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Sometimes we need more than a big picture vision to guide the actions of a company. A powerful mission and lofty goals may provide direction for an organization but do little to clarify the everyday tasks needed to get you there. 

An organizational strategy is a plan that helps bridge the gap between a company’s vision and actual work. It is a dynamic, long-term plan that aligns the actions of a company and specifies how your business will allocate resources (money, labor, and inventory) to support infrastructure, production, marketing,  and other business activities.

An Effectively Devised Organization Strategy Would Allow a Company to:

Set Direction and Priorities

Without clear direction, a business can continue to do many tasks without achieving any meaningful change. An organizational strategy provides your business with priorities. It defines success and shows you what activities you should execute first in order to move your business toward your eventual goal.

Align Teams and Departments

One of the most difficult things to achieve in any business is getting teams and departments to work towards a common goal. Without an organizational strategy that’s nearly impossible. When you set an overarching strategy — even if it’s board, it gives employees something to get behind and creates alignment within and among departments.

Simplifies Decision Making

One of the most difficult things to achieve in any business is getting teams and departments to work towards a common goal. Without an organizational strategy, that’s nearly impossible. When you set an overarching strategy — even if it’s broad, it gives employees something to get behind and creates alignment within and among departments.

A clear organizational strategy allows you to make decisions that are in line with achieving your goals. It helps reduce choices and provides a way to assess different options more accurately. 

Allows Adaptability 

A focused organizational strategy allows teams to be more nimble and adapt to obstacles much better. It continually measures the distance between where you currently are and what your eventual goal is. It allows you to take corrective measures when certain aspects of your business are going off track. 

Three Levels of Strategy:

An organization should base every decision it makes on its overall strategy. If the strategy is poorly chosen or formulated, it has cascading effects on the effectiveness of employees in pretty much every department within the organization. There are three levels of strategy that exist in every organization.

Corporate-Level Strategy 

Corporate strategy deals with the big picture questions like what business an organization should be involved in, how to gain competitive advantages in an industry, and how to establish the optimal set of business practices.

Functional-Level Strategy

A functional-level strategy aims at improving the internal operations of a company. It is concerned with the efficiencies within a department and usually consists of several sub-strategies related to each department like, ‘Marketing Strategy’, ‘Human Resource Strategy’ or ‘R&D Strategy’. The goal is to align these strategies as much as possible with the greater corporate strategy.

Business-Level Strategy

Broadly speaking, a business-level strategy answers the ‘how do we’ questions of an organization. In order to answer these questions, it is important to first have a good understanding of a business and its external environment. Business-level strategy is aimed at gaining a competitive advantage by offering true value for customers to gain sustainable and inimitable competitive advantages within the competitive landscape.

The Pyramid of Clarity

The Pyramid of Clarity is a strategic thinking tool developed by Asana. It is used as a framework to connect everyday tasks to strategic objectives. Everyone in the organization can now understand how and what they are doing ladders up to the company’s vision. It helps teams stay on the same page, build confidence in strategy and execution, and help individuals make decisions that are in line with the big picture.

Every task is connected to a project, which is part of a portfolio, which is connected to a goal that supports the company’s vision. 

The Pyramid of Clarity can serve as a guiding light that helps teams decide what to work on every single day. Team members use it to prioritize tasks that help achieve their Key Result Areas which in turn helps achieve annual objectives which ultimately help achieve a company’s mission. 

Strategy Mapping 

A strategy map is a visual representation of an organization’s overall objectives and how they relate to one another. It is a powerful strategic planning tool that showcases the entire strategy of an organization in one place. It illustrates the cause and effect relationship between the components of an organizational strategy.

A strategy map forces the organization to think about how the various functions interact with and support each other and therefore results in alignment around the strategy, which makes for much easier implementation and execution.

A typical strategy map organizes objectives or perspectives into four categories, including:

• Finance
• Customer
• Internal Processes
• People/Learning & Growth

The first two perspectives deal with the ‘what we are getting’ questions while the latter two are more about ‘what we are doing’. A strategy map is read from the bottom up because what you do directly affects what you get.

Finance

It’s standard to use two measures of financial strategy: revenue growth and productivity. It could be a broad goal of increasing shareholder value or a more specific one of acquiring a certain number of new customers. You can then work backward to build your strategy with this final focus in mind.

Customer

The customer value proposition should be at the core of your strategy. By focusing on what your customer’s needs are, you can build those values into the earlier stages of the strategy map. Companies usually focus on achieving one of these three customer value propositions.

• Product leadership
• Customer intimacy
• Operational excellence

Processes 

After deciding on your value proposition you now have a clearer idea of what you need to do to get there. You can then develop a better understanding of the work that needs to be done and the number of team members you need to do it.

Learning and Growth

This is the foundation of the strategy. It includes the organization’s culture, technology, and employee knowledge and competencies needed to support the organization’s strategy.

For an in-depth guide on how to plan and execute a strategy map, check out our previous blog post here.

Tell Us About  Your Experience with Organizational Strategy

A sound organizational strategy is important to have across all sizes of companies, operating in all industries. It begins with the big picture you want to achieve and then the steps you need to take.  Have you had experience planning and executing an organizational strategy? Tell us some of your biggest learnings in the comments below.

2020 may have had other plans for all your goals, but a new year brings with it a blank slate and a chance to start afresh. As we re-center and look ahead, it’s important to set achievable and detailed plans to guide our new year goal setting process.

Setting lofty new year goals doesn’t mean much if you don’t have a way to get there. You need to find a way to create meaningful goals to focus your intentions. This ensures your team stays motivated throughout the year and doesn’t abandon their goals after a few weeks.

If goals are your rudder that points you in the direction you want to go, plans and processes are the oars that will actually get you there. Understanding the importance of goals and the techniques involved in setting achievable goals paves the way for success.

What is Goal Setting?

Goals can never be created in isolation, the context in which they are set and the plans around achieving them are what makes any goal useful. You can use goal setting techniques to give your organization long-term vision and short-term motivation. Concise goals allow your teams to focus on their acquisition of knowledge and helps them organize their time and resources in a more streamlined manner. 

5 Principles of Successful Goal Setting

Commitment: Commitment refers to the degree to which an organization is attached to a goal. You need to set goals that align with your core values, the closer the goals are to your core values the more focused they will be on achieving them. When teams are less committed to goals- particularly more challenging ones, there is a higher chance of them giving up. If your team is strongly committed to your goals they are more likely to do what needs to be done to accomplish them. 

Clarity: When a goal is vague it has very little utility. The most important task is to set precise and unambiguous goals that can be measured. Teams need to communicate with each other in order to achieve goals, so being able to talk about them in accurate terms allows them to better align themselves and carry out tasks more efficiently. 

Challenge: It’s important to set goals that are challenging yet attainable. Challenging goals can increase self-satisfaction and help teams develop new skills to achieve them. If a goal is unreasonably lofty then teams will develop a feeling of dissatisfaction and frustration when they are not achieved. 

Complexity: Finding the optimal level of complexity of your goals can be a challenge. Special efforts should be made to break down complex problems into smaller, more manageable tasks. Highly complex goals can become overwhelming for people. For such goals, people need to be provided sufficient time to work toward the goal, improve performance, practice, or learn what is necessary for success.

Feedback: Goal setting is more effective in the presence of immediate feedback. It allows teams to assess the degree to which their goals are being achieved and how they are progressing.

How to Get Teams to Set and Achieve Goals

Small Steps: Goals need to be broken down into actionable plans. The board, long-term vision should be laid out into attainable steps along the way.

Put Things Down: Writing down your goals helps you commit them to memory. Post them in a visible location to keep them top of mind. You can use online collaborative tools like Creately where team members can get together and review these goals, and add inputs and suggestions whenever they feel necessary.

Offer Incentives: Devising the right incentive structure can greatly promote dedication and commitment to achieving their new year goals.  The right incentives for each team will vary according to your team dynamic. Some teams work better when there is competition amongst members, other work better when the incentives promote cooperation.

Reward Success: A little bit of praise can go a long way. Recognizing and praising success is one of the best ways to reward a job well done. It’s best to do it amongst peers and can add a sense of validation to the efforts put in by team members.

Set New Goals Together: Getting teams together and setting goals as a collective is a great way to add a sense of ownership to the task at hand.

How Visual Tools Can Help

Visual goal-setting tools are a great way to formalize the goals for the coming year and serve as a common resource that teams can easily access and refer to.

SMART Goals

This tool allows you to structure your thinking and put achievable yet challenging goals in place. You can use this tool in the new year goal setting process. It allows you to finely and accurately define your goals and create concrete plans to accomplish them.

Specific: More clearly defined goals have a better chance of being accomplished. For a goal to be specific consider the 5 ‘W’ questions:

Who: Who is involved in this goal?

What: What do I want to accomplish?

Where: Where is this goal to be achieved?

When: When do I want to achieve this goal?

Why: Why do I want to achieve this goal?

Measurable: How do you measure your success once you have accomplished your goal? Use this tool to list down how you will measure progress and how you will know once your goal is achieved. 

Achievable: Answer tough questions like do you have the expertise, time, money, and resources to achieve this goal?

Relevant: A goal should relate to the situation you are trying to address. It’s important to consider whether achieving this goal contributes to significant business growth?

Timely: Your goals should have deadlines and they should be realistic. This will create urgency and energize you to get the work done without procrastinating.

Action Plans

Using an action plan allows teams to break down long-term goals into specific steps that need to be accomplished along the way. The template provides a visual representation of the new year goal setting process what needs to be accomplished. It lists important dates that need to be kept in mind and highlights what each team member’s responsibility is.

Objectives and Key Results 

Once the team goals are decided, the objective and key results templates help assign individual members with specific tasks. This ensures clarity and avoids duplication of work.

Visual Task Management

Goal setting is just the beginning. Organisational success depends largely on how effectively teams can organize themselves to execute the goals they have set for themselves. Using visual task management tools like Asna and Favro helps you keep track of the various aspects of your project and serve as a central hub where teams can track progress, identify delays, note dependencies, and much more.

Kanban Boards

Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. It enables you to optimise your workflow and can promote focus, boost visibility, and increase productivity. Visual details are displayed in a single place on a Kanban board, minimizing the time spent tracking down progress reports or sitting in status update meetings.

Scrum Boards

Scrum boards are a simple visualisation tool that helps teams plan and execute short, focused tasks that align with larger goals. It provides a daily recap of the status of individual tasks, the progress made and helps identify blockers that are in the way.

Gantt Charts

Gantt charts are a project management tool that teams can use to track the progress of a project and the work that is scheduled to be done on a specific day over the lifetime of the project. It can also help you view the start and end dates of a project in one simple Gantt Chart. It helps teams prioritize tasks and identify which tasks may be holding up others if not completed on time.

Have More Tips on How to Set Goals for the New Year?

Goal setting is both an art and a science. The key is to find techniques that work for your individual teams. You need to constantly track, adjust, and make improvements to the way you set and address your goals. This is what will keep your teams focused and motivated. If you have any goal setting tips that have worked for your team or plans on how you are going to implement them in the future, please let us know in the comments below.