Mobilize your organization

”What I care about are people. Only they can change things, whether they are politicians, employees, or mana-gers. The point of a strategy is to support sensemaking. To give a feeling that I can move things, that I have a scope of action. And that I am not alone in making things happen.”

STINE JOHANSEN, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, HELSINGØR MUNICIPALITY

‍

Ambitious strategies require interdisciplinary initiatives, and that is why you as a chief executive are not the protagonist in your strategy realization. You and your management group are thoroughly dependent on being surrounded by a committed organization that is capable of bringing it into existence. It is crucial that top management does not slow down activities but instead is capable of liberating managers and employees such that their knowledge, ideas, and drive can be converted into new solutions within the framework of the strategy. In this process, it is important to pay attention to potentials in your network-based working communities such that competencies and functions can be put into play across hierarchies, departments, and professions.

Your strategic task is still to provide a framework for your team, but it is not until the individual manager and employee experience that the strategy can be converted into meaningful work and real progress that your strategy realization will get momentum.

ACTIVATE YOUR MID-LEVEL MANAGERS

Making the strategy a living part of your organization is never a task that you can solve yourself. Regardless of how many times you and the rest of top management mount the platform and energetically try to explain the core messages of your strategy, your strategic initiatives can only be set in motion if the whole managerial structure is activated and rises to the occasion. Mid-level managers who work in close proximity to the daily operations should be able to have the strategic dialogues at all parts of the organization, and thus mid-level managers have to be included early on in the work with your strategic messages and the mobilization of your organization as a whole. Due to their insights on practice, specific professions, and concrete problem solving, mid-level managers are able to translate your strategy into ‘everyday language’ in ways that top management sometimes fails to do. Mid-level managers are the ones making it possible for the organization as a whole to put knowledge and competencies into play across departments and hierarchies – and thereby specify how the strategy will look in practice.

LEARN TO LET GO OF POWER

Your organization needs to be empowered to act and fail along the way if your strategy is to be realized. And not merely have formal power but real power to be explorative and test new things. It can be scary for chief executives to let go of power, and we often experience chief executives finding it quite difficult surrendering power, loosening control, and giving space.

But to let go of power and to let your organization seize it do not amount to the same as to merely slacken the reins and sit back. As a chief executive, you must constantly maintain your role as general manager and be persistent in your strategic focus, while curiously interacting with the specific solutions that the organization develops and tests. This also means that you have to be open towards new structures and new procedures within your organization insofar as conventional consultation processes or debriefings do not generate much real co-creation, and most often the effect of forcing necessary development work into normal meetings is small. Instead, you must make it possible for people to have meetings across the organization such that they through dialogue, curiosity, openness, and mutual respect can create something new together.

‍