As a leader, you need to be regularly scanning the horizon and planning for the future. But if your people aren’t inspired to bring that plan to life, it won’t go anywhere. Strategy without execution is like a car without fuel. For real progress, you need to engage your team and connect your plan to meaningful work.

https://swiy.co/go-from-planning-to-progress

You might have big ideas and a clear strategy (good!), but what are you doing to engage your people to execute and implement that strategy?

I work with a lot of leaders – especially senior leaders – who want me to help them understand the future. They can then feed that into their strategic planning. That’s good, because it gives them more confidence and clarity about their plan and decision making.

For example, here are three leadership teams I’m helping now:

• A high school that’s looking at extending what they do by teaching students about skills beyond the curriculum – that is, the broad skills that will help them to be more future-ready.
• A local council that wants to make sure they are planning for changes in their city and and for their residents.
• A financial services organisation that’s facing a lot of disruption from technology, and want to first leverage the technology themselves and also be disrupters themselves.

With all three leadership teams, I’m helping them understand what’s coming up in the future, so it can feed into their strategic planning.

But there’s a third crucial element to a successful strategy: engaging, inspiring, and motivating your people to implement and execute that strategy. Even with the best strategy in the world, if your people aren’t on board to implement it, it will fail.

Many leaders are good at the first two elements, but not as good on the third. Or, even worse, they forget about the third.

It’s like trying to drive a car where you have control of the steering wheel, and maybe even the accelerator, but there’s no petrol in the tank!

One of my speaker colleagues, Stef du Plessis, an international leadership expert based in South Africa, puts it well. He says your people aren’t there to execute your strategy. You might think they are – after all, you’re paying them – but that doesn’t engage, motivate, or excite them.

So what DO they want?

They want meaningful work.

They want to feel fulfilled at work.

They want to know they are making a difference.

Yes, of course, they want the money as well. But more than ever, your people want their work to be about more than money.

So, if you want them to engage with your strategy, make it meaningful – to THEM, not to you! Align it with what people care about. Find the pieces that will motivate people, and prioritise those pieces. Then find the people who want to make that happen.

Whenever leaders ask me about the future of work, I talk about four key elements. And only one of them is about the work itself – what needs to be done. The other three are about the people doing the work.

If you can’t get your people on board, your strategy will fail.

I’m running a free, public online presentation soon about the future of work – and especially what you can do to engage your people at work. Please register here, and invite others in your team and network as well.

I’ll see you in the future.

Register for the virtual masterclass:

https://swiy.co/go-from-planning-to-progress

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