If I am assisting a business owner/s, or directors design and formulate a strategy for the furture sustainability of that business, I am often asked how important it is that their people are aligned to their strategy. Well the easy answer is that this is of primary importance, as there must be some form of correlation in order to obtain that proverbial buy-in.
Your people must arrive at work every day knowing that their performance that day contributes DIRECTLY to their own life-time/family aspirations/plans etc. Now whilst this is not an easy task it is obtainable with the correct strategy implementation activity.
Let me take business strategy down to family strategy.
We all need a plan, this is not debatable, it is just plain common sense. So we go and get married, move in together and here we start planning "together" for the first time. So we realise that if we are both working we need to share chores, this is about appointing the right people to do the right tasks at scheduled times. We might have to train certain people, as we might have to learn these new tasks in our personal life. Careers take precedence, as does education, next we need to plan for children, this involves additional costs, so we need to make sure we can cover these costs either one or both ensuring that the career pays off. Then the kid/s arrive as does schooling, higher education etc. The house purchase takes place, again planning around affordability risks of earnings etc.Then we need to mitigate our earnings vs costs risk, so we take out contingency cover such as life and accident insurance, further along we are also planning for retirement, so its savings, annuities, pension funds etc. This entire process involves planning, budgetting, forecasting, borrowing, so as we can see there is a complete correlation with business strategy planning.
The trick now is to gear our people's plans with those of the business.
