When You Think a Strategy is Wrong

Gallo, A. (2010). When you think a strategy is wrong. Retrieved February 7, 2010 from: http://blogs.hbr.org/hmu/2010/02/when-you-think-the-strategy-is.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29

This posting is found on Harvard Business Review’s Best Practices site and explains how lower-level managers should handle strategy implementation of a strategy they did not develop themselves. If the manager disagrees with the strategy, there are three steps he or she should follow in deciding how to handle the disagreement. First, the manager needs to diagnose the strategy so that he can understand the full picture. Secondly, the manager should contextualize his concerns with the strategy. Is it really that bad? Are you just resisting change? Can minor changes be made to improve it without scraping it altogether? These first two steps may help the manager see that the strategy is not so wrong after all. Lastly, if after the first two steps the manager still feels it is a bad strategy, he should verbalize it with his immediate supervisor. This discussion should be done in private and backed up with facts as to why this is not a good strategy and alternative solutions to the strategy should be presented. The information in this article can be helpful to managers because just going along with a bad strategy without looking into it further and not causing changes to happen when warranted is bad strategy in itself. Also though, it is not a good idea to resist a new strategy until you understand it, to the extent possible, from the viewpoint of upper management.