A walkthrough of strategy maps: what they are, why organizations use them to connect goals and priorities, and how to build one. Includes examples from different company types and practical tips for rolling them out across your team.
Every organization is different when it comes to managing strategy. And strategy maps can be a great way for organizations to organize and manage the goals and the priorities that they have. So what is a strategy map? Well, a strategy map is a visual representation of your organization's goals. Typically, it's split into four categories or perspectives, usually the ones from the balanced scorecard. They will differ depending on the type of organization that you are, whether you're a for profit nonprofit healthcare organization or a local government organization. For example, for profit organizations will typically have the financial perspective at the top of their map, while local governments tend to have the customer or citizen perspective at the top of their map. So you'll want to build your strategy map during your initial strategic planning process. When you're figuring out what those goals are. A lot of times it will show you where there are gaps in your strategy. You may have three goals for your financial perspective and one goal for your customer perspective. And you realize that you need to have some more goals that are focused on your customer. Your strategy map will be most effective if you communicate it and share it with all of your employees. One company that we work with created pocket cards when they released their strategy map so that their employees could always have a copy to reference at any point in time. Another company that we work with had a big launch party. They had their strategy map printed on a cake for all of their employees to share. One way to make sure that your strategy map is always at the forefront is to use software to link your projects up to those top level goals on your strategy map. This allows your employees to always have a place to access the project that they're working on and see how they're contributing to those top level strategic goals. Use these examples to determine which type of map your organization should use and how you should categorize your goals based on your own growth strategy going forward. Keep in mind that every organization's strategy and strategy map are different, so you'll really need to customize your map so that you are working towards the goals that you have at the bottom of this article. We've provided our strategy Execution toolkit to help you get started with formulating your strategy and then putting it into a strategy map. Good luck on your strategic planning journey.
