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Strategy + Team

Your starting point: 

Strategy refresh with a focus on team alignment.

It looks like there's confusion among your team about the overall strategy and how it should best be brought to life. We recommend starting your adaptive journey by revisiting your strategy—how it’s defined, how it's being socialized and what inputs your team can provide to make it clearer.

Starting steps: 
Align on the basics
  • "Strategy" is a word that means different things to different people. Start by meeting with your team to align on exactly what the word means.
  • You might be surprised to discover that when team members talk about a good marketing strategy, they are actually referring to a set of tactics or even operational approaches.
  • Use this meeting to highlight the differences and commonalities among your team and formulate a common definition.
  • One option to consider: "Strategy is the reason you do the thing you’re doing (and not something else).” We like the practicality of this definition because it's squarely focused on what you want to achieve for the organization at large through your collective efforts.
  • Focusing on the reasons behind the work you all do together leaves room for you to explore different tactical approaches to achieve your goals.
Sync with the larger organizational vision
  • Before you drill down into the details of your marketing strategy, make sure you're starting from a place that aligns closely with the bigger-picture priorities of the business.
  • Your marketing strategy should be a natural extension of the organization-wide vision and goals.
  • Sometimes teams can get caught with blinders on, focusing too closely on their own channel or department. It’s useful to zoom out and look at connections.
  • To validate your marketing expertise and strategies against the organization’s overall strategy, ask yourself: "How can marketing enable a connection between our customers and our organizational vision?"
  • Encourage your team to frequently switch between big-picture and detailed thinking.
Develop and share the strategy

After you've aligned on the basics, it’s time to socialize the details of your strategy to ensure broad awareness and understanding. Choose either a bottom-up or a top-down approach, depending on what feels most aligned to your culture.

If your culture is driven by consensus, very flat or characterized by many strong legacy voices and opinions, use a bottom-up approach. If your culture is hierarchical, opt for a top-down approach.
  • Start by asking team members to do their best to articulate the strategy in a few sentences.
  • Use this as a starting point for discussions and workshops to map out the delta between your vision and the team's understanding of it.
  • The end result will be a sharper articulation of your strategy that everyone can understand and use.
  • Re-articulate your strategy and create scenarios in which team members can have safe, practical experiences that bring the strategy to life.
  • This might involve a strategy hackathon, a highly coached pilot project or a series of town hall presentations.
  • In every case, focus on making the strategy tangible and relevant to their day-to-day work.

If your culture doesn’t fit easily into these categories, you can mix both approaches. It’s important to understand that there is no wrong starting point here. 

It looks like there's confusion among your team about the overall strategy and how it should best be brought to life.

“If you’re on a mission to make change happen, you want Modern Craft in your corner.”

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