Genius Strategies Fail Without These Four Principles

As the season comes to a close, the summer lull often gives way to a new batch of inspiring ideas brimming with potential. But, then again organisations, leaders and teams rarely have a shortage of those. What they do lack is a strategic roadmap which survives the leap from the vision of the planning table to execution on the frontlines.

What is a strategic roadmap?

A successful strategic roadmap is a blueprint that outlines an organisation’s vision, goals, and key initiatives in a structured and adaptable manner. It provides a clear trajectory for achieving long-term objectives, effectively prioritising initiatives, allocating resources, and aligning stakeholders. This roadmap incorporates input from diverse perspectives, fostering collaboration and ownership throughout the organisation. It includes measurable milestones, well-defined timelines, and key performance indicators that enable progress tracking and data-driven decision-making.

Ultimately, a strategic roadmap is a foundational concept, central to what organisations do to grow and compete. This does not mean it’s successful. With 80% of strategies failing, a Gartner report on the topic states “ strategic planning is often a disappointment to all involved. The objective sounds simple enough: Define the organisation’s strategy and make resource allocation decisions to pursue it. The problem is, the results often fail to meet expectations.”

A global FranklinCovey survey found 68% of people believed the change they were experiencing required them to do nothing differently and behave no differently. When every step of a strategic roadmap assumes and depends on people’s willingness to do those very things, understanding how to overcome the obstacles to human motivation and momentum is a major competitive advantage.

Urgency beats strategy every day

Leaders are under pressure to do more and more with less, whilst also safeguarding the wellbeing of their people. Towing this line can lead to over-goaling and underperforming as teams are tasked with too many conflicting initiatives they can’t connect with, and aren’t held accountable to anyway.

It becomes easy for overwhelmed leaders to start blaming teams, or team members to start blaming each other, pinning a lack of results on a lack of adaptability, commitment or competence. In reality, people are simply preoccupied with keeping things going and ensuring there is a viable company to build upon.

The real problem is that the day job and all its essential activities devour every available ounce of energy, leaving us in a constant state of urgency. When faced with collective upheaval, replacing and onboarding talent and fluctuating team dynamics, this urgency becomes even more all encompassing.

Follow four timeless high-performance principles to consistent results:

The thing about busyness is that it feels productive, clever, and important, whilst slowly withering your focus and muddying progress without you even realising.

But there is a way it can all be done. Here are four high-performance principles every successful strategic roadmap depends on:

1. Focus

The first bump strategic roadmaps never recover from: veering off in the wrong direction. The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. This is a stark, inescapable principle we all live with.

Somewhere along the way, most leaders forget this. Why? Because most intelligent, ambitious people don’t want to do less, especially if it means saying no to good ideas. They’re wired to do more, but there are always more good ideas than there is capacity to execute.

When there is too much to aim for, efforts become scattergun and we start playing with the law of diminishing returns. The result is disorientation and disengagement. According to Gallup research, 78% of employees don’t think their leaders have a clear direction for the organisation.

When building your strategy, identify what is worth achieving and what must be achieved. Then, ask yourself what must be achieved that won’t be achieved through normal day to day business.

The relentless focus of each frontline team is where the strategy will make or break. When a team has buy-in, they don’t feel they are working for you, they feel they are working with you. Goal-setting is a leadership responsibility but the process should be inclusive of the team. Doing so keeps communication transparent, avoids unsettling surprises and helps prevent individual team members from being or feeling unfairly burdened by team objectives.

2. Leverage

Success and innovation depend on your employees being able to sustainably carry out the day job + 1 incredibly important thing. Identifying what that one thing should be every day or week, means embracing the reality that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your activities.

Frontline teams, who are in the thick of the work every day, will know what these critical activities are. It is a leader’s job to equip them with the tools to identify, measure and plan around them. This means helping them to look at the goal differently.

Looking to the future rather than the past is inherently more optimistic and proactive, yet even when we believe we’re being innovative, most of us don’t do that. Progress gets dragged down by lag measures which only tell you if you’ve achieved the goal. The opportunity to influence it has passed. Your team needs to be directed by lead measures, which tell you if you are likely to achieve the goal.

Empower your people to understand and leverage their influence by showing them how their individual actions contribute to a shared goal that is important to the organisation. By working to measures which are predictive of success, stretched teams are given a level of control which is particularly powerful when so much else is uncertain.

3. Engagement

Chris McChesney, co-author of FranklinCovey’s no.1 business best-seller The 4 Disciplines of Execution said it best: “When your team begins to see a breakthrough move as a direct result of their efforts, they will know they are winning, and we have found nothing that drives the morale and engagement of a team more than winning.”

We can thrive off quick wins for a while, syphoning the satisfaction off each sporadic job well done, but this ultimately gives way to frustration at a lack of meaningful, consistent movement on the long term objective.

You only know if you’re winning or not by keeping score. The lag and lead measures won’t have much meaning to the team unless they can see the progress in real time. A compelling scoreboard tells the teams where they are, where they should be and how they’re already winning.

Having the ability to fanatically track progress in real time also reveals opportunities to course correct the roadmap if necessary. It makes no sense to demoralise and disenfranchise a team who are having to work twice as hard for half the results. 

4. Accountability

People are more likely to commit to their own ideas than to orders from above. When individuals commit to fellow team members as well as their leaders, the commitment goes beyond professional job performance to become a personal promise.

At FranklinCovey we have field-tested the efficacy of each week, teams engaging in a simple 15 minute catch-up to report on and create commitments which are specific, relevant and timely. These commitments don’t have to move the earth- the commitment may take you 30 minutes- just the needle in the right direction.

The purpose is to practice the discipline of mutual accountability whilst also creating a space to celebrate small wins and highlight individual successes. Such sessions create a sense of unity and cement responsibilities.

…but what happens when people fail to keep their commitments? Consider this example leadership response from FranklinCovey Execution Practice Lead Ray McGrath:

“I know you had a tough week, and the escalation with that particular customer and that work you did on that presentation was really strong, and we really appreciate it. In this session though, we’re looking to hold each other accountable, we’re taking this seriously, we’re looking to do what we say we’re going to do. What can I do, or any members of this team can do, to help you get your commitment fulfilled for this week in addition to the commitment you’re making for the coming week?”

Accountability is the last execution hurdle many leaders fall at because it’s uncomfortable. However, balanced with high trust, unwavering respect and authenticity it will create higher, tighter performing teams who willingly own what they’re doing.

Future-proof your strategy

Focus, leverage, engagement and accountability are principles which hold up under pressure because they create a high performance culture rooted in purpose, recognition and community. 

If it’s not systemic or destabilising change, a lack in just one of these four areas will trip even the most genius strategies and talented teams up. They are simple, but not simplistic. Common sense, but not common practice.

Institutionalising these four principles transforms your individual and collective ability to keep delivering against the odds. And sometimes- increasingly- the odds do feel great.

Learn more about our approach to helping businesses achieve breakthrough results.