Strategic management involves the management of both strategy and performance through the implementation of strategic plans and addressing specific issues and challenges, such as entering new markets, dealing with a demotivated team, mitigating a competitor’s attack, and responding to market share losses, or other changes in the external environment.

Implementing strategy is not a new issue in the business world; however, current generations of leaders generally focus on how to plan, but not on how to implement. Those who participate in the strategic planning process often focus on strategy development, while few focus adequately on the implementation of the developed strategy. This behavior creates gaps in the implementation of strategies, and these gaps are one of the main determinants of the failure of many strategies.

The term “strategic challenges” refers to factors that exert a decisive influence on the likelihood of an organization’s success. These challenges are often motivated by an organization’s desired position versus competitors.

There are three main challenges in developing and implementing strategies: ideation, engagement, and focus.  It’s important to understand what’s at the heart of these challenges before diving into solutions.

The first strategic challenge is ideation.

Ideation is the moment when brainstorming takes place about the challenges of the organization and identifying alternative paths to solving the presented problems and achieving desired objectives. Ideation takes place to collect ideas that help answer questions and to develop efficient solutions. It is at this stage that all those involved in the development of the strategy will give their opinion and propose interventions in the problems. A good result of ideation is arriving at a solution developed from various perspectives on an initial issue.

Managers have an initial idea of what they want to achieve, but when they put it down on paper, it often falls short of their expansive vision.  They often don’t have a clear understanding of the steps required to go from initial vision to strategy delivery.

The second challenge is engagement.

Aligned employees are key to the success of a strategy. The engagement challenge can be understood by observing the lack of alignment of the organization with the strategy. This happens when the manager has a plan in mind but lacks the essential support or assistance of the organization to realize it. Maybe the manager doesn’t feel empowered enough. Or maybe s/he feels empowered, but people refuse to get excited about his/her ideas for the company.

The third challenge is focus.

Staying focused is not easy. This strategic challenge is perhaps the most frustrating of all. The manager implements the plan but sees, perhaps, that people are losing focus and returning to the old ways from before the new, “incredible” strategy was launched. People are not meeting the goals assigned to them in the plan. Nothing has really changed between the before and after. New ideas continue to be added to the strategic plan that do not necessarily add value. Focus implies defining indicators (KPIs), establishing goals appropriately, and monitoring the evolution of the strategy by analyzing the results achieved for each indicator against their respective, established goals.