Senior management focuses on the right questions and assignment of tasks during the strategy development process
Provide the guide rails and questions
It is executive management’s responsibility to define the strategic guide rails, formulate clear tasks, find the right key personnel, involve and instruct them and to participate in review meetings to set directions.
Strategic guide rails include the vision, the mission and scope for development for strategic ideas and options; eventually also the financial targets and growth objectives.
This requires an intensive engagement with the strategy
Caution: involving the employees with strategy work does not relieve senior management of its responsibilities. On the contrary, senior managers have to spend more time on strategy work: they have to read documentation, conduct intense (insightful, inspiring and also challenging) discussions – and this not only during the development stage, but also during implementation. They regularly have to challenge their employees‘ work, as well as their own.
They need to dig deep, apply themselves and offer their support to advance the implementation. It would be fatal to sit back, rather than leading from the front.
The reward is the very satisfying experience of seeing your own people make the strategy their own and want to put their all into proving that their strategy actually works.