Strategy Map Explained: How to Make a Strategy Map Template

A strategy map is an action plan companies and nonprofit organizations use to chart their goals on a host of different metrics. Descended from the Balanced Scorecard approach championed by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, strategy maps also take a four-pronged approach to analyzing business planning.

Strategy maps correlate employee learning and internal business procedures with generating customer value and boosting financial performance. A strategy mapper generally lines up these four rows from bottom to top on a single page, displaying how internal elements help build the foundation for the customer and financial perspectives.

After adding goals to each tier, a mapper can then draw lines between the goals to show how each supports the other. This illuminates how intertwined business strategy is from multiple different vantage points.

To set your strategic objectives well, take multiple aspects of your business into consideration. Line up these four elements in horizontal bands from the bottom to the top and fill them in with all your goals:

1. 1. Learning and growth: This tier represents how employee training and growth undergirds your entire strategy as a business. Employees are important stakeholders, and they also perform the work to give your company value. It’s important to take a growth perspective with your workers—continually looking for ways to hone their skills for your business and incentivize them to increase productivity. When you treat your employees well, you add an essential ingredient to any formulation for business success.
2. 2. Internal business process: When you take an internal process perspective, try to elucidate how you can improve all the procedures essential to daily activity at your company. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and initiatives to expedite processes while keeping quality high. This helps promote the best possible practices and decision-making processes for each department.
3. 3. Customer relationships: Once you get your ducks in a row for the internal aspects of your company, you’re ready to move on to the customer management process. As you take the customer perspective in your strategy map, ask for ways you can improve outward-facing communications and marketing. See if there are ways you can tie internal procedures and employee growth to outreach in a tangible way.
4. 4. Financial performance: Financial goals are generally at the top of any organization’s strategy map, given how all the other aspects shore up company performance on this tier. Ask how you can improve your business strategy to facilitate maximum revenue growth and increase shareholder value.

Achieving strategic goals requires developing an ironclad plan for their accomplishment. Keep these tips in mind as you build your strategy map:

• Assess company needs. Ask where your company needs improvement at any level and see determine how fixing one aspect might indirectly lead to fixing others, too. For example, if you improve internal project management, you might also correct issues with delivering goods to customers in a timely manner. Similarly, addressing employee competency issues will have a positive effect on meeting your financial goals more effectively.
• Decide on your ultimate goal. Corporate strategy execution requires a far-reaching vision statement. All of your strategic priorities should fall under this wide umbrella. Try to crystallize the purpose of your business, as well as the audiences you hope to reach and serve. This will help you better plan on a granular level when it comes to strategy mapping.
• Depict causal relationships. Strategy maps allow you to visually depict all the cause-and-effect relationships among different areas in your company. For example, meeting value propositions internally as fast as possible might require an increase in pricing for customers. Draw lines from goals in one tier of your map to another as a rough step-by-step guide to how your company runs.
• Feel free to experiment. The general strategy map template consists of one page with four predefined rows, but you can try out different methodologies. Check other businesses’ strategy map examples to see if you prefer any alternative ways to structure goal setting. Keep the core elements of drawing connections and depicting various aspects of your business intact.
• Seek input and feedback. As you plot your overall strategy, reach out to people at all levels of your company for input on strategic planning. Your sales team might have different ideas about achieving customer satisfaction than your marketing team, but both will likely have important feedback. Ask employees for the best ways to go about performance measurement and customers about what most appeals to them.
• Take a wide-angle view. Define more granular strategic themes by looking at the big picture. For example, clarity about your long-term financial strategy will help you set short-term financial goals more effectively. By taking a wide-angle view, you better allow yourself to zoom in when necessary.

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