As we reach the midpoint of the year, it’s crucial for executive teams to take a moment to assess the alignment of their actions with the strategic priorities they set for the year. This period of reflection is not just a routine check-in; it’s a strategic imperative that can significantly influence a company’s trajectory.
I am currently doing just that for our company. During our strategic planning process, we established clear priorities and promised to allocate the necessary resources to achieve them. We also made commitments on what we would not pursue to ensure we freed resources for our top priorities. Every member of the executive team had more ideas and needs than we had resources, so we made tradeoff decisions for the greater good of the company, which we all agreed to support. Now, it’s time to ask ourselves: Have we stayed true to our word?
Best Practices for Midyear Strategic Review
Strategic planning and executive alignment are not one-and-done activities. They are living, breathing processes that need to be actively managed over time. Formal check-ins are required, and midyear is an obvious choice. Key aspects of this check-in should include the following:
Revisit each strategic priority established at the beginning of the year.
- Ask: Are they still valid? Are the underlying assumptions still true, or has new information come to light that would be cause for change?
- We all know that the real world is very dynamic. As Mike Tyson famously channeled an old military adage, “Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.” Plans need to flex, and organizations should be prepared to pivot. However, the key is to do so intentionally and to ensure the executive team, and ultimately the rest of the organization, realigns appropriately.
Review each strategic program’s progress.
- Ask: Are we making the intended progress? What are the risks and obstacles? Have we provided adequate resources? Is there clarity and alignment among the program team? Does current progress align with our original strategic intent?
- Organizational feedback loops are critical to monitor alignment throughout the year. Since program activity is where the rubber meets the road with strategy execution, it is also often the first place misalignment appears. If the intended resources have not been applied and are working on lower priority tasks, you will see it in their lack of progress. If wheels are spinning due to confusion or frustration, it could very well be due to misalignment. Another sign is that assigned teams are stuck in the “forming” or “norming” stages for too long. Organizational stress and frustration is an important signal to monitor.
Confirm inactivity on deprioritized initiatives.
- Ask: For what we explicitly said we would not do, is there any evidence indicating resources are still being applied? Are pet projects still progressing under the radar? Have we really stopped activity or just throttled it back a bit?
- We often say executive alignment is not achieved until you have to give something up. Saying “yes” is easier than saying “no.” We have seen time and time again that the biggest threat to any strategic prioritization process is the “executive workaround.” There needs to be a check and balance, and the lack of activity on the list of programs that fell “below the line” really should be confirmed. Organizational inertia often allows activity to continue or resume on pet projects even after everyone agrees they should stop. We often put things on the back burner and think a low level of activity over a longer period of time satisfies our priorities, when it really still saps resources and causes distractions to what really needs to be accomplished. Think of this as vampire drain on your strategy execution.
Conclusion
As we conduct our midyear review, let’s ask ourselves the tough questions. Are we part of the problem or the solution? Are we contributing to misalignment or actively working towards staying aligned? Our organizations deserve our best efforts to ensure that we are moving in the right direction, together.
Let’s use this opportunity to reaffirm our commitments, adjust our course if necessary, and continue to lead our teams towards successful strategy execution.
July 19, 2024
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