How to successfully execute a strategy? It's teamwork!

How do you bring a global strategy into the APAC region? You might have guessed, not with a push approach. Rather, based on a dialogue among equals.

That's what we did last week with Jungheinrich Singapore, bringing together the Racking business team to discuss how they can explore and accelerate in this market.

Jungheinrich is well known for their forklift products and less as a provider for racking systems. The headquarters identified this as a global business opportunity and encouraged all regions to explore this. The challenge for the APAC region was that solutions that work in Europe might not be applicable in Asia; the market dynamics are very different. Another challenge is that this region operates very much on a country level; what are the opportunities to work across countries in APAC?

To answer these questions, the regional leadership team brought together their racking business leaders for a workshop and I was honoured to take the lead as a facilitator and catalyst, guiding the conversations throughout the workshop.

We started off with sharing what is already happening in the region. From my experience, I know that many headquarters do not sufficiently involve the regional and local teams in defining the strategy. Already from the start we could identify a lot of experiences and opportunities for collaboration within the region.

At Hive17 we believe that the identification and execution of strategies is based on two pillars: one is to define the value we want to create for our customers; the other is the way we want to deliver to the client: how we want to behave. During the workshop, we then engaged the regional team in brainstorming and reflection along a number of questions to create a better understanding and alignment of the customer value and the behaviours.

How can we achieve our strategic objective successfully? This was the last question the team was looking at. The result was a series of concrete action items for the short-term and the mid-term future. These will help the team to prioritise and allocate resources in an optimal way.

As an observation from my side, it was great to see that we can strengthen the team cohesion when we bring them together in one room. This has created momentum and unity to tackle any challenges and opportunities together. It was great to feel the energy in the room. Thank you very much for this opportunity to support your organisation.

When do you organise your leadership retreat to build cohesion and clarity?