The Execution Coalition is a collective name for the various people who are responsible for the various stages of a new initiative. Figure 1 illustrates this important, innovative concept. The Execution Coalition consists of five key roles that are consistent across all accelerators. The first four are the people who come up with the solutions:

1. The Chief Execution Sponsor
2. The Co-Sponsors, who support the chief sponsor
3. The Execution Lead, usually the project manager
4. The Execution Team

The fifth member of the Execution Coalition is concerned solely with reaping the benefits of the initiative:

5. The Benefit Realization Manager

Many people fail to see the importance of the Benefit Realization Manager and don’t assign this role the weight it deserves. But in the end, what counts most is using the newly-introduced solution—the executed initiative—to achieve the desired results. So actually, the fifth role is the most important of them all. Sometimes, the Benefit Realization Manager plays a key role in the analysis, design and implementation of the initiative. But not always. For example, a sales manager who was not involved in the initial analysis of a sales effectiveness project still has to use the new business processes to achieve results and meet targets.

This clear division into five distinctive roles is key to ensuring alignment across the organization, which in turn is crucial for the success of your strategy execution. The strength of the Execution Coalition is its built-in coordination between Running the Business and Changing the Business, and across the various disciplines and vertical chains, which ensures the best odds of success: Agile avant la lettre. Creating an Execution Coalition for each initiative relieves you of any dependence on the current organizational structure of the business and on individual actors’ alertness and willingness to align with others. The division of roles in the Execution Coalition turns alignment into a daily routine, a fixed item on the agenda. What better way to be poised for success?

Don’t underestimate the importance of alignment. It’s a fundamental principle underlying strategy execution. It’s about so much more than how to organize strategy execution in terms of project management. The Execution Coalition is the change engine that drives every initiative. It pays systematic attention to the change leadership provided by the sponsor(s) and the execution lead, and to the change management provided by the execution lead, the execution team and the benefit owners.

It might sound dull, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Execution Coalition is a real “throughput engine”, as one professional called it. Not because of its formal power, but because it’s an a priori coalition that connects the boardroom with the mailroom and because its multidisciplinary composition institutionalizes alignment.