So the strategy is complete. It’s bound up in a nice binder containing a beautiful series of strategies and goals wrapped up in a bow with objectives. It’s bound up.

Now, how do you “unbound” human potential and engage leaders and teams in implementation?

Many strategy efforts produce 100% perspiration but little inspiration or innovation. Strategic plans, are often the effort of the senior team with a sprinkling of selected others working together over six months. Unless you have already created a movement, where more get involved and inspired early, the plan is unleashed to the masses with the expectation of immediate results.

Whoa! Yes, Whoa.

Like horses jarred by distraction, the late comers will most likely become agitated and need time to become familiar with the plan. When it becomes abundantly clear that change is necessary to succeed, progress slows. As employees realize successful implementation requires work in addition to their regular jobs, resistance takes the form of distractions, emergencies and familiar routines.

So, yes, whoa there!

Mandates work to create more perspiration but little engagement. Wouldn’t it be better if perspiration were replaced with inspiration and engagement? So how do you do that?

Three ways to keep the strategic movement alive include

1. Create Ongoing Opportunities to Connect:  Create containers (forums for connection) to keep people captivated and in conversation. Step out front and include as many people as possible early and often. Invite their energy into the mix. Allow those closest to the customer to be part, or better yet, invite your customers.
2. Develop Sustaining Structures: Create innovation teams and strategy champions by inviting them to build process and practices that sustain momentum.
3. Engage: You engage your leaders and teams in executive and team coaching to help widen the lens, shift energy, and create more synergy of alignment and purpose.

Human potential is boundless. Ongoing opportunities to connect, sustaining structures, and engagement allow boundless potential to move full steam ahead. Take the leap, include, captivate, and lift up the full complement of human potential in your organization.

Related articles

• Strategic Planning: it’s about creating a movement, not just a plan by @tonysilbert
• Reframing the role of a board in strategic planning by @tonysilbert
• SOARing from SWOT: four lessons in strategic planning done right by @jhsilbert and @tonysilbert
• Strategic Planning with Appreciative Inquiry: Unleashing the Positive Potential to SOAR by Catherine McKenna, Joanne Daykin, @BernardMohr & @TonySilbert