Stellafai Expert Series
Uh-oh! No one on our delivery teams knows why they’re here!
This week, our experts examine what happens when teams are not connected to their organisation’s overall strategy and purpose. What happens if the ‘doers’ don’t understand why they are doing what they are doing? Asked about the most painful problems they have seen resulting from delivery that is decoupled from strategy, our experts share their experiences.
🤫 Psst — If you’re in a rush and want a speedy summary of our expert’s wisdom, skip to the end to hear what the key takeaways were!
When delivery is detached from strategy it is difficult for your customers to understand the potential value offered by your organization. This is the result of an inconsistent and disconnected set of offerings presented to them, offerings that often contract one another. Which do I choose? How do they fit together? Why am I being told different things by different groups within your organization? The bottom line is that if your customer doesn’t understand you they’re less likely to work with you.
Mismatched measures/OKRs. Strategy is linked to business outcomes, but the delivery is focused on delivering X — whether or not X moves the needle on the outcome or not.
If teams or employees can’t describe the impact they have made in relation to strategy, it’s actually a nightmare. There is not a single team or company out there having enough capacity. Capacity is always scarce, se we should try everything to use it for things which matter and make sense.
Loss of Focus: When delivery becomes detached from strategy, it’s easy for teams to lose sight of the organization’s broader objectives and become immersed in operational minutiae. This disconnect can lead to a misallocation of resources, with energy and finances being directed towards activities that don’t align with or contribute to the overall strategic goals. Decreased Morale and Engagement: Employees need to see how their work contributes to the broader strategy of the organization. When this connection is lost, it can result in decreased motivation and engagement. People want their work to matter, and a clear link between strategy and delivery provides this context. Lack of Agility: If delivery isn’t strategically aligned, organizations lose their ability to quickly respond to market trends and changes, reducing their agility. Further, if the products or services delivered aren’t in line with the organization’s strategic vision, it can lead to customer dissatisfaction and potential harm to the organization’s reputation.
- Kills employee motivation.
- Kills innovation
- Kills trust (bi-directional)
- Lack of involvement from leadership.
- Leadership inability to coach people that do the delivery work.
- Top-down (micro) management
- Pushing solutions down to teams instead of problems to solve.
- Focus on output rather than outcomes.
Responding to immediate issues resulting in disengaged, overworked employees and high turn-over.
- People feeling like they are just being told what to do and have no autonomy to make decisions.
- Innovation and creativity is stifled.
- Less collaboration and accountability — always someone else’s problem.
People want to feel useful, and like they are doing meaningful work, so if you aren’t able to clearly align delivery to strategy, the people involved can turn a “meh, what’s the point”. There is potential that this also leads to teams or individuals not measuring the impact of the work they are doing, and heading into feature/delivery factory mode. This can cause lots of engagement issues in a team or entire business, and this ultimately will lead to higher turnover and much less happy employees.
Alignment, Engagement and no clear direction in the work of each team and team member.
Waste, we waste resources because of sunk cost fallacy and personal attachment to pet projects.
Armstrong, Stellafai’s Digital Assistant with the Key Takeaways:
- When delivery does not have any alignment with the strategy, employees can quickly become caught up in trivial operations and disregard the overall goals. This disconnect can cause the wrong utilisation of resources, meaning energy and money are invested in activities that do not benefit the objectives.
- Decreased motivation and engagement can also arise, as employees wish to see how their contributions are linked to the bigger strategy. Without this connection, their inspiration can be damaged and people want their work to have an impact.
- The absence of a link between strategy and delivery means the organisation loses its capability to rapidly adapt to changing markets and trends, which reduces its agility and may lead to consumer dissatisfaction and damage its reputation.
- It can result in top-down management, decreased collaboration, less accountability, and a feeling of having no control or autonomy, therefore reducing the opportunity for creativity and invention. This ultimately causes people to be unhappy, lose interest in their job and look elsewhere.
- If delivery is not clearly connected to strategy, it is not only likely that teams and individuals won’t measure the outcome of their efforts but also that the organisation as a whole will lack direction, alignment and engagement, leading to wastage and additional difficulties.
Keywords: strategy, disconnect, alignment, direction, impact
