It has been reported that more than 65 percent of all organizations have agreed-upon business strategies. That's impressive when you consider how many startups, sole proprietor shops and at-home businesses there are across the U.S.
Unfortunately, what happens after the strategies are developed isn't as impressive. According to a column in Forbes, only 14 percent of employees understand their organizations' strategy, and less than 10 percent of organizations ever successfully execute their strategies.
When strategies fail, stall out, or never make it off the ground, excuses fly around like a gaggle of drunken geese dropping blame all over the organization: Bad leadership. Poor execution. Lack of team involvement. Lazy coworkers.
In truth, most strategies fail or fail to fly because of something else: lack of alignment.
Alignment reconciles what customers want with the products and services you offer. For alignment to work, you need a training program that accommodates the different thinking styles of your employees as well as your customers.
In other words, creating an aligned strategy to successfully grow your business is all about using whole brain thinking, which teaches your employees to communicate with people who think differently than they do.
Here's how whole brain thinking and growth-aligned business strategy can work together in your organization:
1) Start by acknowledging that not everyone processes information the same way
Too often, strategies are developed with the assumption that everyone thinks the same way. In reality, however, everyone has a different thinking style. Some people are logical, analytical, and fact based. Others are organized, sequential, and detailed. Then there are those who are intuitive. And who could forget the emotional, feeling-based thinkers? And before you start to believe that there are only four types of thinkers, you'd better believe that there are plenty of people who do their thinking at the brain buffet, grabbing bits and pieces from each area to form their thought processes.
If your strategy only accounts for one type of thinking, you're likely to alienate a whole lot of people – and your strategy will likely fail. If you use the whole brain thinking model and acknowledge that your strategy needs to be able to be understood by a whole lot of people with a whole lot of different thinking styles, it's more likely to succeed.
2) Coordinate your communication
If you've ever played a game of telephone, you've seen – and heard – firsthand what happens when messages are passed among people who process information differently. Messages become mutated, employees fail to see how their day-to-day functions connect to strategy, and eventually everyone just goes back to doing their own thing.
But what if your communication was coordinated to account for the fact that people need to hear the same message, differently? Perhaps through different mediums. Perhaps by allowing employees to share ideas about how they'd like to do their jobs. For sure it's about understanding how employees think so you can best inform them about the strategy and inspire them to go out and execute it.
3) Execute
It's been said that you can't change thinking without changing behavior, but you can't change behavior without changing thinking, either. This is what whole brain thinking is all about. If you want to become one of the 10 percent of organizations that executes strategic business plans, you'll have to understand how employees think so you can produce the desired behavior to execute your plan.
4) Be impressive!
Don't be a statistic. Instead, be impressive: be one of the statistically few organizations with strategies that employees understand and execute by utilizing whole brain thinking and creating a useful growth-aligned business strategy.
