Small Business Blog from Atlantic Canada

I am "CA" Atreya (PMP, MBA), the author of this blog. I help businesses in Atlantic Canada achieve their BHAG successfully. You may subscribe to this blog using a feed reader (RSS).

Note: For the first article in this series please go to Issues in Strategy Implementation.

Continuing with our discussion on strategy implementation, we turn our attention to internal company polices and procedures. Changes to the strategy usually entails some form of change in internal operations. People are set in their ways of doing things. You are going to face some resistance when asking them to change. This could also generate some degree of anxiety and stress among some people. A change may also cause confusion. So you need to have policies and procedures in place. This will be a great aid in strategy implementation.

du Pont has a policy that employees shall neither seek nor accept for themselves or others any gifts, favors or entertainment without legitimate business purpose as part of their Business Ethics Policy and Procedures. McDonald has a policy to discard the burgers if they are not purchased within 10 minutes after bing cooked – french fries 7 minutes. Washington State University has a policy for maintaining its data – non-public and confidential University data shall be used only in the performance of assigned roles within the University. User IDs shall be unique and assigned to an individual WSU computer or network system user and passwords must be of a minimum 8 characters in length.

As we can see, there is a definite role for the new and revised policies to help in the strategy implementation process. Written wisely, policies and procedures help channel actions, behaviour, decisions and practices that promote the strategy. When policies and procedures are not strategy-supportive they become a barrier to change. It has been my experience, when implementing change, some people will vigorously defend the “old way of doing things” in an effort to stall or redirect the change process.

You must review existing policies and procedures whenever you modify your strategy. As a CEO you need to be proactive about it and discard the ones that will hamper strategy implementation. I know a lot of people who will oppose policies and procedures in the first place. It stifles creativity and innovation they say. This is true specially for SMEs. Small businesses are so overwhelmed with the work that they either do not take the effort to write one down or it sits in the shelf gathering dust.

Ricardo Semler, in his book, Maverick tells us how Semco got rid of all the manuals and polices and procedures. But they did have a one pager “common sense” document that provided a direction on … well … internal policies. If that works for your business, by all means follow it. For those SMEs that do not have one – it is time you got one. I am not saying you have to write a policy of each and every action – vacation time, sales calls, flextime, etc. Just make sure your employees understand what is expected of them – especially when you change strategies. It can mean policies that require things to be done in a certain way or polices that give employees independence and leeway to use their creativity to do the activities in the manner they think best.

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