You pulled your leadership team away for a day, built a strategic plan everyone agreed on, and walked out with real energy. A few months later, the plan lives in a binder and the business looks a lot like it did before. That’s frustrating, and a little lonely, because you’re the one who still remembers what everyone agreed to.
A strategy that’s driving more growth or impact than normal is probably a new strategy, or it has new initiatives. And new means there has to be a new way to operate. Most companies keep running the old way, and that’s where plans stall. The fix is to rebuild how the business runs around the new strategic plan: how decisions get made, what you measure, the playbooks your team works from, and who owns each piece.
What an aircraft maintenance crew taught me about executing a plan
In the Army, we did this every morning in our maintenance teams. Aircraft status. That fed into operations so they knew if we could fly our missions for the day, or what would need to be shifted. Then it fed all the way up through every chain so we understood the combat power we had available. If we were dropping below the expected combat power, we knew when we’d be back up and where we needed help, whether that was pushing parts, pushing labor, or reprioritizing events.
Every time we deployed on a training or combat event, we’d look at when decisions needed to be made and when the elements were able to give information, and we’d tweak them to where it made sense. That way we always had the most up-to-date information, the kind that actually leads to decisions or tells you whether you’re on track. We had a battle rhythm, and that battle rhythm was designed to support the actual battle we were going through.
General Stanley McChrystal writes about this in Team of Teams. His task force ran a daily operations and intelligence brief, never canceled, that set their battle rhythm and gave people across the force the same picture of what was happening. He paired that shared picture with pushing decisions down to the people closest to the problem. Authority without information creates chaos, and information without authority creates a bottleneck.
Every level of your business needs a rhythm too: reports, meetings, updates, and reviews of the scorecard and the financials, with each level’s rhythm feeding the next. If your leadership team has a decision meeting first thing Thursday morning, they need information from the level below them by sometime Wednesday. A lot of times teams feel like they can’t make a decision because they don’t have the information. That’s because they’re not giving the time for information gathering below them and within their sub-teams.
Signs your strategic plan is losing to the old way of running the business
Owners describe a stalled strategic plan in a lot of ways. Here’s what they tell me:
- The priorities got done, but the strategy didn’t. They did the weekly and monthly things they were supposed to do across the team, and it didn’t result in actually accomplishing the strategy.
- The day-to-day took over. They got distracted with day-to-day things and things that changed, and as a leadership team they didn’t pull themselves back to handle the new issues and stay on track with what they said they’d do.
- Too many meetings. The meetings are ineffective because of the way they’ve always done things before.
- Agreement without ownership. People agreed with the strategy and their parts of it, but they’re not executing their parts.
- The why stayed at headquarters. The strategy lives with the leadership team, and all that gets communicated out is what people need to do. People don’t like to change just for change’s sake.
- The old playbooks. The systems and processes were never redesigned for the new strategy, so it feels like forcing a round peg into a square hole.
- Vanilla-flavored numbers. They’re still tracking the same financial metrics everybody tracks, and those don’t tell them if they’re accomplishing their goals.
- Nobody is raising the bar. No one inside or outside the organization is challenging the team, so people fall back into their old ways and wait for somebody else to challenge them.
Most of these trace back to the same root: a new strategy up against the old way of running the business.
If more than two of these sound familiar, the Baseline Assessment will show you where the old way is holding your strategic plan back.
How to get your strategic plan moving again
I always start by understanding what the owner wants to be able to do: their goal, and the culture they have today. Then I want to understand the frustrations with how they’re working toward their strategy right now. If it’s not working, we talk about what needs to be different, and then we design a system for them to execute.
I don’t start with a template or an off-the-shelf business operating system. Everything’s on the table to reevaluate, including your meetings and your structure. Each step below answers one or more of the signs above.
- Build the rhythm around decisions, not meetings. Start with when decisions need to be made, then look at when each team can realistically get its information in, and tweak it until it makes sense. That’s how we planned every training or combat deployment. The meetings you need fall out of that.
- Measure what the strategy should produce. Set measures that tell you weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually that you’re on track. Don’t stop at the vanilla-flavored financial metrics everybody tracks. Getting the priorities done isn’t the same as accomplishing the strategy.
- Rework the playbooks the strategy touches. Redesign the systems and processes for the new strategy. If your team is still running the same playbooks from before, they won’t give you the results of the new plan.
- Turn agreement into ownership. Every piece of the plan needs someone who owns it, and the team needs to hold each other accountable. Be clear about who makes which decisions, because if it’s not clear, it always gets pushed back to the owner.
- Carry the why all the way down. Communicate the strategy down to the most junior person on the team, not just what they need to do. If people understand why they’re changing, and they’re a good fit for where the company is growing, more than likely they’ll be on board.
- Make sure someone is raising the bar. Somebody inside or outside the organization has to challenge the team to meet this new strategy. Otherwise people fall back into their old ways and wait for somebody else to challenge them.
What this looks like in a real business
Every day, teams need a point where they share what they’ve done or are going to do that the rest of the team needs to know, and where they need help. Patrick Lencioni calls this the daily check-in. Depending on how many shifts or crews you run, it might need to happen by shift. But there has to be an opportunity for people to cross-level information and ask for help.
Then there needs to be a weekly rhythm where the leadership team makes the decisions that reduce the bottlenecks, reduce risk, and let their teams keep executing on plan. For a construction company, that might mean leadership decides Thursday morning, operations has its picture by Wednesday, project leaders roll up status and needs by Tuesday, and crews flag problems in their daily check-in as they happen.
Every leadership team I start working with tells me their meetings go too long. The teams that have actually tried a new rhythm report back almost immediately. The leadership team at one animal hospital told me they’re spending 50% less time in meetings. Another owner told me recently that the new rhythm is producing more focused meetings and better information flow.
Once the rhythm is in place, the rest of the strategic plan has somewhere to live. Measures get reviewed on schedule, playbook changes get worked on a timeline, and commitments get checked by the team instead of forgotten until the next planning session.
The two mistakes that keep decisions stuck
Waiting for 100% of the information. I’ve never had 100% of the information to make a decision. But I’ve never had a problem getting to 80%, making the call, and adjusting as the rest of the information comes in.
Not being clear about who decides. If it’s not clear who makes the decision, it always gets pushed back to the owner or the highest-level person in the room. That’s how owners end up buried in calls they shouldn’t be making.
What a stalled strategic plan really costs
Left alone, a stalled plan costs more than a year. Your team learns that plans are something you make, not something you do, and the next one gets less buy-in than this one. The owner picks up the slack, which usually means more nights and weekends at work instead of at home. A strategic plan your leadership team agreed to shouldn’t die in a binder.
What to change this week
Figure out what old habits your team is still holding onto that aren’t actually producing results for your strategy. Look at your recurring meetings, the reports you send and read, the numbers you review, and the routines everyone runs on autopilot. For each one, ask whether it helps you hit the new plan or whether it’s just how you’ve always done it. Pick one and change it.
Picture walking into next year’s planning session with this year’s strategic plan done. Your leaders bring you decisions instead of questions, you know where you stand before anyone has to ask, and you’re home for dinner more often than not. You become the owner whose plans actually happen. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
What’s one habit your team is still running that was built for last year’s fight?
Here’s how we’d start: 1) Take the Business Efficiency & Scaling Assessment to see where your business stands. 2) We sit down and walk through your plan and where it’s stalling. 3) We build the battle rhythm that gets it moving. Start with the assessment, or if you’d rather just talk it through, schedule a conversation.
I’m Justin Shaffer, owner of Growth Navigator Solutions in Mechanicsburg, PA, and a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and aviator who served in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. I help owners and leadership teams execute their strategy. Instead of a one-size-fits-all system, I build a battle rhythm around your plan: the decisions, measures, playbooks, and ownership that turn it into results.
Along the way, I develop the leaders who carry the plan. As a certified Working Genius facilitator, I also help each person on your team do the work they’re best at. That means more profit and more impact on your people, customers, and community, with an owner who still gets to be present at home.