How Are You Communicating Strategy Within Your Business?

Enhancing communication skills, particularly offering transparency in conducting business, is a critical need coaching can help address. Managers who coach individuals and teams around developing clear, dependable communication protocols and behaviors encourage broad understanding and engagement in business strategy and help align individual performance with business performance. Gina Abuti’s post here illustrates a common problem in organizational life and how to attack it.

Gina Abudi, MBA
Guest blogger, Gina Abudi, has over 20 years of consulting experience in the areas of strategic development, project and process management, and management and leadership development. Gina speaks on a variety of management topics and is co-author of the CIG to Best Practices for Small Businesses (October, 2011) and contributing author to Gantthead’s Project Pain Reliever (July, 2011). She has also written a number of white papers and articles on various management and project management issues. Gina serves as President of the PMI* Massachusetts Bay Chapter Board of Directors and has served on the Project Management Institute’s Global Corporate Council as Chair of the Leadership Team prior to that. Gina has been honored as one of the Power 50 from PMI* – one of  the 50 most influential executives in project management, working to move the profession forward. She is Co-Chair of the NEHRA Program Committee. Visit Gina, and read her articles and papers on: http://www.GinaAbudi.com.

If you want strategic plans implemented, communicate your strategy to employees. Too often, I hear from CEOs and other executives that they can’t get their employees to implement the strategy. When we dive into the discussion further, however, it becomes apparent that the employees don’t even know what the strategy is, let alone how to implement it! The problem lies in poor, or no, communication.

Too often, strategy planning happens in a bubble. The top executives in the organization, along with members of the Boards of Directors, discuss and set strategy for the organization. This frequently leads to projects being asigned to employees; but often those assigned to implement have no idea that they are being tasked with moving forward the organization’s strategy.

If you want strategy implemented successfully, you need to share with your employees your strategy for the business and how they can help ensure that the strategy is a success. Employees perform better when they know the purpose of what they are doing. It helps when employees understand how all the pieces fit together and how they are part of it. What a great way to engage your employees!

Get started today. Call an “all hands meeting” to talk about the organization’s strategy and how employees can help contribute to the success of that strategy. When you assign strategic projects, explain how the project fits into the organization’s strategy. The best organizations take it a step further and involve employes in planning and setting strategy for the business.

You might even use any of the following for discussing strategic plans with employees:

• An intranet portal site
• Company newsletter
• Small group discussions with executives of the organization

Your thoughts? How might you best share strategic plans with your staff? If you’re an employee, how would you like this information shared with you?

If you found this post helpful, check out “About the Book” on this blog, and order yourself a copy of “What could happen if you do nothing?” A manager’s handbook for coaching conversations.