Structural barries for strategy implementation

Just like life jackets keep you afloat, recognizing structural barriers—such as misaligned company culture and unclear decision rights—helps keep your strategy implementation on course

Why great strategies fail to get implemented?

Four built-in organizational barriers can hinder strategy execution. Regardless of how your organization’s strategy appears, it’s essential to focus on removing structural obstacles to improve your chances of success.

1. Company culture doesn’t support the new strategy

The saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast” resonates with many. In fact, when planning and preparing for execution, clearly understanding the organizational culture helps determine the appropriate level of strategic ambition. One best practice, widely recognized, is to assess what unites the organization, rather than focusing solely on how it differs from competitors. This shared sense of unity—whether it’s core values, a vision, or a common history—must be clearly articulated, as it drives business success by fostering purpose beyond profit.

Moreover, several cultural elements help determine whether your strategic ambition is set at the right level, with organizational flexibility being a key factor. For instance, in rigid organizations, decision-making and idea acceptance typically come from the top. These organizations favor predictability and maintaining the status quo, which often stifles radical strategic changes. Additionally, another important element is the flow of information. In high-performing organizations, information moves freely both horizontally and vertically. However, when information flow is restricted—especially horizontally—achieving strategic alignment becomes energy-intensive and produces weak results.

2. Decision rights are not clear

Often, people within an organization are unclear about who holds final decision-making authority, which stalls progress. It seems basic: do all managers know their roles, responsibilities, and the decisions they are empowered to make? In smaller, younger companies, colleagues tend to understand each other’s responsibilities clearly. However, as organizations mature and grow, this clarity fades. Typically, in strong execution-focused organizations, over 70% of employees have a clear understanding of their responsibilities.

3. Motivators are incorrectly set

Balancing traditional core business with new initiatives presents a challenge in setting the right motivators. Generally, financial and promotional incentives have the greatest impact. However, for transformational strategies, the key lies in finding the right balance between old and new activities. For example, even in traditional businesses, motivating sales teams solely on revenue or margin can lead to an overly broad product range and hidden development and delivery costs. Consequently, if one part of the organization is rewarded for profitability while another focuses on revenue, internal tension arises.

Additionally, many organizations reward employees based on past performance and delivered results, which encourages a “play it safe” mentality. This approach, in turn, discourages risk-taking and experimentation, as failures may not be tolerated. As a result, few organizations reward ambitious projects, agility, or teamwork—qualities that drive innovation. Unfortunately, organizations often reward those who meet their targets, thereby reinforcing a fear of failure.

4. The structure is not suitable for the selected strategy

Organizational culture, decision rights, and motivators are closely linked to structure. Ideally, structural changes should result from these three elements, not precede them. Otherwise, if decision rights are unclear, structural silos can form, which paralyzes decision-making and stifles information flow. As a result, top-performing organizations build their structures around streamlined decision-making, clear responsibilities, and a straightforward customer service path.

Moreover, since middle management drives strategy execution, it is critical that the organizational structure, reward system, culture, and decision rights are clearly defined and understood. By ensuring this clarity, organizations can enable smoother strategy implementation and improved performance

Implementing strategy and Amplon

At Amplon, we provide strategy coaching and consulting as part of implementing our software. We’ve helped numerous organizations successfully execute strategies and dismantle structural barriers.

Amplon applies Hoshin Kanri principles to engage employees and visualize strategy, allowing companies to design a bottom-up approach that adapts to their culture and processes.

By making joint development projects easy to share, Amplon ensures organizational focus, while instant strategy monitoring through dashboards enables immediate responses to deviations.

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What if your organization were perfectly aligned to execute its strategy? Amplon makes the alignment easy.