5 Steps to reboot your corporate strategy

by Shawn William Creative Writer

How to reboot your corporate strategy?

Having a great corporate strategy is what helps your business grow and thrive. Being concerned with profit performance and how your team manages its activities is a significant factor in determining success or failure. Having an inappropriate strategy only leads to your team exerting full competence and energy only to end up losing ground in the long run. Luckily, this is avoidable through five steps. Namely, knowing your position, determining your priorities, looking at strategic factors, identifying objectives, and establishing first steps.

1. Map your position in your competitive landscape

Having the ability to sit your team down and establish your posts and approach to strategy development is the first step in a new direction that will yield success for your company. Breaking up your strategy into smaller, manageable parts assists all team members involved in keeping traction from the beginning. Concentrate on the highest priorities first, and the rest will fall into place with your team understanding what the new process is and what they need to do.

Through successive meetings and discussing topics in-depth, your team can fine-tune decisions made and address any new developments since previous sessions. By dividing your meetings into schedules, you may find accessing the goals that you all want to work toward more comfortable. An example of this is when you have a ten-meeting plan that you can distribute over the year. The ten sessions look similar to this:

● Decide what your company’s competitive position is

When you start your meeting, draw your team’s attention toward the fundamentals of the Power Curve of economic profit. The idea here is not to beat your immediate competition or improve on last year’s results – it is about moving up on the curve, which in turn reflects the broad corporate universe. At this meeting, it is also advisable to start brainstorming which business units can most quickly help the business grow.

● Analyse how the business makes money

In this session, it is crucial to look at your company’s financials and see the factors behind your team’s growth and return on capital. Knowing what your baseline is will allow you to calibrate your aspiration and update future strategic projections.

● Make decisions on corporate-level priorities

After setting your baseline, it is essential to discuss what choices you must make on each strategic topic. Also, continue debating which business units deserve continued backing of significant resources.

● Discuss any big moves the business could face in the future

Discussing the significant steps with partners and team members allows investable pockets to develop the willingness and opportunity to start freeing up resources in preparation for the business to grow.

● Discuss priority topics in-depth

Do a second round of debate to see what big moves need to take priority. You must remember to analyse the potential danger and impact of each.

● Focus on any big moves and the risk and potential gains for the company

Weighing up the risks and the potential gains for your company allows space for productivity improvement proposals. Having these is vial in rebooting your corporate strategy.

● Explore the big moves

Focus on which business should be your number one choice and concentrate your time and energy there.

● Commit to the plan

Look back and make sure that the path you have chosen is the correct decision for you and your team.

● Make sure you mitigate any concerns

If you have any concerns about the plan you are implementing, then you need to see if you can alleviate them.

● Decide on your first step

You and your team need to commit to your first step. An example of this would be if you want to have a presence in Sydney, Australia, then you need to commit to opening up an office there by the end of the second quarter.

2. Determine your priorities

Being a leader in your company means that you need to make decisions about what is right for your team and what is wrong. Having the ability to grade the significance and importance of different initiatives is the first test of leadership. To determine priorities effectively, you need to look at the three interdependent variables used to execute actions. These variables are objectives, resources, and timing. You can only see the desired effect of any project through precise goals, ample resources, and a reasonable time frame.

Of these three variables, the most important would be resources, as this is what enables you to complete an objective within the set timeframe.

Priorities for the company can be acknowledged in three ways, namely, critical, essential, and desirable. You need to complete crucial priorities within a specified amount of time without any exceptions. Important priorities, on the other hand, have a noteworthy optimistic impact on performance. Within these initiatives, the resources are fixed, and the variable is time or the objective. In contrast, desirable priorities are when resources and time are both variables. So, for example, your company may desire a specific outcome but cannot commit specific resources for the required timeframe.

After you have identified critical, essential, and desirable projects, you can acknowledge the objectives, resources, and time required for each project. Having the ability to show the transparent allocation of resources is an advantage for managers and aligns your team toward significant company goals.

3. Decide which strategic factors you need in building your play

Overcoming corporate games and politics through strategies helps to align teams and puts processes into action. From reserving eight to ten minutes per year, you can have the power to change your strategy development approach. In the beginning sessions, your team may have started with moves and decisions that your rivals make. When you begin to analyze the danger and impact of these moves, you begin to go deeper into allowing for resources that alleviate these pain points. In addition to this, sorting out the proposals according to their level of risk enables your team the opportunity of making informed decisions.

4. Identify your objectives

Having objectives for your team is a vital aspect of your company’s success. Otherwise known as a continuous improvement activity, because there is no stopping point. To strengthen, improve, and enhance your business, getting your strategic objectives right is crucial.

Starting your strategy right from the beginning allows you the opportunity of creating a successful balanced scorecard system. Four key elements are essential in getting this correct. These are:

● Building strategic objectives for strategic themes

You must build strategic goals with your team. Remember that it is crucial to have the right people on board to ensure the representation of a cross-section of the business. In the beginning, management needs to consider all team members' strategic objectives. The brainstorming session will lead to grouping objectives into their perspective layers and eventually seeing if there is balance, having 12-14 strategic objectives per theme with 3-4 in each perspective.

● Creating strategic objectives for the company from the themes

Creating your strategic objectives brings you a step closer to providing the elements needed in creating a company strategy map. It involves grouping the strategic goals established with the strategic themes.

● Document the strategic objectives

It is essential to describe what is meant by each strategic objective accurately. During the planning stage, these objectives will be fully understood by all participants involved. However, as time goes on, or when new people join the team, they will require significant details so they don’t confuse or misinterpret findings.

● Classify objective owners, roles and responsibilities

By giving ownership to specific objectives, your team accounts for the responsibility which is crucial in developing a strategic management system. Taking ownership and accountability for results allows management to make a positive step towards resourcing and supporting strategic objectives.

5. Establish your first steps

Creating the first steps is vital to rebooting your corporate strategy and business growth. There needs to be a link between your long-term vision and the steps one needs to take to reach it.

Managers often make the mistake of listening to the vision, then developing additional plans that they feel they can achieve. The ideas may indeed get the company on the new path; however, it may not be the one that reaches the vision and full potential that the company is capable of achieving.

To avoid this, your team needs to look at the strategy and break down the moves required to reach it. These need to be broken down into intermediate goals that are realistically achievable, given a specific timeframe. Breaking up goals into smaller doable steps allows team members to focus and get practical about what to do next. Working back from your destination and setting milestone markers will enable you to know your capabilities and constraints needed to advance your goal or strategy. You can break up your goal into six-month increments. Remember that it is not all about money. Taking the first steps and having in-depth performance conversations allows your team to focus on what they need to plan for regarding corporate restructuring and milestones.