Organizational Strategy: What Is Organizational Strategy?

An organizational strategy is an action plan for how a company will achieve its long-term goals. Organizational strategies should be comprehensive and include the organization or team's missions, goals, and core competencies; a plan and timeline for how to achieve those objectives; and the allocation of resources needed to do so.

Developing an organizational strategy should result in a business plan that aligns with the company’s mission and business goals. An organizational strategy also helps clarify the mission and ensures that all relevant teams are on the same page. The overarching strategy of an organization can be broken down into three main levels: corporate, business-level, and functional. Each component provides a necessary building block for meeting strategic objectives.

Every business needs a robust organizational strategy in order to create a roadmap for future success. Here’s a closer look at the three levels of organizational strategy:

1. 1. Corporate strategy: Corporate strategies are broad in scope and aim to reflect the overarching values and mission of the company. Corporate strategies lay out high-level plans for achieving strategic goals and include diversification, differentiation, and growth strategies.
2. 2. Business-level strategy: Business strategies are where the rubber meets the road—where the corporate strategy gets distilled down to specific goals. Some business-level strategy examples include investigating new markets, launching new products, or rebranding the organization.
3. 3. Functional strategy: Moving further down the funnel, functional strategies take on next-level specificity and provide team members with action plans for making strategic decisions. Functional strategies may include detailed steps like running an A/B test, creating a new landing page, or removing bugs from certain code.

To make your organizational strategy as effective as possible, consider the key features it should have and what you want it to achieve. A strong organizational strategy should be:

1. 1. Specific: When creating your organization’s strategy, provide specific goals that you aim to achieve. For example, instead of saying “We want to expand our customer base,” say “We aim to grow our customer base by twenty-five percent by the end of the year.” This provides a clear understanding for your team and enables them to work together towards a common goal.
2. 2. Realistic: Your organizational strategy should be aligned with your core competencies in such a way that makes your goals realistically achievable. All startups have dreams of becoming big, successful companies. But significant organizational changes are unlikely to happen overnight. Instead, leverage your competitive advantage and focus your strategy on incremental goals that can be reasonably achieved.
3. 3. Measurable: An organizational strategy should include milestones and metrics to determine whether or not the strategy is performing successfully. For example, simply wanting to improve your production output is not measurable. However, wanting to improve your production output by a five percent over a quarter can be measured.
4. 4. Limited: The scope of your organizational strategy needs to have a deadline. Create a strategy based on a three-to-five-year plan. Have periodic feedback cycles and assessments, and adapt as needed. When you reach the end, assess your success and begin a new strategic planning process.

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