Every year millions of entrepreneurs come up with great ideas. And every year they spend countless hours creating and re-creating detailed business and strategic plans. Often most of this effort goes to waste as entrepreneurs fail to follow through on their own well-thought-out plans.

Formulating and executing a strategy is the most important activity any organization can undertake. It ensures your organization understands its key capabilities, its current and future environments and that it is able to position itself of sustainable growth and profit.

Below is the simple five-step process to help entrepreneurs execute their strategies:

 Engage the right people
All members of the executive team should be a part of strategy formulation. But this isn’t where it should end. Who else in your organization can contribute meaningfully to your strategy and help you implement it? Look across your organization for staff who, while not a part of the leadership team, have influence across the organisation. Look for influential staff who can contribute insights to the strategy and, more importantly, can help with the successful execution of the strategy by helping engage staff across the organisation.

Set clear priorities
Entrepreneurs might fail in carrying out their strategy if they set too many priorities. Establish only one priority at a time along with supporting initiatives. For example, a priority might be penetrating a new territory. Supporting initiatives could be leasing an office, hiring staff and initiating a marketing plan.

Having too many priorities is like trying to keep too many balls in the air. Then it's problematic if only one gets focused on. Chances are good that eventually, all the balls fall to the ground.

 Create the right environment
Demonstrate the importance of your strategy by committing to it and expecting the same of all those who contribute to its formulation. Take at least two days off-site to commence setting the organizational vision and to set priorities. Then take a few months undertaking the research and focus groups that will help inform it. Meet regularly (every couple of weeks) to update the strategy team on findings.

And make sure you’re across the whole formulation process. For example, don’t leave focus group findings just to a third party (ie. market researchers). Make sure the strategy team attends all focus groups. Because focus groups are often when you will find hidden gems of information about your organization, your competition, the industry, and untapped opportunities. Hidden gems that the research company will never see, because no-one can know your organization or your marketplace like you do.

Collect and analyze data
Entrepreneurs often specify measurable goals in their strategic plans. But once the planning process is a wrap, the document might be set on a shelf and not revisited for quite a long time.

A key to ensuring execution is staying on top of results. Entrepreneurs should develop key performance indicators (or KPIs) that can be measured and monitored on an ongoing basis. They need to procure operating data related to these indicators and evaluate results on schedule (daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly).

The executives should evaluate what's working and continue these processes and enhance them to boost performance. With failing results, they should determine what processes don't work and make immediate adjustments to prevent further deterioration.

 Communicate across the organization
So often what is forgotten in strategy formulation and execution is where the strategy intersects with those that deliver the strategy – those that will determine its success or failure – our staff. When staff doesn’t feel they understand the vision of the organization, when they feel they are expected to change but don’t understand why, when staff is not engaged in the strategy, you are guaranteed one thing: resistance. A resistant staff results in a failed strategy.

For a strategy to execute effectively all staff across the organization and all critical stakeholders must be engaged in the strategy and its delivery. The vision of the organization must be communicated to all. The story must be clearly articulated: what is the company vision, what will success look like, why is change necessary, what role does each individual play in the delivery of the strategy and how will they be measured.

When staff feels they understand the organizational vision when they understand the role they play in its delivery when the expectations are clear on how they will deliver on the vision and how they will be measured against that vision they are likely to engage. And when the staff engages with a strategy the most important part of the execution process is enacted.

When organizations fully commit to formulation and execution of a strategy: when the right people are engaged to create a meaningful strategy that sets out the future for the organization; when the execution process is integrated into the strategy formulation, and staff are meaningfully engaged we create an environment that not only facilitates successful strategy but propels organizations into a sustainable and profitable future.
http://www.businessmasterclassng.com/2018/10/09/5-secrets-to-a-successful-strategy-execution/