Week 4 - Blog - Challenges of Strategy Implementation

Challenges of Strategy Implementation

We have heard of the various number of challenges that come one’s way in the path of implementation of strategy but let us study the challenges in a more structured way.

We typically identify three divisions in an organization where challenges would take place:

1) Strategy

2) Structure

3) Behaviour

Here, Strategy specifically stands for formulation and planning, Structure of the organization also plays an important part in the implementation of the strategy and at the end behaviour of the employees towards the strategy change can also be identified as one division.

Challenges in the Strategy Division:

1. Formulation and Planning: Traditionally strategy planning has always been either top – bottom or bottom – top. These practices involved a few leaders who drove the strategy change but today the organizations are changing and do not necessarily stick to these rules. Thus, one challenge for the organizations is to keep adapting to the new ways to strategy formulation and planning.
2. Poor Understanding of the broader scope: Many times, in an organization, different departments or teams working towards a strategy change are not on the same page and often fail to understand the broader goal for the strategy change. This situation leads to a failure in strategy implementation.
3. Lack of Consensus: Every decision maker and the employees of the company should agree to the strategy change and there should be a common consensus among all.

Challenges in the Structure Division:

1. Cross-Functional Teams: When your strategy involves cross-functional teams working together, it may pose certain challenges or barriers such as – physical barriers, the tension between the departments, little reward for a team which may lead to restricted involvement from that specific team/department.
2. Resource allocation: Generally, every company has 100s of things going around and each of them works parallelly irrespective of other tasks hence allocating enough resources is always a big challenge which would help to stick to the expected timeline of competition.
3. Communication: In today's age of Globalization communication is rarely an issue but it is still a factor to be looked at while considering the structural division of the company to identify the challenges in the implementation of the strategy.

      Challenges in the Behavior Division:

1.    Good Leadership: This part becomes one of the most important parts in the strategy implementation where the leader is not just responsible for having good technical skills and business acumen but at the same time Is expected to have great interpersonal skills and believes in enough autonomy for employees.
2.    Cultural context: When one is working with people from different cultures it becomes important to understand and respect the culture of everyone so that it sets a positive tone for the team and ensures equal involvement from all.