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How clear is your company’s strategy to you? Do you know how your work and your team’s work is aligned with this year's priorities? If you are unsure of the answers, I doubt you are alone. It used to surprise me when people in a company, even senior management, were unsure of the purpose and direction of their organization. Unfortunately, I have now seen far too many examples to suspect this is an issue ion many companies. For instance, it’s not uncommon when a manager in customer support is asked to work on an internal initiative, that they have little understanding why the company is doing the project. Or a product team is asked to focus on a new segment, but unsure how that ties to the company's goals. Often a company’s strategy and what is most important to them right now is not communicated past the board room or C-suite. Or worse yet, the executive leadership has not spent the time to define the business objectives and goals in a way that is clear. 

To make sure your company has a clear direction and that everyone knows how they support it from the board room to the scrum pod, here is an outline you can follow.

1. Starting with Why: Be clear about your company’s purpose 

What is that one purpose your organization is here to fulfill? Many companies have mission statements, but often they are so convoluted it remains unclear what the real purpose of the organization is. If you are unsure why the company started in the first place, if that purpose is clear to everyone in the organization, or if your mission still holds as you have grown, here are some guide post to help you evaluate your current mission and/or purpose statement. 

• How do you know if your purpose is clear?  A litmus test to see how clear it is is to see how embedded the mission is in every decision you and your team makes. Do you decide what products and services you create based on if it gets you closer to that purpose? Do you decide to shut down or divest a business because it detracts resources and attention from focusing on your mission. An example of this is Nike in 2012. Nike’s purpose is focusing on inspiration and innovation for athletes. They decided they had strayed from that focus with some of their subsidiaries and therefore decided to divest Cole Haan to focus more on the Nike core brand. This allowed them to reinvest into their core business and invest in inspiring every athlete globally.
• Does the mission of your organization change? While the strategy changes, your purpose is long lasting. In other words, how you are trying to accomplish your purpose can change and should evolve. NASA did put a man on the moon. That was their strategy in superiority in space exploration in the 1960s. Did NASA go away? Nope, they have not put a man on the moon again but have continued their mission in space exploration.  
• As you grow how do you make the mission relevant for a bigger organization? This is where it is very important to look at the organization and structure of the corporate organization. If you have business groups that are different, they may have different purposes. Those should be allowed to run somewhat autonomously in order to ensure everything they need to support their purpose is clearly aligned to it. The subsidiaries purpose should also not be starkly different from the parent. For example, Unilever’s purpose is different than their subsidiaries. However, they are not incongruent. Let’s look at one of their subsidiaries, Ben and Jerry’s. Their purpose is very much about challenging the status quo through both their ice cream and their social justice missions. Unilever’s overarching purpose to be a global leader for sustainable business. Ben and Jerry’s purpose fits within that purpose. They also has an independent board and autonomy to fulfill their more focused purpose. This is where large corporations need to be clear about their mission and using it as a guide post for growth, whether that growth is organic or through acquisition. 

2. Creating focus: Define objectives for what is most important right now. 

Even with a mission statement that is well understood, the second hurdle is defining what your objectives are right now that will get you closer to fulfilling that purpose. How are you going to accomplish your purpose? What is your strategy? To define your objectives, you will need to do some research, create understanding and alignment with your team, and ruthlessly prioritize. 

• Do the research. This will require some hard introspection. What are you company’s strengths and weaknesses? What is getting in the way for you to move forward? Do you understand your customer’s needs? How are you serving that need? What innovations will help better serve those needs? 
• Create understanding and alignment of where your opportunities are. There are a number of tools to help with this: SWOT analysis, growth trajectory, competitive analysis, horizon planning, etc. You can also start out with something as simple as a retrospective. The sailboat exercise being a good one here. 
• Prioritize your opportunities based on effort/reward. A lot of companies will prioritize based on ROI, a cost and revenue analysis. The flaw with this is it doesn’t evaluate “should we do this project? Will it further our mission?" It also has the risk of keeping your company in planning mode, doing detailed and costly business cases. The flaw in business cases is that because you get to detail precision on numbers, you assume it is accurate (precision does not equal accuracy). The second flaw is this is for prioritization. You don’t need precision or accuracy for that matter. You just need effort and reward estimated in terms of relativity to each other. Will this cost be about 2 times more than the other project? Will the impact be ten times more than this program? This you can crowd source amongst a cross-functional team. The results are often more accurate than the business case analysis and, bonus, much less costly to perform. 
• Define your business objectives to focus on right now. Setting clear objectives is not always easy but critical. Objectives must be specific and measurable. Also, think about what you want to achieve in the next year. Your near-term business objectives can be ambitious but also should be achievable within a one.year time horizon. While some objectives may be part of a long-term goal and take a few years to fulfill, breaking down results to incremental points helps track if you are headed in the right direction. It took NASA 8 years to land a man on the moon from the time Kennedy first set the goal. The space program set incremental milestones to achieve that. Eight months after setting the moon objective, the first American to orbit Earth was achieved. A huge milestone in propelling the objective further along. also measurable. Ensure you are setting objectives that can be evaluated in the near term but also meet those long-term goals.
• Double check if the objectives are clear and aligned to the company purpose. Is this what you want every team and department focused on? Are you willing to stop doing other things to focus on this? A clear way to double-check these, is to ask if you want every team making decisions based on these objectives. For example, if you are a leader at NASA in the 1960s, it was clear that your organization’s purpose was space exploration and the clear direction you had was to land a man on the moon. Therefore, as a leader you would be asking the team in every decision: “How will this help us get to the moon?” Do you prioritize your portfolio of projects, products, and programs by “What will help us get to the moon faster? Safer?” What blockers or policies are in place that interfere with us getting to the moon? Everything was focused on the clear objective. You get the picture. It should be so clear and so embedded that decision making is easy.
• Set measurable results you want to see against these objectives. Define the results you would like to see in terms that are measurable and you can track. For example, improving customer satisfaction is a good idea, the objective on the other hand should outline how you will do that and how you will measure if it is successful.

3. Embedding throughout the Organization: Communicate, communicate, communicate. 

Now that you have done the crucial part of defining your goals and being deliberate about what your company’s purpose is, now it’s time for the hard part. To execute your strategy well, you need to ensure your purpose is embedded in all levels of the organization. Shout it from the roof tops. No one that is in the organization or does business with you should have any doubt. I believe you would be hard pressed to find anyone that is aware of the Patagonia brand to not also be aware of the company’s purpose to appreciate and protect Earth’s natural resources. Their purpose is clearly laid in their values, their decisions, their programs, and now their ownership, and is well communicate inside and outside the organization. 

When working with your employees, communicate not just the mission but also what is most important right now. There should be no question for anyone in the organization what the goal is and what we are trying to achieve this year. One of the most powerful ways to activate your teams is making the purpose relevant for what it means to them and how they can support it. 

• Communicate the business objectives. Think in terms of: Our purpose is ______, this year we are focused on ______ because we believe it will make the most impact to achieve that purpose. 
• Define at the functional level and team level how they will support the goals. Ask your teams: "How can you and your team help this year to achieve our purpose?" 

Notice we are encouraging you to ask the team how they believe they can help. By setting a clear vision and then empowering the team to define how they can best support it, you now have motivated and inspired teams. They know what the purpose of their work is, and they are empowered as a team to work towards it. 

4. Track, reinforce, and reevaluate: make rethinking part of your business rhythms

Now you have done the hard part. You have spent the time to ensure your purpose is clear, you have decided on what your focus is right now, and you have aligned the organization to these objectives. Now it’s time ti sit back and relax. Unfortunately, if that were true, that lemonade stand I started when I was eight would not only still be reaping in the profits but I would be a mogul for a company that produces the best exile to quench thirst on a hot summer day. But alas, the purpose died, I did not track and evaluate my performance, and I did not adjust my approach and tactics to respond. 

To keep your purpose leading the way and to realize your near-term objectives, make it part of your regular operations to: 

• Track you progress to goals. Do not just track your financial performance, but make sure you are also tracking your progress to the objectives set out. Financial performance can have big swings month to month and quarter to quarter. Some of you goals may require investments and divestitures that have short-term profitability hits. Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will get you closer to your goals. Keeping progress to goals front and center will help you stay to course even when turbulence hits your company.
• Regularly reinforce your purpose and goals. Every leader and every team should keep these front and center when they are planning and deciding on course of action. Regularly reinforce to ensure that is the case. It keeps you and your team members inspired.
• Evaluate and adjust tactics. The market changes, you learn more about your customers, you try new things, and new technology is developed. These are all things that are true for every organization in any industry. This requires you to review and update goals and objectives. Constantly evaluate if what you are trying is getting us closer to our goals. Look at the data and challenge yourself and each other. Are you focused on the right things to achieve our goals? What are you doing that is working? What should you be doing that you are not? I recommend for most organizations to have these reflection and planning sessions throughout the year to adjust and maintain momentum. Planning should no longer be an annual event. Try moving to quarterly cadences. See if that gives you the agility you need.

In short, running a successful business is more than having a business plan and strategy. It is ensuring you have defined your objectives, aligning all levels of the organization towards a common goal, and regularly reviewing and updating your goals.

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