Business literature is full of advice for CEOs and leaders on what to do, but sometimes falls short on the how. Case in point is this article published by SmartBlog on Leadership titled “What’s the plan?” The author, S. Chris Edmonds, tackles the important topic of how to create a corporate strategy as well as ensure all employees understand it and can link it to their individual goals. He presents a five-step process for developing, communicating, and reinforcing a strategic plan. The first few steps give advice for crafting the strategy, which is fine, but where I believe his article – and strategic plans for that matter – falls short is in what he calls the “Work” and “Assess” phases.

In the “Work” step, Edmonds says you’ll spend the majority of your time “working the plan.” What does this entail? He states that you should “…craft relevant performance dashboards that help communicate progress on strategies and goals with a quick glance. You’ll communicate, educate, and promote your strategies and goals. You’ll then align plans, decisions, and actions, daily.”

This is all well and good but not a trivial undertaking. Create dashboards? Align everything daily? How is a busy CEO supposed to do this, especially in larger organizations?

The last step is “Assess,” where you’ll “assess the progress on and effectiveness of your strategies and goals.” At least quarterly, he says, “gather data with key players and refine targets as needed.”

Again, this is an important step, but how can a CEO gather data from hundreds or thousands of employees and make sense of it?

This challenge is why CEOs need a system. I created Khorus software specifically to help CEOs better instill their strategies across the organization and align employees to those strategies. Instead of waiting to find out where the company stands at the end of the quarter or getting anecdotal input, CEOs can see on demand, cascading goal performance for the entire organization, departments and individual employees, and how they each link to the corporate goals.

It’s about time someone gave CEOs and other organizational leaders the “how” amidst all the punditry about the “what.” My aim with Khorus is to provide that.