Why inclusion can help you to deliver successful strategies

Four techniques to consider

1. Get more people involved 

Route one is simply to increase participation. It’s not perfect, but it has a big impact on how your employees feel. For example, Roche Diagnostics’ General Manager for Germany took a big leap of faith when updating the territory’s strategy. Instead of asking the executive team to come up with all the ideas, as per normal, he asked all 800 employees to say what they thought. As a result, engagement numbers at this regional arm of the Swiss multinational healthcare company went through the roof. 

2. Ask specific groups to take the lead 

Another option is to assign limited-sized, non-traditional groups to lead parts of the strategic process. Take the Finnish forest products firm Stora Enso. In 2011, the senior team of this big global company was all male, all white, all Finnish or Swedish, and all aged over 45. They understood that they did not necessarily have the right perspectives to build for the future, so they asked employees from across the company to apply to join a special group of “pathfinders” to act as a shadow executive board to devise strategic options for the future. A larger group of “pathbuilders” was created to continue this process and cascade the new strategy. The result was a linear increase in engagement, perhaps because the initiatives only involved a small number of a 20,000-strong workforce.  

3. Focus on the must-win battles 

This approach means not just democratizing the process of coming up with strategic options, but allowing a larger team to make strategic decisions based on those options. The incoming CEO of Northern European façade engineering firm Staticus wanted to change the habit of bringing in new people to fix problems by engaging more of the existing organization. In practice, this meant involving 25 out of 600 employees to decide what the critical priorities were and then to act as change agents to transmit the new approach throughout the company. With each change agent tasked with cascading the strategy to relatively small groups, Staticus’s engagement scores skyrocketed.  

4. Building strategy together  

Is it possible to involve large numbers of people at great depth in the strategic process, from coming up with ideas to making decisions and delivering on those decisions? Let’s go back to Roche Diagnostics. Following his success at the regional level, the head of Germany was promoted to lead a division of 1,600 people. He took a similar mindset to his new job. Through 60 workshops involving 800 people, 11,300 ideas were generated for the future, from which the groups made key choices for the division’s critical priorities. This initiative, under the banner “Building our organizational strategy together”, was a big success and resulted in a “step change” impact on engagement scores.  

As you explore options, it’s important to remember that embracing inclusion in strategy does not have to lead to a trade-off between the numbers involved and the depth of involvement. By going broad and deep with inclusion, executives can enable all employees in their organization to really understand what their roles are and the meaning behind strategic decisions in order to deliver successful strategies.