By Mike Cline, VP Operations, Venturist, Inc.
Would the following conversation between Joe and his boss in a $100 million small company with 500 employees seem unusual to you?
Boss, I think executing the company strategy is my day job. I want my team and I to be more involved in the formulation and execution of our company’s strategy. We want to be doing the right things, day to day to make our company stronger and more competitive.
Joe, you run the loading dock and supervise 15 people. Your day job is to ensure all our deliveries and shipments get handled properly and on time, 24/7. You don’t need to be concerned with the company strategy, the front office handles that. Just make sure the loading dock is doing its job!
Whether you would consider that conversation unusual or not, the idea that Strategy is everyone’s day job is a not widely espoused idea. In fact, there may be many in the Strategy business who would take the opposite view. Take for example this post from Tim Shanne in The Glue-A Blog About Executing Business Strategy: Is Strategy Execution Anyone’s Full Time Job in a Hospital?
Virtually all hospitals and health systems have full-time staff responsible for developing strategy. These VPs and Directors of Strategic Planning work in concert with their CEOs, Executive Teams, and Board Members to create what is often a 100+ page document we’re all used to seeing. Unfortunately, what we’re not used to seeing is a single person who has the full-time job of executing that strategy.
Now Tim’s post goes on to recommend the appointment of a full-time Strategy Execution Officer (SEO) who’s job as Tim describes later in the post, is the [Coordination] (my interpretation) of strategy execution not the actual execution itself. However the last sentence in the quote above is really what I find issue with. If the SEO’s fulltime job is executing the company strategy, what are the fulltime jobs of the other 499 people in the company? If it is not executing the company strategy then why do they have one?
We have a mantra in one of our Strategy presentations that goes like this:
Strategy Is The Number One Responsibility Of All Leaders And Managers, And Should Be Of Great Interest And Concern To Everyone In An Organization
In other words, Strategy is everyone’s Day Job! Do you agree? Should the guy who runs the loading dock be concerned with executing the company strategy?