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I’ve talked in the past about having a vision for your team – this describes where you want the team to be at a set point in the future, and should guide all decisions you make with and about your team. This team vision fits into a wider strategic approach to running your team – you need a strategy for what the team will achieve, and you also need to ensure that the team strategy is aligned with strategies above you in the organisation. Organisational strategy works something like this…   There’s an organisational strategy set from the top. There are then X number of divisional strategies which feed down from this. The sum of all the divisional strategies should achieve the organisational strategy. The next level down is team strategies, and even within your team, you could have functional strategies: the individual tasks and KPIs for each team member. A solid organisational approach to strategy means that all the lowest level parts, when combined, achieve the organisational strate...

By Neil Shorney, CEO, Navanter Knowledge Bites . Many leadership teams spend a large amount of time developing goals for their businesses, and strategies to achieve those goals. As leaders tend to have larger salaries, and these leaders all get together in the same room (or video call), this time comes at a cost. So we can say that strategy development is an expensive business, especially if you also bring in a consultant to help with the facilitation of those meetings (which, incidentally, is a good idea). So I find it quite depressing when this investment in the organisation’s future is wasted because the strategy is so poorly communicated. It ends up with a business having great, well-thought-through plans, that no-one knows about. I remember doing some work with a company a couple of years ago, for middle managers to work to align their team strategies to the organisational one, and when I arrived in the training room, I was shocked to hear that I knew more about the company’s st...