How you work: The key to achieving your strategy
By Tony Fifoot 4 min read
So much effort is invested into creating a great strategy, and intense focus on what they want to achieve—revenue targets, Reduced Cost to Serve, Customer Acquisition… Leaders define ambitious objectives and track key metrics to measure success.
Why then do 90% of senior executives fail to reach their strategic goals?
Because they lack focus on how they operate, how they execute—the processes, collaboration structures, and ways of working that enable those results. Without this focus, execution suffers, and the best-laid strategies fail to deliver the impact needed. Execution is the bridge between strategy and results.
The Cost of Ignoring "How" You Work
Most of the focus is invested to ensure people clearly understand the strategy and where we need to go. We polish the strategy deck, run town halls, print posters, and walk the floor to be sure that everyone understands “What” the strategy is, the goals and key initiatives to get us there.
Underinvesting in how teams mobilise, collaborate and coordinate, and deliver the key cross-functional initiatives at the core of your strategic success, unintentionally create bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and misalignment.
This leads to:
For the Business: Slower execution; higher costs; missed opportunities; and the inability to scale.
For Customers: Delayed deliveries; inconsistent experiences; and eroded trust in the company’s reliability.
For Executives: A cycle of firefighting instead of progress; reliance on heroics rather than sustainable execution; and a disconnect between strategy and reality. The impacts of burnout or key person loss is devastating to strategic achievement.
Why Businesses Struggle to Focus on "How"
If the costs of poor execution are so high, why don’t more companies prioritise and invest in it?
Organisational Debt (Entrenched Practices & Inertia) – Many companies are stuck in legacy ways of working that no longer serve them but feel “too big” to change.
Short-Term Focus – Leaders prioritise immediate wins (hitting quarterly targets; the next delivery milestone) over sustainable improvements that take time to materialise.
Fear of Looking Incompetent – Most leaders fear having the torch shone on the performance of their area - in reality, it is almost always the cross functional challenges outside their control which cause issues.
Transformational Disruption – Many assume that improving “how” they work requires a massive transformation program, creating resistance to change.
Relentless Busyness – Ironically, being too busy is the exact reason you are too busy. Slow down to speed up.
Fortunately, shifting focus to operational improvement doesn’t have to mean another massive transformation program. Start with small, incremental changes that drive real impact.
How to ReBoot “How” you work
Look at Flow, Not Just Outcomes – Examine how work moves through the company, identifying cross-functional challenges and blockers that slow the work down.
Align Teams Around Value Delivery – Ensure teams understand not just the goals, but how their work connects end-to-end to deliver them effectively.
Encourage Experimentation – Test small process improvements, measure impact, and refine before scaling changes.
Expert Focus – Day to day management of your teams, fighting fires and applying your expertise to the most challenging problems is all consuming. Bringing in an expert dedicated solely to “how you work”, can reveal and resolve hidden inefficiencies that internal teams are too busy to spot.
Empower Teams to Improve Their Own Ways of Working – Shift from centralised process improvement to enabling teams to remove inefficiencies themselves.
Bringing a dedicated focus on "how" your company operates is the missing ingredient to executing strategy effectively. Instead of chasing results with brute force, optimise how work gets done – unlocking speed, efficiency, and long-term success. Most companies wait until execution problems become crises before taking action. The best time to fix 'how' you work is before inefficiencies cost you your strategic goals.
If you’re seeing these challenges, let’s chat. ReBoot Co. specialises in uncovering the hidden blockers in how your company operates, and helps to simplify and ReBoot how you generate value.
* Closing the Gap, Economist Impact, October ‘17