The Six Most Acknowledged Strategy Execution Problems
The first step in finding the biggest strategy execution problem is identifying the most important problems that are acknowledged already. To this end, I went through all the lists of strategy execution problems and solutions that I have found in publications over the past decades and narrowed them down to the most important ones. This led to the following six key problems.
Ineffective communication. The most mentioned problem in strategy execution is bad communication. This means communication that is too vague, too late, too early, too much, too little, to the wrong people, or otherwise ineffective. Some even go as far as saying that successful strategy is all about communication. While this is a substantial exaggeration, ineffective communication is an important inhibitor.
Ineffective alignment. Bad strategy execution is also often seen as a misalignment problem. Alignment refers to achieving coherence and consistency between different levels of strategy: corporate strategy, business strategy, functional strategy and operational strategy. When there is misalignment, the overarching corporate strategy gets diluted at lower levels, resulting in silo behavior and not everyone being on the same page.
Ineffective change management. Strategy usually involves a lot of changes. Accordingly, managing change is an important aspect of strategy execution. Problems in this area include resistance, lack of commitment, no buy-in, and keeping up appearances. These are largely emotional and mindset problems, resulting from not having involved and engaged people enough throughout the organization during strategy generation and execution.
Ineffective performance management. As they say, what gets measured, gets managed, and what gets managed gets done. Therefore, performance management is a key ingredient of successful strategy execution. If done ineffectively, this leads to problems such as unclear or missing objectives and targets, wrong use of measures and performance indicators (KPIs), failing resource allocation, or counterproductive incentives.
Ineffective project management. Good strategy execution requires systematic follow-up and project management. The lack thereof is a fifth key problem in strategy execution. It comes with missing or conflicting priorities, unclear responsibilities, exceeded budgets, bad time management, delays, and poor or missing leadership at various levels in the organization.
Ineffective strategy. Not a pure strategy execution problem, but one that is often hindering effective strategy execution: having an unclear, unfitting, unconvincing, uninspiring, non-actionable or otherwise ineffective strategy. Effective strategy execution asks for a strategy that is executable in the first place, without that, failure is built in before the execution even starts.
