I welcomed a younger colleague into my office one afternoon to discuss our corporate strategy. We were part of a large multi-national non-profit, serving people in poverty in 24 countries and conducting fundraising in 12. My colleague, our Global Strategy Manager, shared about his plan to cascade the enterprise strategy throughout the organization, all the way down to each staff members' performance review metrics. I laughed! We had over 3,500 staff across 36 countries using disparate HR systems. How could we hope to define performance plans tied to our global strategy at such a scale? I thought he was overly optimistic, even idealistic. We would have to use some other method, something less specific and time-consuming, to make the strategy real on the ground.

In retrospect, I was wrong and my colleague was right. My colleague had recently relocated from a smaller partner office of about 100 staff. They were accustomed to rolling strategy out at an individual level for personal goals and accountability. I had never worked in such a small and controlled environment. I couldn't even imagine such a thorough and personalized approach to strategy implementation. But recently, after completing my time with the large non-profit, I took a leadership role with a much smaller organization. We are a team of only 18, primarily located in the U.S. with two staff in Africa. It was an opportunity to try what my former colleague had proposed so many years ago, crafting each performance plan around the organization's strategy. And we did it! Using the "playbook process" developed by Patrick Lencioni, we determined four strategic themes that would guide our decisions and activity. Each of our staffs' personal goals was tied to one of these strategic themes using a custom performance plan template. We also developed a list of organizational behaviors and included those in our performance plans to regularly assess how well we were living those out and how we could improve. The results were exciting! The entire team was pushing in the same direction and could see their role in making the strategy real for our stakeholders. After this experience, I'm a believer in making strategy a part of the performance review process. If you want to make strategy real, you've got to make it personal.

I still have a lot to learn about integrating strategy and performance planning at scale. But here are a few ideas from our recent experience:

Develop a sharp strategy with clear themes. Lencioni's book "The Advantage" provides a playbook model that's practical and really works.
Get your HR/People leaders involved early so personal performance can become an expectation and fully integrated with the strategy.
Design performance review templates that incorporate specific references to strategic themes and make integration with these themes a mandatory step.
Hold each other accountable with honest and direct coaching. Strategies only work if people throughout the organization use them to make solid decisions along the way.

What other ideas come to mind for you? How have you made your strategy real throughout your organization?

Make Your Strategy Personal