Send in reinforcements
To support and reinforce a strategic plan, you need good communication from the top of the organization. Your communication needs to be clear, frequent and constantly focused on the key points of your strategy.
Flood says communication can’t be a one-time event. Just because you announce a strategy and identify the key areas on which your managers and employees need to focus doesn’t mean the message is going to stick in the minds of everyone throughout the company.
“You must realize that communication needs to be reinforced constantly,” Flood says. “I think a lot of business leaders, myself included, have concluded that declaring it once means that employees will absorb it. That is something that allows you to delude yourself.”
You need to cascade the strategic message through all layers of your organization, so that each level is hearing the message from the level directly above. That allows the message to become more personal to each employee and will give you and your managers a better opportunity to show each employee how a single individual’s job helps to further the strategy as a whole.
As the leader of the company, it’s your job to figure out what employees need to know about the company’s strategy, how to best relate the company’s overarching goals to each person’s 9-to-5 job.
“Communication breaks down not because employees can’t understand it; it’s that the leader doesn’t understand the employee’s daily life,” Flood says. “When we declare a goal, employees really do want to support it. But the reality is that they finish the call, they hear the message and the declaration, and they go back to their daily business. That’s why the constant communication is helpful, because combined with subsetting goals to leaders throughout the organization, that more directly leads the employees so that you can make sure all of your employees understand what the goal is.”
As part of the cascading communication and engaging managers at each level of the company, Flood and his senior leadership team divide the overall company goals into subsets, so each manager in each department knows exactly what the department needs to accomplish for Logicalis to hit its overall targets.
It’s part of the strategic planning process. As the old cliché goes, you want the right hand to know what the left hand is doing throughout your organization. Flood makes it happen by condensing the strategic plan down to department-specific key points and making those bullet points a part of his ongoing communication.
“You have to take the strategic plan and subset the goals of the company, so that you make sure that you have leaders within the company who are goaled appropriately and understand what that subset mission is,” Flood says.
“That’s why we take a condensed version of our overall strategic plan, condense it down to the high points and the most relevant points, and put it in a PowerPoint presentation on our online employee portal. That way, all employees can see it. In addition, I do a voiceover, bringing the employees slide by slide through our thought processes on the overall market, our challenges, who and what we see as our disrupters to the current environment. They hear all of that directly from the CEO.”
