Managers must own strategy, not just be the audience, says HR leader
Organizations spend enormous amounts of time developing strategy. Senior leaders debate priorities, set ambitious goals and communicate a vision for the future. Yet too often, somewhere between the executive meeting room and the front line, strategy begins to lose momentum.
Why?
Because strategy does not execute itself. People do. And managers are the critical link between organizational strategy and what actually happens every day.
The problem may not be that managers don’t understand the strategy. It may be that they don’t feel genuinely connected to it.
Strategy often arrives at the manager level as another initiative, another presentation, another set of targets or, worse, another item added to an already overflowing list of responsibilities. When that happens, even a well-designed strategy can feel like something being done to managers rather than something they are responsible for making happen.
That’s where commitment matters.
Understanding their role in strategy and success
Managers need more than information. They need to understand why the strategy matters, what success looks like and, most importantly, why their role is essential to achieving it. They need to see the connection between the organization’s strategic priorities and the decisions they make every day with their teams.
Understanding creates the foundation for execution. Commitment creates the energy behind it.
A manager who can explain the strategy but doesn’t believe in it is unlikely to inspire a team around it. A manager who understands the organization’s goals, sees how their team contributes and believes their contribution matters is far more likely to translate strategy into action.
This is where organizations sometimes get the cascade wrong.
A feedback loop for managers
We communicate strategy from the top down, assuming that if leaders explain it clearly enough, everyone will understand and execute. But communication isn’t the same as commitment. You cannot cascade commitment through a PowerPoint presentation.
Managers need opportunities to ask questions, challenge assumptions, understand the choices being made and work through what the strategy means in their particular part of the organization. They need to know not only what is changing, but why it matters and what they and their teams can do to influence the outcome.
And they need to hear something else: You matter to this strategy. Your team matters to this strategy.
That message is surprisingly powerful.
Managers are often the people translating organizational ambition into priorities, behaviours and decisions. They are closest to the customer, closest to the employee and closest to the operational reality of the business. If they are disengaged from the strategy, execution will inevitably suffer.
Perhaps, then, the question isn’t whether managers are capable of executing strategy? It may be, have we done enough to bring them into it?
If organizations want strategy to move beyond the executive team, they need to stop treating managers as the audience for strategy and start treating them as owners of its execution.
Because ultimately, strategy succeeds when people understand it, believe in it and can see themselves and their teams in the story of how the organization will succeed.
Janet Bray is the Vice President, Human Resources, at Pier 4 in Toronto.
