Shifting mindsets and driving behaviors.
The ability to execute is a principal quality of organizations that become and remain great.
As increasingly volatile environments pressure executive teams to adjust their strategies
more frequently, successful execution is more critical than ever.
Based on more than 30 years of experience working with executives leading strategy
implementation, there are three typical barriers that prevent execution: speed, siloes, and
the struggle to understand what a new strategy really looks like. We also uncovered three
key elements that make the greatest impact on employees’ ability to connect strategy and
execution: alignment, mindset, and capability.
In this paper, we’ll explore the three main challenges organizations face and the three critical
elements organizations need to ensure great execution.
The strategy execution challenge
Strategy execution has never been easy. Research shows that 67% of well-formulated
strategies fail in execution.
Still, strategy execution remains a top priority and key challenge
for executives. Based on our work with executives, there are three common roadblocks that
executives encounter:
• Speed – execution is slow. People spend too long planning instead of shifting to
implementation.
• Siloes – people are disconnected and often misaligned. This makes strategy
implementation nearly impossible.
• The struggle – implementation is painful, especially when people can’t fully grasp its
effects on their individual roles.

Speed is the first issue. Strategy execution is slow because leaders get stuck in the
formulation stage, which is often seen as fun and gratifying, rather than moving to
implementation, which is perceived as more difficult and frustrating. This transition
demands that leaders substantially shift their mindsets, a hurdle that most strategies fail to
overcome.
Discussions about execution are commonly drowned out by operational
concerns, “Can we deploy strategy without breaking the operational
model?”; process concerns, “Do we have the right processes and systems in
place to reflect how we do things now?”; and finance concerns, “How do we
know we’re driving value?”
While legitimate, these questions miss the point, which leads us to siloes.
Strategy execution is as much of a people issue as it is a business one, as
the most critical element of its success is a strong, shared sense of direction
amongst the people responsible for executing the strategy. People tend
to work in siloes, struggling to reconcile individual goals with those of the
overall enterprise. With pressure to attain department-specific goals,
employees and leaders alike need a higher level of business acumen and
strong leadership to remain both connected and focused while executing
the strategy in their daily work.
Lastly, the struggle. It is often difficult for employees to fully grasp what
a new strategy means for them, which makes its execution painful. While
executives may benefit from the analytical boardroom debates that led to a
new strategy, employees not privy to those conversations will pay the price.
Successfully bringing a strategy from the boardroom to the front line
requires meeting these common challenges with the right alignment,
mindset, and capability to drive success.
Keys to successful execution
Alignment and capability are two of the most well-known and well-regarded
drivers of strategy execution.
1. Alignment accounts for employees’ understanding of the strategy itself.
To achieve alignment, regardless of their role, each employee must
understand how they can contribute to executing the new strategy.
They must also understand the impact of different trade-offs they will
face while executing strategy and organization-wide consequences.
This strategic foresight allows for cross-functional empathy and a more
intentional approach to collaboration driven by the understanding of
how a decision’s impact goes beyond one’s function thus driving stronger
alignment.
2. Capability, in this context, refers to the skills required to implement
strategy at all levels in the organization. Most organizations typically
regard capability development as the clearest path towards short-term
strategy execution.
Take, for example, a financial institution seeking to integrate a new
strategy. Firstly, the organization’s leaders needed to develop alignment
by better understanding how their decision-making impacted other business
units. To do so, leaders experienced a customized business simulation during
which they practiced making decisions in an environment directly modelled after
the business. This allowed them to develop stronger business acumen capabilities
and better comprehend the organization as a whole, thus accelerating strategy
integration.
However, capability development is more than just a short-term solution; it can also
support strategy execution in the long term.
In the case of a leading food-industry organization, capability development was
instrumental to strengthening value creation. After experiencing a customized executive
development program, focused on both leadership behaviors and strategy by using a
tailored, context-rich business simulation, the organization’s leaders developed a deeper
understanding of their end-to-end value creation. The leaders gained clarity around the
interdependencies of their differing functions and how decisions made by other parts of
the organization would impact the business overall.
In terms of strategy execution, alignment and capability development receive plenty
of attention. Leaders know that their strategic initiatives are futile without strong
organizational alignment, and many even go so far as to say that alignment is their
top priority.
This makes sense, as misalignment of senior teams has been proven to
negatively impact organization and employee performance. Similarly, capability
development is critical to organizations, whether in executing new strategies marking
a departure from past ways of working, or in stable strategies where the criticality
is around having a strong command of the value creation process across the entire
organization.
The final component of effective strategy execution is just as critical as alignment and
capability, but often overlooked: mindset.
Mindset for execution
Mindset describes an individual’s worldview; it is their beliefs, attitudes, and physiology.
Mindset also plays a pivotal role in how one thinks, learns, and behaves.
Surveyed executives agree that mindset has the largest potential to impact an organization’s ability to execute strategy successfully. Therefore, shifting mindsets is an incredibly powerful way to
strengthen leaders for times of change.
At the organizational level, outcomes are shaped by the company’s collective mindset.
Adopting a shared mindset helps employees better understand the existing business and its
future direction, as well as buy-in to the collective momentum of the strategic shift.
For example, a global financial institution adopted an Agile way of working to support
its strategy of becoming more customer centric. This required a consistent, systematic
mindset shift from people at all levels within the organization. After identifying new ways to
contribute, employees brought the strategy to life through ownership, empowerment, and
self-organization.
While shared mindsets are critical at the organizational level, it is ultimately up to each
employee to shift their individual mindset to make a collective shift a reality. In the context of
executing strategy, a single person’s unique blind spots, experiences, personal worldviews, or
attitudes and beliefs can make or break a strategy. This is because each individual must buy
in to the collective mindset to implement the strategic shift.
For instance, imagine an engineer eager to devise more advanced and technically rich
product. The engineer’s sole focus is on the product and its features, rather than the
outcomes for the end-user. Therefore, the engineer struggles to adopt a customercentric mindset because they fail to put the customer first. Executing strategy requires a
corresponding mindset shift at both an individual and organizational level.
A shared mindset, when aligned with strategy, makes execution faster, better connected,
and less painful. In summary:
Strategy execution is….

So, how do the world’s leading organizations build the right strategy execution capabilities from the C-suite to the front line? And how do they do it in a way that both caters to their
organization’s specific challenges and drives tangible changes?
Safe and relevant interventions that target leaders and provide them with a powerful
coaching platform are key. Immersing leaders in a realistic environment that reflects board
room tensions and trade-offs, while allowing them to safely practice their new strategy, will
ultimately lay the foundation for the mindset shifts required by transformation.
Strategy execution is a complex, multi-faceted challenge that most organizations struggle to
enact. However, by focusing on people, developing the proper alignment and capabilities, and
integrating the required mindset, any organization can achieve strategy execution
Source: bts.com, March 2022
Author: Ignacio Vaccaro, Head of Strategy Execution and Business
Alignment for BTS Europe, Senior Director
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