Strategy means the skill of managing any affair. It is used to describe a pathway along which the organization moves towards its goals or objectives. It is a method or plan chosen to bring about the desired future, such as the achievement of a goal, objective, or solution to a problem.
Policies and operating procedures aid the task of implementing the strategy in several ways:
- Providing guidance: New or revised policies and procedures provide top-down guidance to operating managers, supervisors, and employees regarding how certain things need to be done and what behavior is expected.
- Aligning actions and behavior with strategy: Policies and operating procedures paces limits on independent action and channeling individual and group efforts along the intended path.
- Enforcing consistency: Policies and operating procedures help enforce needed consistency in how’ particular “strategy-critical activities are performed in geographically scattered operating units.
- Changing the corporate culture: Instituting new policies and procedures invariably alter the internal work climate. Policy changing process can be a powerful lever for changing the corporate culture in ways that produce a stronger fit with the new strategy.
Company managers, therefore, need to be inventive in devising policies and practices that can provide vital support to effective strategy implementation and execution.
