Sound Bites

Iterative Strategy Execution
is the Soul of Company Performance and People's Experience

with Deidre Paknad, WorkBoard CEO

Listen now:

Iterative strategy execution is the soul of company performance and the heart of people's experience.

Achieving the business strategy of the organization is not separate and apart from people's experience at work. And you simply can't achieve the company's strategy without those people and their engagement and their participation, nor can you have a fulfilling work experience if you're making no contribution to the strategy of the organization. That will be inauthentic and hollow for individuals and of course hollow for the entity.

The strategy is the center post, and when we have clarity on what that strategy is, focus on executing it, and the efficiency of being free and able to channel our energy to its execution, everybody wins.

It turns out that the company's strategic ambitions — the strategy itself — provides the purpose for people's work.

The high alignment we need to achieve the strategy comes from providing clarity to it, and it's that clarity that gives people the confidence to make decisions and avoids the paralysis of not knowing what to prioritize and what to act on.

And that in turn makes it possible to have strategy achievement: when we are focused on the strategy, we have the mechanism and the means to drive that focus. And if we have the mechanism and the means to drive focus on the strategy, we can include people in value creation.

That focus is the source of our speed and our agility. And if we have the mechanisms and the means to be efficient, we can adapt and drive adjustments, and through that efficiency, we can provide people with the capacity to do their best work: fewer meetings, more time spent in value creation combined with more clarity, more confidence, and more inclusion in value creation.

That same efficiency gives us higher leverage. We have more people focused on the strategy, so we have higher leverage and speed in how we achieve it. And because we're doing that with the mechanism and the means to do it efficiently, the organization gets stronger and gets more leverage from the resources, people and the brain power, the brain trust that it has.

For people, that efficiency translates into the headroom to grow, to build their competencies, to think about and lean into what's needed next, and how to make an even greater contribution to that strategy going forward.

Hand in glove, the company's outcomes and people's experience are centered in the strategy itself.