Emerging Leaders, Strategy Execution
It’s budget season for organizations on a calendar-based fiscal year. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or first-time budget manager, submitting a budget for approval during times of economic uncertainty can be a confidence shaker. Being a budget manager isn’t just about creating a wish list and bracing for a 30% cut. It’s about being a strategic thinker and a persuasive communicator. These five questions will help you win the hearts of senior leaders and get your budget approved, even when times are fiscally fickle.
1. What are the organization’s strategic goals? Before diving into the nitty-gritty of spreadsheets and numbers, take a step back and grasp the bigger picture. Understand the organization’s strategic goals and how your budget aligns with them. When you can clearly articulate how your financial plans contribute to the overall success of the company, you’ll earn the respect and support of senior leaders.
2. Who are the key decision makers? Knowing the lay of the land is crucial. Identify the key decision-makers in your organization, especially those with the final say on budget approvals. Take the time to understand their priorities and tailor your budget proposal to address their needs, where possible. Winning hearts can be just as important as crunching numbers.
3. What are the major cost drivers? As a budget manager, you’re not just a number cruncher. You’re also a detective. Dive into the data to identify the major cost drivers in your organization. Understanding where the money is going will help you make informed decisions and justify your budget allocations to senior leaders. It’s all about making your case with solid evidence.
4. Where can we save money? Let’s face it – everyone loves cost-saving superheroes. Channel your inner superhero and negotiate with vendors and suppliers for better pricing on products and services. This can result in significant savings over time and demonstrate your dedication to saving the organization’s resources.
5. What’s Plan B? Life is unpredictable, and budgets are no exception. Senior leaders appreciate budget managers who are prepared for unforeseen circumstances. So, create a Plan B – a contingency plan that outlines how you’ll handle unexpected challenges or changes in the financial landscape. Having a backup strategy shows your ability to think ahead and adapt to any situation.
By asking these five questions and incorporating the answers into your budget proposal, you’ll improve the odds of getting the resources you need and help your organization meet the challenges of the coming year.
Question: What are some of the budgeting tips in your management toolkit?
Strategy Execution
This is the time of the year when most organizations go into strategic planning mode. Senior executives gather for an annual planning summit. They look at external factors such as economic, competitor, and market data. They compare the strengths and weaknesses of their organizations with external opportunities and threats. They make decisions about what adjustments to make to services or products, how to reach new markets, and ways to generate higher profits.
Then what?
Unfortunately, most strategic plans sit in a 3-ring binder on a shelf collecting dust, or get saved in a digital file on one person’s hard drive, until it’s time to work on next year’s plan. It’s not much more than a theory, really. The sooner you can connect your strategic objectives with employee goals and rewards, the better chance you have of turning that theory into reality.
Here are three proven ways to move from strategic planning to strategy execution:
Break it down.
Many strategic plans focus primarily on financial metrics. Most employees don’t connect on a day to day basis with metrics like operating margins, cost of goods sold, and net profit. They don’t see how making a decision about how to handle a customer leads to achieving a desired profit margin. And when employees do get to see key performance metrics, the gap between when their performance occurred and the metrics is far too great to have any real meaning.
What kinds of metrics help people connect? Things like improving customer satisfaction, speeding up response times, reducing waste – just about anything that ties directly to the tasks they perform on a daily basis. When employees can see what winning looks like in ways they can relate to, they make better decisions in support of the plan.
Monitor progress.
Throw out the old paradigm of the annual performance review. That pattern traditionally goes like this: set goals, file goals, pull goals out after 12 months, beat employee about the head for not achieving goals. Instead, change the annual performance review process to one of continuous review and adjustment throughout the year. Why? You don’t want to save up negative feedback until the employee fails. Employee failure means organizational failure.
Link performance to rewards.
Employees should feel that when the organization has been successful, they share in the rewards. Conversely, when the organization has been unsuccessful, they should feel some of the pain. Incentive and reward systems should link directly to organizational and individual performance. Don’t be afraid to move all employee performance reviews to coincide with the release of annual performance results.
Strategy execution happens with true goal alignment from top to bottom, regular monitoring of progress, and linking individual incentives with organizational performance. Help your employees move from obliged to engaged to turn your strategy into reality.
Here’s a short parable to summarize the importance of true goal alignment:
There once was a Pharaoh who went out to inspect the progress of two pyramids. The first pyramid was a mess! The blocks were uneven, the ramps were unstable, oxen were milling about… The Pharaoh stopped a nearby worker and asked, “What is your job?” The worker replied, “I move stones from this pile to that pile all day.” At the next pyramid, the Pharaoh saw much greater progress. The blocks fit together perfectly. Teams of oxen were moving evenly up the ramps. This pyramid was really taking shape. When the Pharaoh asked a worker, “What is your job?” the worker replied, “I am building a pyramid!”
Question: How deep into your org chart do employees connect with the organization’s strategic goals?
Bonus! Download our simple, FREE strategic planning template here – a framework to help you measure organizational performance beyond key financial metrics.
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Strategy Execution
This is the time of the year when most organizations go into strategic planning mode. Senior executives gather for an annual planning summit. They look at external factors such as economic, competitor, and market data. They compare the strengths and weaknesses of their organizations with external opportunities and threats. They make decisions about what adjustments to make to services or products, how to reach new markets, and ways to generate higher profits.
Then what?
Unfortunately, most strategic plans sit in a 3-ring binder on a shelf collecting dust, or get saved in a digital file on one person’s hard drive, until it’s time to work on next year’s plan. It’s not much more than a theory, really. The sooner you can connect your strategic objectives with employee goals and rewards, the better chance you have of turning that theory into reality.
Here are three proven ways to move from strategic planning to strategy execution:
Break it down.
Many strategic plans focus primarily on financial metrics. Most employees don’t connect on a day to day basis with metrics like operating margins, cost of goods sold, and net profit. They don’t see how making a decision about how to handle a customer leads to achieving a desired profit margin. And when employees do get to see key performance metrics, the gap between when their performance occurred and the metrics is far too great to have any real meaning.
What kinds of metrics help people connect? Things like improving customer satisfaction, speeding up response times, reducing waste – just about anything that ties directly to the tasks they perform on a daily basis. When employees can see what winning looks like in ways they can relate to, they make better decisions in support of the plan.
Monitor progress.
Throw out the old paradigm of the annual Performance Review. That pattern traditionally goes like this: set goals, file goals, pull goals out after 12 months, beat employee about the head for not achieving goals. Instead, change the annual performance review process to one of continuous review and adjustment throughout the year. Why? You don’t want to save up negative feedback until the employee fails. Employee failure means organizational failure.
Link performance to rewards.
Employees should feel that when the organization has been successful, they share in the rewards. Conversely, when the organization has been unsuccessful, they should feel some of the pain. Incentive and reward systems should link directly to organizational and individual performance. Don’t be afraid to move all employee performance reviews to coincide with the release of annual performance results.
Strategy execution happens with true goal alignment from top to bottom, regular monitoring of progress, and linking individual incentives with organizational performance. Help your employees move from obliged to engaged to turn your strategy into reality.
Here’s a short parable to summarize the importance of true goal alignment:
There once was a Pharaoh who went out to inspect the progress of two pyramids. The first pyramid was a mess! The blocks were uneven, the ramps were unstable, oxen were milling about… The Pharaoh stopped a nearby worker and asked, “What is your job?” The worker replied, “I move stones from this pile to that pile all day.” At the next pyramid, the Pharaoh saw much greater progress. The blocks fit together perfectly. Teams of oxen were moving evenly up the ramps. This pyramid was really taking shape. When the Pharaoh asked a worker, “What is your job?” the worker replied, “I am building a pyramid!”
Bonus! Download our simple, FREE strategic planning template here – a framework to help you measure organizational performance beyond key financial metrics.
Question: How deep into your org chart do employees connect with the organization’s strategic goals?
Leadership, Strategy Execution
Congratulations! You just returned from your annual strategic planning summit. You gathered economic, competitor, and market data. You compared the strengths and weaknesses of your organization with external opportunities and threats. You decided where to tweak your services, how to reach new markets, and ways to generate higher profits. Now what?
If your strategic plan is in a 3-ring binder sitting on a shelf collecting dust until time to work on next year’s plan, it’s really no more than a theory. The sooner you can connect your strategic objectives with employee goals and rewards, the better chance you have of turning that theory into reality.
Here are three proven ways to keep your strategic plan from collecting dust:
Break it down. Many strategic plans focus primarily on financial metrics. Most employees don’t connect on a day to day basis with metrics like operating margins, net profit and EBITDA. They don’t see how making a decision about how to handle a customer leads to achieving a desired profit margin. And when employees get to see key performance metrics, the gap between when their performance occurred and the metrics is far too great to have any real meaning.
What kinds of metrics help people connect? Things like improving customer satisfaction, speeding up response times, reducing waste – just about anything that ties directly to the tasks people perform on a daily basis. When employees can see what winning looks like in ways they can relate to, they make better decisions in support of the plan.
Monitor progress.
Throw out the old paradigm of the annual Performance Review. That pattern traditionally goes like this: set goals, file goals, pull goals out after 12 months, beat employee about the head for not achieving goals. Instead, change the annual performance review process to one of continuous review and adjustment throughout the year. Why? You don’t want to save up negative feedback until the employee fails. Employee failure means organizational failure.
Link performance to rewards.
Employees should feel that when the organization has been successful, they share in the rewards. Conversely, when the organization has been unsuccessful, they should feel some of the pain. Incentive and reward systems should link directly to organizational and individual performance. Don’t be afraid to move all employee performance reviews to coincide with the release of annual performance results.
Strategy execution happens with true goal alignment from top to bottom, regular monitoring of progress, and linking individual incentives with organizational performance. Help your employees move from obliged to engaged to turn your strategy into reality.
Here’s a short parable to summarize the importance of true goal alignment:
There once was a Pharaoh who went out to inspect the progress of two pyramids. The first pyramid was a mess! The blocks were uneven, the ramps were unstable, oxen were milling about… The Pharaoh stopped a nearby worker and asked, “What is your job?” The worker replied, “I move stones from this pile to that pile all day.” At the next pyramid, the Pharaoh saw much greater progress. The blocks fit together perfectly. Teams of oxen were moving evenly up the ramps. This pyramid was really taking shape. When the Pharaoh asked a worker, “What is your job?” the worker replied, “I am building a pyramid!”
Bonus! Download our simple, FREE strategic planning template here – a framework to help you measure organizational performance beyond key financial metrics.
Question: How deep into your org chart do employees connect with the organization’s strategic goals?
Strategy Execution
Stand up if you can locate a copy of your organization’s strategic plan in less than five clicks from your desktop (or in a 3-ring binder on your bookshelf). Now keep standing if you’ve opened that file (or binder) in the last quarter.
Most likely, your organization is going through another season of strategic planning this time of year. But, if you haven’t cracked open last year’s plan, then the hours and hours of work you’re about to repeat will likely become another waste of valuable time and effort. To be relevant, strategy must be both planned and executed. Here are four ways to make your strategic plan come to life:
1. Make your goals short and clear. Fuzzy goals are easy to agree on but hard to execute. Fuzzy goals are open to interpretation and a waste of valuable resources. The outcomes need to be empirically verifiable. Everyone involved needs to be able to gauge whether the target has been met.
2. Assign individual responsibility for each goal. It may take a team to achieve each goal, but if everyone is responsible, no one is accountable. Clarifying responsibility will lead to accountability. Bonus: don’t assign most goals to the top executives. The further down the org chart goals are owned, the more likely your organization will be aligned for success.
3. Measure twice. Cut once. Take the time up front to establish the best way to set targets for goal achievement, then report monthly on target-to-actual measurements. If you’re measuring something that your organization hasn’t executed before, look for industry benchmarks to set targets.
4. Review performance monthly. Execution-focused leaders meet regularly to review target-to-actual performance. When performance slides, ask this series of questions:
a. Why is performance sliding?
b. Keep asking “why” until you get as close as possible to the root cause.
c. What are we doing to fix the problem?
d. Do we need to put a cross-functional team on this to improve performance now, or is this an anomaly that will correct itself next month?
When leaders create explicit goals, assign individuals responsible, agree on achievable targets, and revisit performance every month, they are more likely to stay connected to strategic plans — and those plans are more likely to become reality.
Download our Balanced Scorecard fillable template to help you with your 2019 Strategic Plan!
Question: What is your organization doing to move from strategic planning to strategy execution?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
![Cure Initiative Overload with the Balanced Scorecard]()
Strategy Execution
A few weeks ago, I was asked by one of my clients if I could help her company with strategic planning. My answer was, “Yes and no.”
Like many of today’s organizations, this team was already suffering from initiative overload. Without a system for tracking business critical and mission critical goals, their strategic plan was doomed to fail. I explained that, “Yes, I would be happy to help your team create a strategic plan, but only if I can also help them put a system in place to help them execute that strategy.”
This is the season of the year where many of us are busy working on strategic plans. For some, those plans get shelved in favor of jumbled priorities and unfinished initiatives. For others, the goals that come out of the plans get added to the already impossibly long list of projects our overloaded teams are already working on. Either way, if we don’t have a process to turn our most important goals into an executable strategy, our plans can be pronounced dead on arrival.
Don’t let this happen to your organization. Instead, track your strategic goals with a performance management system like a Balanced Scorecard. First developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in the late 1990’s, today’s Balanced Scorecard platforms help organizations of all sizes and in every industry turn strategy in executable goals in four important ways:
- Communicate the business critical and mission critical goals the organization is trying to accomplish.
- Align the day-to-day work that everyone is doing with strategic goals.
- Prioritize projects, products, and services.
- Measure and monitor progress toward strategic targets.
The system connects the dots between big picture strategy, operational goals, and key performance metrics. I have my favorite balanced scorecard platforms, but one-size does not fit all. Check out this site for options that may work for your organization, and ensure that your strategic plans get executed in 2018!
Question: What is your organization doing to manage initiative overload?
Bonus! Download our simple, FREE strategic planning template here – a framework to help you measure organizational performance beyond key financial metrics.
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