I ain’t Martin Luther King. I don’t need a dream. I have a plan. — Spike Lee

You can hatch a lot of great ideas, but if you don’t undertake strategic planning, they’ll never materialize. You can’t simply store awesome ideas in your brain and expect to successfully execute those ideas.

Translation: You Every startup or scaleup needs to craft a plan for success.

Why a Plan Matters

This logic certainly applies to your business strategy. Therefore, you must create a roadmap to effectively achieve your business growth goals. This roadmap can’t live in your head. Rather, it must be a living, breathing document that you can adjust as needed.

Furthermore, our strategy guide is designed to equip you with the knowledge and tools to help you develop a strategic growth plan that will deliver revenue growth results for your business.

This strategic planning guidebook covers:

1. Strategic Planning Process 
2. Current State Analysis
3. Goal Setting 
4. Business Growth Strategies
5. Strategy Execution Plan
6. Strategic Execution Resources
7. Strategic Roadmap 
8. Strategy Execution

Business growth requires a strategic growth plan. If you take your company’s success seriously, you’ll invest the time and resources needed to develop a strategic execution roadmap. Your growth strategy, whether your business is in the launch or scale stage, will focus your resources on intended goals and ensure your efforts deliver precise results.

So, why do you need a strategic growth plan? Here are three examples:

• You wouldn’t plan a journey without some kind of itinerary.
• No one should run a meeting without an agenda.
• You wouldn’t choose a college curriculum without consulting an academic advisor about your career objectives.

Therefore, why would you attempt to launch or scale a business without a proper strategy? To put it bluntly, that would be foolish.

If you need a push toward coming up with a business strategy, consider this: About 70% of businesses that survive for five years follow a strategic business plan, according to BusinessDasher. Don’t you want your business to be around for at least five years?

Despite your best intentions, leading your company through business decisions and operations based on gut feelings isn’t sustainable. You can’t launch or scale a company successfully when you’re flying by the seat of your pants or you’re looking through a lens of “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” No matter how talented you may be, no matter your brilliance in leadership, this style will only result in throwing more time, resources, people, and money at growing challenges — without resolution.

In the absence of a strategy, marketing, sales, and operational activities lead to:

• Budget overruns 
• Ambiguous ROI
• Inability to connect efforts to outcomes
• Reactive, random activity rather than intentional and proactive action
• Misalignment among marketing, sales, and operations
• Inefficient use of resources, including time, money, and human capital
• Lack of clarity for team members about the path forward

By contrast, a strategic growth plan and strategic execution roadmap provide a clearer, simpler path to success. The plan ensures all of your business growth activities are carried out with intention, purpose, and effectiveness so you can achieve your goals.

To develop a growth strategy, you must stick to a process and take precise steps to flesh out the strategy. No one business plan will look like another. But the steps necessary for creating your growth roadmap should follow the path outlined here.

The Practical Value of Strategic Planning

Strategic planning establishes a vision and common goals for your business that everyone can understand. It carves a path for achieving those goals with key strategic initiatives, and the tactical and process-driven activities to accomplish your overall strategy. And it clarifies the business case to invest time and resources into those activities to carry out the goal-delivering strategies.

A goal-focused strategic growth plan provides awareness, intentionality, priority, and measurable direction to get your business from where it is today to where you want it to be. It’s time well-invested so that you know where you’re going, you have a clear path to get there, you can measure progress along the way, and you can recognize when you’ve arrived. 

Without a strategic growth plan, a business runs the risk of stumbling. Consequently, too many entrepreneurs hop on the first strategy they devise as they rush to get their product or service to market. That’s no way to succeed in business.

Benefits of a strategic growth plan include:

• Increased ROI
• Improved marketing and sales campaigns
• Streamlined operations
• Flexibility to pivot when needed
• Quick identification of unproductive efforts
• Ability to rapidly address challenges

Strategic planning is an ongoing process, so it needs to be scalable and repeatable. Those requirements are best achieved with a framework for a strategic growth plan.

Your strategic planning framework should provide a reliable structure and allow flexibility. Conversely, plan that’s too rigid might not leave room for flexibility. Meanwhile, a framework that’s too high-level or flimsy may not provide the structure needed to make your strategic plan actionable and accountable. 

And while there are countless strategic growth plan templates out there, every business should customize a strategy based on its assets, resources, challenges, market, and other factors. Additionally, as you develop your strategic growth plan, do so in a way that lets everyone in your organization easily understand it, apply best practices to support it, and visualize the benefits of it.

Rely on a Strategic Investment in Time and Resources

You’re investing time, money, focus, and other resources to operate and grow your business. But are you getting the most value from those investments? Do you see the results from those investments?

It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind of working in the business instead of on the business. But it’s a costly mistake to neglect or put off developing a strategy at any stage in your business. Burning up resources without an intentional plan is like buying lottery tickets and hoping, against the horrible odds, that you’ll become a millionaire.

Also, a strategic growth plan isn’t something you can create and then shelve. Company growth, and the framework you design to guide it, are constantly subject to change. A strategy that you developed two years ago may no longer be relevant in today’s market.

But those resources and that time are valuable. You shouldn’t risk wasting those efforts on the wrong path forward. Similarly, avoid developing a static plan, one that won’t be agile. Instead, develop a set of guidelines to serve as a guidepost for accountability and pinpoint a sharp focus on your business goals. 

And when it comes to time, spend a considerable amount of it going over your business strategy. Many business leaders devote too little time to reviewing strategy. How can your strategy succeed if you’re not dedicating enough time to it?

Recognizing the importance of strategic planning is the first step toward preparing for business growth. The next step is knowing where to start and how to begin improving or developing yours. It shouldn’t be complicated. But it does need to be collaborative.

Start with a Framework, Stakeholders, and Facilitation for Your Strategic Planning Process

To develop a new strategic growth plan or rework an existing plan, begin with a few fundamentals. Whether you’re in startup mode or are an established brand pivoting in today’s market, these first steps can guide the design of your growth strategy.

The Goal Pyramid is a great tool to help you visualize this first step in the process. It’s a framework that allows you to address planning at a company level, a departmental level, and an individual level.

The Goal Pyramid Framework: Simplicity and Order

If you’re unfamiliar with the Goal Pyramid model, here’s how it works.  

GOAL: The Goal Pyramid framework starts with one SMART goal. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

STRATEGY: Next comes the strategy layer, featuring strategies that work together to reach the goal.

EXECUTION: Below this is the execution layer, with activities (one-time tactics and ongoing processes) that fulfill the strategies geared toward achieving the goal.

RESOURCES: Finally, the resources layer identifies the people and tools needed to execute the tactics and processes that fulfill the goal-delivering strategies.

Always start at the top of the pyramid and work your way down to ensure your resources, execution, and strategies are goal-oriented. “Setting business goals is a best practice for a reason — goals help drive businesses in the right direction,” says Asana, a producer of project management software.

The Stakeholders: Who Should Be Involved?

Don’t overlook including key stakeholders in your strategic planning process. These stakeholders should not only be company leaders and decision-makers but also key influencers, thought leaders, and future leaders.

Of course, it’s important to have a lot of voices in the room. But there is a limit. If you include too many people, the process can become as messy as a youngster’s face after eating ice cream.

Ask these questions to identify key stakeholders:

• Does the stakeholder play a critical role in the success of your business?
• Can you clearly identify the contributions of the stakeholder?
• Is the stakeholder someone who can be easily replaced?
• Is the value that the stakeholder brings duplicated by another stakeholder?

Use the answers to narrow the pool of stakeholders to those who are critical to development of a strategic growth plan. Choose only those who play key roles in your company’s growth. These people will offer valuable insights and unique perspectives rooted in experience based on their expertise, position in the company, responsibilities, and leadership.

Avoid picking contributors based on feelings or personal connections. Also, consider that sensitive materials may be discussed. Discretion and trustworthiness are vital in this situation.

Selecting a Facilitator

Identify a facilitator who can lead your strategic planning process. The facilitator might be someone from your team or an outside consultant. The right person should have:

• Experience in facilitating strategic planning
• Familiarity with the framework and process you’re using
• Superb conflict resolution and communication skills

If you do select a facilitator from your team, ensure that they don’t influence the direction of the process based on their interests, their existing relationships with stakeholders, or their position in the company.

You need to understand where you are now before you can determine how to get to where you want to be. A current state analysis helps determine your baseline.

Create a Foundation Based on a Current State Analysis

Before you build anything intended to serve long-term objectives, you first must build a solid foundation, just as you should build a house with a solid foundation.

The Importance of a Solid Foundation

A strategic growth plan will succeed only if the foundational pillars are rooted in facts, metrics, and actionable intelligence. A great start is taking a snapshot — a Polaroid, if you will — of current conditions and company analysis. This consists of four exercises.

Your business plan need not be lengthy or detailed, but it should at least include:

• Product or service solution (who, what, and why)
• Operational structure (people, processes, and tools)
• Marketing plan (market, message, and media)
• Financial projections (sales, costs, and profits)
• Business structure (legal, funding, and assets)

The elements of a business plan are interwoven and should evolve over time as your business changes. Although your business may have initially concentrated on one concept, your business might have shifted over time to include other ideas, solutions, and markets. Your operations, organizational structure, and even overall business structure may have changed. Your marketing and financial models probably were updated as you learned more about what worked and what didn’t work.

“Think of a business plan as a GPS to get your business going,” the U.S. Small Business Administration advises. “A good business plan guides you through each stage of starting and managing your business. You’ll use your business plan like a GPS for how to structure, run, and grow your new business. It’s a way to think through and detail all the key elements of how your business will run.”

Revisit and update your business plan to reflect your current state position as an essential part of your strategic growth plan.

What if you lack a business plan? Create one before you dive into strategic planning. To nudge you in that direction, take a look at this data:

A business plan helps a company attract 133% more investment capital, boosts the odds of growth by 30%, and grows 85% faster than a business without a business plan.

Your business exists in a huge ecosystem — not in a vacuum — which means you need to research and adjust market factors that influence your success. The competitive landscape affects your opportunity to capture market share. And changes in PEST factors can alter the evolution of your business and should be taken into account when assembling your strategic plan.

It’s easier to connect with people when they understand not only what you do but why you do it. In any business today, customers probably won’t buy from you if you don’t know your why. If you clearly state your beliefs and share them as part of your culture, vision, and mission, you’ll attract others who understand and agree with your beliefs. These values equally influence development of your strategic plan.

A SWOT analysis evaluates your:

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

Some items may fall into a few categories, as a strength can also be an opportunity or a threat. A weakness can sometimes reflect an opportunity that hasn’t been seized. Documenting these internal and external influences on your business helps identify trends and prioritize goals for your strategic growth plan.

Business.com notes that a SWOT analysis is merely a starting point, not an actionable plan. “Don’t confuse SWOT for strategy,” says executive and leadership coach Greg Githens.

Startup or Scaleup?

There’s an important distinction to make during this stage of developing your company strategy. With all of your metrics, trends, and analytics in mind, you must determine whether you’re in the startup or scaleup stage.

Every strategic planning decision you make should be aligned with your actual business stage — not your aspirational business stage. Think of it like this: A gymnast might aspire to win an Olympic medal, but they first must focus on practicing and competing.

Startup Defined

Any business still in the formative and market-validation phase (also known as the “product-market fit” phase) is typically referred to as a startup. A startup should be on its way to its first $1 million in annual revenue. Because they’re relatively new, startups must establish themselves as legitimate contenders in the market, introduce their offerings to early stage customers, educate people about new innovations, and secure investments for their go-to-market launch.

Scaleup Defined

When a business has proven its product-market fit, has started selling to mainstream markets, and has surpassed $1 million in annual revenue, it usually can be categorized as a scaleup. A scaleup might be ready to adopt new branding, take advantage of strategic partnership or channel sales opportunities, launch new products or services, or expand into new territories. Scaleups may hit a plateau at some point and seek new strategies to ensure sustainable, scalable revenue growth.

Investing the time to create a current state analysis results in logical thoughts that you can apply to developing your goals, strategies, execution, and resources in the strategic planning process.

“Understanding the process, collecting data, assessing the current state vs. future state, defining the problem, and identifying the right solution — it sounds like a lot,” says Mastercard Data & Services. “However, a current state [analysis] is a worthy exercise that can help you achieve your organizational goals.”

Setting goals for your company might be the most critical step in the strategic growth planning process. Without clear, attainable objectives ahead, your business will operate without any trajectory. As a result, companies that lose sight of their goals risk becoming, losing market share, and eventually failing.

Why Goals Are Essential

“Establishing company goals is a common business practice — and for good reason,” according to Asana. “Setting clear business goals influences motivation and increases performance. Whether you work at a small business, large enterprise company, or as an individual, you are more likely to succeed with strong business goals.”

Set Goals the SMART Way

Whether you’re developing a strategic launch plan or strategic growth plan, you must be realistic, intentional, and authentic about setting goals. Everything you do within your business needs to support these goals. Keep in mind that there’s more to effective goal setting than jotting down a few ideas or figuring out how to hit your next revenue target.

Elements of a SMART Goal

A SMART goal should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable*
• Relevant*
• Time-bound

*Sometimes, the “A” is achievable, and the “R” is realistic. There may be other slight variations on the words used, but the five key concepts and characteristics are the same.

To achieve the best results, be specific. Instead of stating that your goal is to “grow our business,” you might state, “Grow our revenue by at least 15% with a 22% gross profit margin and an 80% year-over-year client retention rate by the end of the fiscal year to establish our company as an emerging leader in the widget automation market.”

Once you’ve developed your goal, apply the SMART goal to your statement to see whether your goal is:

• Specific: Is it well-defined and unique enough to provide a distinct description?
• Measurable: Can you determine progress toward achieving the goal?
• Attainable: Is the goal something that can realistically be accomplished?
• Relevant: Will accomplishing this goal push your business closer to your vision?
• Time-bound: Is there an end date aimed at creating urgency and determining success?

SMART Goals in Action

SMART goals provide the foundation for effective strategic planning. Your SMART goal sits alone at the top of the Goal Pyramid. It’s important to only create one SMART goal per Goal Pyramid. If you have more than one goal (and you probably will), build a different pyramid for each goal. This way, every strategy, every execution tactic or process, and every resource will naturally be goal-focused.

Be sure to create a manageable number of active Goal Pyramids. So, rather than shooting for 10 goals, you might target three goals. After all, scoring three goals can win a soccer match, right? As you complete a goal, build another pyramid and keep the process moving along.

Too often, overambition results in poor execution or outright failure. If you create effective SMART goals, achieving just one will demonstrate positive results, while achieving three can give a tremendous boost to your business. As your business evolves with the achievement of each SMART goal-focused pyramid, so will subsequent goals.

A number of SMART templates are available, including this template from HubSpot.

Goals without strategies are just aspirations without action. The first step to transforming an objective into an attainable outcome involves coming up with a series of growth strategies.

Develop Growth Strategies to Reach Your Goals

With clearly defined goals and objectives in hand, it’s time to map out the steps required to meet those objectives. This part of the strategic growth plan involves creating a roadmap.

After you’ve created your goal at the top of the Goal Pyramid, review your SWOT analysis for ideas on how to capitalize on your strengths and opportunities to build strategies that’ll work toward reaching the top-tier goal.

It’s vital during this phase of your strategy development to recognize the stage of your business. Are you a startup seeking product-market fit or a relatively new company yet to achieve your first $1 million in revenue? Or are you an existing brand, ready to position your company for explosive growth and scaling?

Launch Strategy

Some key elements of a successful launch strategy might include:

• Establish go-to-market initiatives
• Validate product-market fit
• Recruit early adopters

Scaleup Strategy

Some key elements of a successful scaleup strategy might include:

• Increase revenue and customer retention
• Improve sales productivity
• Expand into new markets

When you introduce your strategies to your strategic growth plan, keep in mind that there’s a “Goldilocks” number of paths to create. It’s ideal to have more than one to avoid putting all of your goal-achieving hopes into one method or basket. Additionally, it’s equally ideal to avoid having too many strategies in the plan, resulting in a watered-down effort to make progress toward those goals.

Although there’s no magic number of strategies required in the Goal Pyramid, there is a “just right” estimate of three to five to achieve the ideal balance of execution and results. Having three to five paths leading to your key company objectives will enable you to tap into an array of solutions without overextending time and resources.

Here are four tips:

1. Write down strategies that clarify your intent so you can visualize the envisioned path you envision. These representations may include financial, customer, operational, and personnel perspectives.
2. Make your strategy statements actionable, short, and easy to communicate. As a grammatical structure, the most basic strategy statement consists of an action paired with a descriptor to deliver an outcome.
3. Cite a program or plan of action that employs people, processes, and tools to arrive at a result or achieve an objective.
4. Make a list of the necessary projects, activities, and tasks, but include it in the execution layer, not here.

As an example, a strategy might be to “increase client retention.” This states an intent that’s part of a bigger goal, but it’s not a step or detail to reach that goal. Instead, it’s an actionable intent that requires tactics and processes, perhaps in the form of several projects, to reach the desired outcome.

Combined with other strategies like “add new clients,” “grow per-client revenue,” and “develop channel partnerships,” these strategy statements create a big-picture direction for accomplishing a goal.

With your company vision laid out, you can pinpoint the actions and resources required to execute your plan.

Prioritize the Tactics and Processes to Execute Your Strategy

Once you’ve outlined the goal and the path, it’s time to start peppering your strategic growth plan with some verbs. This series of ideas usually involves action steps and projects intended to drive your company toward your SMART goals. 

The execution layer consists of both tactics (one-time events or activities) and processes (ongoing events or activities) that are part of a strategic objective, program, or project. Each strategy in the framework pairs with one or more tactics or processes designed to complete that strategy. The value of the framework in the execution layer is ensuring activities and tasks will help meet your business goals.

Objectives, programs, and projects are defined in the execution layer, with detailed milestones and deliverables cited for carrying out the strategy. Documentation of the execution focuses on:

• Managing people
• Following processes
• Communicating progress, issues, and resolution

The more detail you provide about delivering on execution, the easier it’ll be to measure and manage outcomes.

Be clear, with a common understanding of each tactic or process, so that there’s no misunderstanding about expectations and deliverables. Clarity helps stakeholders understand the importance of each activity, enabling resource allocation for your execution plan. Detail also provides transparency for stakeholders and team members, and supports better governance, leadership, and management in the execution phase.

Each milestone and deliverable documented in the execution layer can be attached to a timeline, assigned resources and budget, and measured.

As a part of your strategic planning process, the execution layer creates organizational buy-in. And that’s important, as many employees don’t even understand their company’s own strategy. If your employees don’t grasp the strategy, then how can they help execute it?

Execution also pairs team members with responsibilities based on knowledge, skills, and abilities. It also serves as an easy-to-use tool at the leadership level for accountability, measurement, and progress. Meanwhile, regular communication throughout your reporting structure provides real-time transparency, learnings, and insights to reduce risks and improve outcomes.

“The best strategy is useless without people to execute it,” former Walmart CEO Mike Duke reminds us.

Before you press the “play” button on your business growth plan, you’ll need to assess existing and strategic execution resources. Trying to execute a plan without adequate resources will only stall your efforts. It’s like trying to start a car that’s got a dead battery.

Determine the Resources Required to Effectively Execute Your Plan

Working down the Goal Pyramid, the next step involves determining required resources. With your goals, strategies, and execution plans in place, now’s the time to assemble the tools needed to put these plans into motion.

Again, imagine the strategic growth plan is your roadmap to success, much like the maps that explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark relied on during their American expedition in the early 1800s. If the goal is the destination on your roadmap, the strategy is the road, the execution plan is the vehicle, and the execution resources are the fuel.

In the Goal Pyramid framework, the resources layer appears at the bottom. It becomes a consideration only after you’ve created a goal, developed one or more strategies to achieve your goal, and mapped an execution plan to deliver on your strategies. By knowing what you want and how to get there, you can determine whether you already have the resources you need to succeed or if you should add resources.

Key Questions to Assess Available Resources

Here are some key questions for assessing your available resources:

• Are any of your team members armed with the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to successfully execute?
• Do those people have the capacity to be responsible for execution?
• Are you equipped with the right tools to complete the execution activities and tasks?
• Is it cost-effective to use internal resources for these activities and tasks?

Answering these and other questions helps determine your resource needs. Following the Goal Pyramid framework to create your strategic plan builds a well-informed business case for making decisions about allocating resources.

Never Start at the Bottom of the Pyramid

In a culture with short attention spans and an attraction to what we don’t have, instead of what we do have, it’s important that resources are the final part of your strategic planning process.

People often fool themselves into thinking they can shortcut their way to success “if we only had that salesperson” or “if we buy that piece of technology” or “if we create this marketing asset.”

The truth is that no matter how impressive or inspiring a resource may seem, if it doesn’t closely align with the path to your ultimate goal, it’s simply a distraction. It might even be a mistake, wasting time and resources.

“Acquiring and aligning resources for new initiatives allows you to seize opportunities and overcome challenges,” says the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The Goal Pyramid framework offers a top-down approach to ensuring your investments in people, processes, and tools are targeted at achieving your goal. Starting with the “shiny metal objects” may or may not help you get there. By starting at the top and working your way down the framework, you remain goal-focused and stay in sync with each stage of strategic planning.

Here’s the order you should follow for the Goal Pyramid:

1. Figure out the resources required to execute your plan.

2. Start with a SMART goal.

3. Develop one or more strategies to achieve the SMART goal.

4. Document the execution tactics and processes.

Once you and your colleagues have agreed on the blocks of the Goal Pyramid — much like the enormous blocks of the Egyptian pyramids — it’s time to put together your strategic growth plan. From inception until now, every detail has been theoretical. Creating a guide will solidify the plan and enable you to share the roadmap with every contributor in your organization.

Prepare a Strategic Roadmap to Make Your Plan Actionable

Strategies define how you’ll reach your organization’s goals. Plans guide your execution and detail what you’ll do to deliver on the strategies.

All too often, businesses spend time and resources on strategic planning only to generate a document that gets shared, reviewed, praised, and set aside or even tossed in the trash. A strategic plan that’s not carried out is like a child’s unfulfilled holiday-gift wish list. Alternatively, a strategic plan that’s effectively executed is golden when it comes to achieving goals.

According to business software provider Planview, a strategic plan allows a company “to be quick to adapt to changing initiatives and priorities with less disruption, fewer wasted resources, and greater responsiveness. It is the foundation for execution and delivery.”

Commitment to the Plan Starts at the Top

A strategic growth plan can easily flounder if you don’t gain buy-in from stakeholders and leaders. They must be on board to support the time and resources spent on executing the plan. The support of stakeholders and leaders bolsters the team’s confidence and contributions.

Bottom line: Stakeholder commitment helps motivate people in your organization to understand the why.

Companies often “embark on growth strategies by having a consulting firm or an internal strategy team collect data, analyze markets and competitors, and then work with senior leaders on a growth plan, after which people are simply given their marching orders,” the Harvard Business Review points out. “With this approach, managers and teams that were not involved in the creation of the strategy often don’t fully understand it, may not agree with it, or may not have the skills to do what’s needed.”

Of course, successful execution of a strategic plan requires time and resources. The plan will typically contain milestones and deliverables that are outside the day-to-day responsibilities of team members. So, the organization must carve out time for them to work on the business rather than in the business.

By investing in the right resources and rewards, leaders can demonstrate their dedication to realizing goals and working toward an organizational vision.

Create a Visual Representation of Your Plan with Clear Timelines and Responsibilities

To effectively engage people and teams, map out activities and tasks from your strategic growth plan as directives. By creating a map and laying out a timeline, you help everyone visualize the plan’s dependencies, timeframes, and workloads.

Mapping lets you:

• Prioritize activities, milestones, and deliverables
• Align roles and responsibilities with people who are ready to accept them
• Carry out action plans to guide successful execution

Prioritizing the activities of your execution plan sets clear expectations for delivery; enables a focus on high value, urgent tasks, and activities; and identifies requirements for activities to be carried out before others can be executed. A simple “ABC” prioritization can clarify the sequence of execution tactics and processes. 

When figuring out the level of prioritization, consider the benefits and consequences of each activity, as well as constraints and available resources. Prioritization helps maximize time and resources, rather than operating under “biggest fire first” or “first in, first out” approaches that often don’t yield ideal benefits or productivity.

“Good things happen not by managing time but by prioritizing attention,” author and entrepreneur Richie Norton says.

Assigning and Defining Roles and Responsibilities

After prioritizing your strategic execution plan, determine who will take on roles and responsibilities for each activity. One person might embrace a role aimed at completing an activity, while another person might be responsible for on-time, on-budget delivery.

Like prioritization, mapping out roles and responsibilities provides clear expectations and lets team members manage their workloads. It also prevents one person from being overloaded with too many roles or too much responsibility. In the end, accountability for roles and responsibilities creates a strong sense of ownership.

With prioritization and ownership set, prepare your action plan and timeline for tasks, activities, milestones, and deliverables.

To do this, you might employ a Gantt chart, project management software, or strategy execution management software. (A Gantt chart displays activities that need to be done along with a schedule for completing them). Be sure to include required resources, budgets, and costs, as well as KPIs and success metrics.

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As you and your team members take the first steps to execute your strategic growth plan, you must recognize that strategy development and oversight aren’t finished. Your strategy may need to change and or may require extra support or training.

Research shows a majority of organizations are weak on execution. Don’t let your organization be a member of the Weak Execution Club. Instead, aim to be a member of the Strong Execution Club.

What follows are suggestions for successfully executing your strategy.

Manage Your Progress with Accountability and Support

With a strategic roadmap in place, you gain clarity toward achieving goals. While the strategic plan may be complete, managing the work and progress of executing a strategic plan is often where organizations fail. Strategy execution consistently ranks as one of the top challenges in organizations.

Strategy execution brings together the decisions, actions, outcomes, and communication needed to advance toward a goal. To effectively execute your strategy, consider this four-step process:

Supporting Your Team Through the Strategic Execution Process

Establishing the execution structure begins by determining who’s involved and what their responsibilities are. Although this should be clarified by the “roles and responsibilities” portion of your strategic roadmap, it’s critical to clarify who owns decision rights and how far those decision rights extend. Decision rights shift responsibility from executives to team members.

Accountability for successful execution is also shared with the people doing the work, creating an opportunity for leadership training and experience. Establishing the execution structure sets boundaries that enable team members to contribute to the best of their abilities.

This approach offers two benefits:

• You complete the execution tactics and processes that deliver on the strategies to achieve goals in the Goal Pyramid.
• The process evolves into a pattern for continuous improvement, delivering even more value the longer you stick with it.

Don’t overlook the need to articulate, acknowledge, and address the ideas, concerns, issues, and risks that team members raise. Effective managers know that careful listening helps create confidence and commitment.

Along those lines, be prepared to offer upskilling to team members so they can perform at their peak. That doesn’t mean you should jump in and take over, though. Avoid micromanaging projects so you don’t discourage or alienate team members.

If you’re not convinced of the need to steer clear of micromanagement, consider this: 70% of employees complain that micromanagement lowers their morale, and 55% gripe that micromanagement hurts their productivity, according to HR services company Helpside.

Measuring, Reinforcing, and Optimizing for Success

To keep your strategy execution on track, regularly evaluate progress and outcomes. You can do this by coming up with KPIs for measuring progress.

Make sure you measure only what you’ll actually use to boost performance, though. Measuring a limited number of strategic KPIs beats measuring an array of tactical KPIs, because throwing too many KPIs into the mix can create an burdensome, negative climate. It’s like dumping too many ingredients into a cake mix — it screws up the recipe.

Here are four other tips for optimizing the success of strategy execution:

Create a Strategic Roadmap for Goal-Focused Execution and More Targeted Outcomes

Strategic planning is about current state evaluation, critical thinking, goal setting, structural organization, team engagement, and timeline accomplishments.

To achieve success with a strategic roadmap for your business, begin with a framework, stakeholders, and facilitation. Then:

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Planning and executing a growth strategy involves change management, strategic transformation, and accountability for the vision, goals, and culture of an organization. The people who plan, execute and enhance the strategy are accountable for the behaviors and outcomes that create value for customers, team members, stakeholders, and themselves.