Survey Stakeholders

By Mike Loughrin, CEO for Transformance Advisors

This is the third article in our series on strategy execution.

Click here to start at the beginning.

Milestones

For many organizations, there are six milestones for launching strategic initiatives.

In this article, we will look at the second milestone – Survey Stakeholders.

Key Constituents

The next milestone involves gathering inputs from a number of stakeholders. This is critical for strategy development and identifying those strategic initiatives required for success.

The most important stakeholders include:

Customers: Learn how customers value your products and services and how they rate their overall satisfaction. Collect suggestions for areas to improve and potential new products and services.
Employees: Seek to understand how well employees understand the current strategy and how their work is directed toward accomplishing any strategic initiatives that are in process. Determine what projects people are working on.
Leadership: Have your leadership team rate the effectiveness of your current efforts to define and communicate strategy. Assess how well your organization is executing the strategic initiatives and meeting improvement goals.
Owners: Determine the vision and goals of the owners. For small and medium sized organizations, the objectives of owners can include many things besides just making money. For nonprofit organizations, money is important, but for reasons other than rewarding the owners.

Competitive Analysis

Conduct, or update, a competitive analysis.

The following example is an efficient method to assess your position relative to selected competitors:

Value Proposition	Competitor 1	Competitor 2	Competitor 3	You
Price	1.2	0.9	1.0	0.7
Quality	0.6	1.1	0.8	1.0
Service	0.8	0.7	1.2	0.9
Lead Time	0.9	1.0	1.1	0.8
Total	3.5	3.7	4.1	3.4

Other Stakeholders

You could also contact or survey:

Suppliers: Learn how suppliers view your organization and how they value your business. Collect suggestions for areas to improve and opportunities for mutual growth.
Prospects: Check your sales pipeline and survey prospects to learn how they view your organization. What do they consider to be “order qualifiers” and “order winners”?
Business Partners: Determine if your business partners see the relationship with you as win-win. Are you a good partner with whom they would like to grow? Find out if they know about all of your products and services. Collect suggestions for areas to improve and opportunities for you to help them.

Other Possibilities

Additional activities could include:

Compile a list of external trends as understood by each member of your leadership team. One of the most important responsibilities for your leadership team is being connected and plugged into everything important for your organization
Using your SIC code, obtain benchmarking reports which leverage data from public sources
Have each member of your leadership team complete a personality assessment – such as the DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness) profile
Conduct other fact finding activities such as a technology review, a financial review, a supply chain audit, or a performance measurement review

Milestone 2 is complete when:

The surveys have been returned and the results compiled into a format which will provide value to your leadership team
All other activities, which you desire, are complete and ready for consumption by your leadership team

Mike Loughrin

Mike Loughrin is the CEO and Founder of Transformance Advisors. He also teaches for Louisiana State University Shreveport and is on the board of directors for the Association for Supply Chain Management Northern Colorado.

Mike brings exceptional experience in industry, consulting services, and education. Mike has helped organizations such as Levi Strauss, Warner Home Video, Lexmark, and Sweetheart Cup.

Keeping a commitment to a balanced life, Mike loves downhill skiing, bicycle rides, and hiking in the mountains. See one of his trails of the month at: Little Switzerland.