented to successfully pursue the Growth Opportunities and reach the Aspirations.
Behind every Opportunity and Enabler box on the SOAP is a template describing in detail the who, what, when, and why of each. These can range from one- or two-page descriptions to fully developed business cases and implementation plans, depending on the needs of each client.
Aligning around a SOAP – whether done in one meeting or in multiple meetings over several months - is just one of the many ways we help our clients have fluid, productive strategy conversations with lasting impact.