After expending considerable effort on formulating a strategy, most executives would like to see their company’s strategic plans fully executed. Deviations from the strategic plan are often assumed to be detrimental to corporate performance. However, compliance with the strategy doesn’t necessarily correlate directly to performance.
Great Corporate Strategies Thrive on the Right Amount of Tension
Research has shown that a bit of healthy stress can be helpful — to a point. In this piece, the authors discuss the benefits (and limitations) of “strategic stress” when it comes to improving your company’s performance. Specifically, they argue that if there’s too little stress being placed on your strategy — that is, if the company and its employees are going in too many directions and no one is asking challenging questions about the strategic direction of projects — there’s little chance of your strategy actually being executed. Likewise, if there’s too much stress being placed on your strategy, where employees are blindly implementing the strategy without asking challenging questions about it, they’ll be equally blind to emerging risks or opportunities. The challenge is to find the sweet spot where employees challenge the strategy while not moving the organization too far away from its original strategic domain.