imapMyTeam Blog

Strategy vs. Execution: Which is more difficult?

Stop for a moment and ask yourself: Which is more difficult? Implementing your strategy or executing that strategy? I’ll take an educated guess that your immediate response- at least for most of you- is “execution.”

Organizations today are in a constant state of adaption; they are seeking new ways to achieve strategic organizational change and they are often successful in doing so by focusing their efforts on execution.

Excellence in execution requires far more people working in sync than in developing strategy. The sheer number of people involved in implementing the strategy creates great complexity. Personal interpretation and perceptions of how the strategy should be implemented may or may not be in alignment with the optimal approach to executing it.

imapMyTeam® is a great resource to provide an accurate and authentic picture of how you execute against strategy. The “Getting Things Done” snapshot report will help you understand 3 important areas that contribute to your preferred way of moving things forward. Specifically, it addresses your process for making decisions, moving your decisions into actions and finally working all the various to-do’s populated on your actions list.

The first page of this two-page report describes your usual behavior or most likely way you would approach each of the 3 areas. The challenge to you is to evaluate whether your most likely approach is appropriate given the situation you or the business is in, or if you need to use your self-awareness to better self-manage your behaviors to accomplish what’s needed.

The second page of the report looks at the type of support you might need from the team or others that will help you operate in a way that allows you to do your very best. Sharing this information when asked what you need to be successful, can help speed your effectiveness and minimize misunderstandings. Also, without these fundamental needs being met, we cannot adapt our behavior as described on page one.

“Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.”
                                                                                      Morris Chang, CEO TSMC


Don’t risk rendering your strategy “useless.” Know how you get things done, what you need to support your ability to get things done and be relentless in managing yourself to calibrate your behaviors to the business conditions.