Strategy and vision can come to nought unless we get our people at all levels to take the right actions.
This is a concern that many of my clients in leadership roles face. What can we do to make it more likely that the vision and strategy in our heads turn into the actions and results that we want and need?
I believe we need to create our strategy and detailed plans around common purpose. This common purpose is the “big why” that people at all levels, in all roles, can buy in to.
Part of leading our teams is to curate and communicate the vision for where we are going. We also need to explain where we’re going, and why, and what actions we all need to take to contribute to making the vision a reality.
One of the hardest parts of doing this is to work out how a single “why” can resonate with so many different roles. After that, we need to then work out how that “why” drives the “what and how” for each role in our team.
Purpose-driven planning is one of the approaches I use to pull together a single overall purpose and the specific drivers and actions for each team or area. This is a technique that visually shows the support each area gives to the overall purpose, whilst drilling down into the root causes and actions needed to make the changes real.
The purpose-driven plan explicitly links day-to-day actions with delivering the overall strategy. Making this link obvious to all is vital, in my experience, to getting people pulling together in making change happen, even through difficult or complex changes.
However you choose to create and communicate your strategy, your message is undoubtedly stronger if people feel that their purpose is part of the overall reason for delivering change.
Please contact us to find out how we can help you create and implement your own purpose-driven plan.