After introspection comes action to make a great 2010. Action means change, but make sure that change produces progress. Continual improvement is what we’re after, and building on solid foundational principles comes first. I’m a strong proponent of innovative tactics, but without that foundation it’s easy to lose your focus. So let’s look at what do.
1. Refine your vision and tell your people. It’s the company vision that attracts and keeps good people. Does it need to change a little or even a lot? Look at the economic landscape, look at your competitors, look at all indicators and decide. Then communicate it to everyone in the organization in a variety of ways. Plan on how to reinforce it throughout the year. Don’t underestimate the power of a strong vision to build employee engagement.
2. Build the culture to support the vision. Corporate culture includes the values, norms, beliefs and behaviors of the organization. If you don’t purposefully guide its creation and development, your culture will become what others make it. Decide what you want the values to be. What beliefs do you want your people to have? How should organizational behavior look? Build the culture around your vision so that employees believe in what the company stands for and their behavior will reflect their belief. Your results depend on that.
3. Spend time on tactics first, strategy second. Countless hours are spent in strategy development, most of it wasted. Business Week once reviewed the history of strategic plans of major US companies and found over half were failures. I suspect that is still the case today. Tactics are active, strategy is passive and in the changing economic times of today you need to do things, evaluate them and try again. Along the way, that evaluation will lead to strategy unfolding. Do something, learn from it, then do something better.
By the way, if you’ve refined your vision and built a strong culture, your people will take the initiative to make your tactics and strategy succeed. Culture builds belief, belief determines behavior and behavior drives results. These are foundational activities and they take time, but the payoff is huge. Most of your competitors won’t do it, so get started.
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