Make strategy touch hearts, minds and behavior

It has never stopped to amaze me how some of my big corporate clients spend hundreds of thousands of euros to bring together their topmanagement in fancy, extremely well organized events to bring strategic inspiration, direction and engagement to leaders in the organization without embedding these events into a continuous flow of triggers that ensures that leadership inspiration is translated into a shared ambition and collective actions. Most of these corporates do know how to work in disciplined processes though; they have yearly financial, HR and supply chain processes with clear deadlines, roles, inputs and outputs.
How come there is no consistent, connected and continuous process of bringing strategy into hearts, minds and behavior of people in organisations? I am not debating that well organized and fancy looking topmanagement events do bring inspiration and connectedness (Who does not like to stay in 5-star hotels and be treated like a star?) I just believe that they could yield a much higher impact in terms of shared ambition, pride and engagement, if they were embedded into a more continuous process through which leaders are triggered (more regularly) to engage into actions derived from the inspiration they got through the event. 
The road from strategy (aka plans, objectives, priorities, projects...) towards behaviour is a challenging one; there are quite some roadblocks like no shared vision in the executive team, silos created by the organisational structure, a defensive culture or stress, an overload of initiatives and just plain tiredness among key people are some of them just to mention a few. On the image are the paradoxes that I recognise most organisations struggle with in the process from vision and strategy towards people. Below are some principles to bridge these paradoxes and connect strategy with hearts, minds and behaviour of people in your organisation:

1. Start up a dialogue around the question: what behaviour do we need to add, change or stop to realise our strategy? Behaviour is culture and culture changes top-down: what can we as leaders do visibly differently? In many cases this is a first insightful step to become aware of and align on the behavioural changes needed.
2. Support leaders in the organisation to really understand the strategy and changes needed and translate the strategy into leadership behaviour and a strategy pitch (not more than maximal 10 bulletpoints) that they can model and bring into the organisation.
3. Create a year-round strategy engagement clock for your organization connected to the business pulse (new year ritual, budgeting, year-end rituals, goal-setting and evaluation practices). Ensure that HR, financial, communication and strategy departments are all aligned and working together in this process. No departmental sweethearts allowed.
4. Connect topmanagement strategy communication moments - the top 200 -to leadership strategy translation activities towards units, teams and individuals. Organise, inspire and surprise this process; do not make it an excel top-down strategy deployment fill-in exercise only.
5. Measure strategy engagement of people in the organisation with regular online pulse-checks; make sure these pulse-checks don't exceed 5 questions. The outcomes of the pulse-checks are the starting point for further change and implementation dialogues for leaders and teams.
6. Organise regular top-down and bottom-up strategy progress update dialogues with various stakeholder groups in the organisation; recognise new "desired" behaviour on all levels of the organisation. Online dialogue and sharing tools can support this process.
7. Wrap-up natural cycles (quarter, year-end, strategy horizon, etc.) with harvest rituals to reconfirm awareness of what has been achieved, what has been learned and what is still out there to reach forward to.
8. Use the power of repetition for important strategic messages. Weave these key messages into everything you say and do.
9. Renew your strategy & leadership inspiration & discipline flow regularly. Focus, attention and awareness need surprise to be captured (again and again) otherwise we can get lost into meaningless routines. And: energy, action and results follow attention.  

Making strategy touch hearts, minds and behavior of people needs to be an ongoing flow. Like couples are never done renewing their love and connectedness with each other, an organisation is never done working on the connection between its ambition and the hearts, minds and actions people take.
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How do you engage people towards your vision and ambition? 

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