Six Tactics for Effectively Cascading Your Strategic Plan

What is Cascading and Why Is It Important? For the purpose of this blog, cascading means driving your strategic plan throughout your organization for effective implementation. And here’s why cascading is important: ● 90% of companies have a strategy but fail to execute/operationalize it. ● 95% of employees, on average, are unaware of or do not understand their company's strategy. Coincidence? Maybe. But I suspect these statistics are connected... Even the most well-developed strategy will sit unimplemented if it's not effectively cascaded throughout an organization. One leader - one team in an organization - cannot and should not create or implement a strategic plan in a vacuum. Successful implementation is dependent on many contributors, and leaders must ensure every contributor knows exactly what is expected of them to help move the plan forward.

Six Tactics for Effectively Cascading Your Strategic Plan 1 - Communicate the core components of your plan with everyone. The core components of your plan include your Vision, Mission, Values (+ associated behaviors), Strategic Priorities, and Organizational Goals. Sharing these will orient your team to the overall direction of the organization. One-way communication is fine to start, but to ensure understanding, improve alignment, and effectively address concerns, do this in 1:1s or small groups. 2 - Align the purposes of each organizational department/team to your strategic plan. Meet with the leader of each team in your organization and explain how they fit into the organizational strategy. Ask them to share how they see they fit within implementation. Have a conversation about the team’s purpose in the organization and how the team will help drive forward the strategy. 3 - Coach leaders to set goals for their teams. Restate your organizational goals with each leader and discuss setting SMART goals. Guide leaders to develop 1-3 team goals with supporting action plans that will support one or more of the organization's strategic priorities.

4 - Coach leaders on fostering buy-in with their department/sub-team. Discuss the importance of sharing the team’s purpose with and providing clear delegation to each team member. Make sure leaders know who will support them throughout implementation. 5 - Track + report performance to goals + actions at all levels. Determine how all levels of the organization will track their operational goals that support the strategic plan. Set a cadence to meet with leaders to review goal progress and reporting. We recommend ongoing tracking alongside monthly and quarterly reporting to be most effective. 6 - Reprioritize business operations. Oftentimes current-state business operations are a function of “business as usual.” Once you’ve got a new strategic plan with new/renewed strategic priorities, it’s important to realign operations with your strategic direction. Prioritize items/activities that will drive you toward your plan. Deprioritize other items/activities. Eliminate items/activities that detract from achieving your plan.

Next Steps: Make a Plan Define who needs to know about your strategic plan. For each stakeholder/group of stakeholders, consider:

• What (and in how much detail) does each stakeholder/group need to fully understand?
• What 1-way communication to provide (stand-up, email, posters, etc.)
• What 2-way communication to provide (1:1s, small groups, Q+A, etc.) Make a specific plan, with actions and deadlines. Get to work, be consistent, be transparent. Happy cascading. :)

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