Questions About Strategic Thinking
I love receiving responses to my articles – in the form of questions, observations, sharing of experiences and alternative views, as well as useful tools that I can share with my readers. Here are some questions asked by one of my clients in response to these articles. My answers are based on my personal experience and my fairly extensive reading.
1) Can one get so engrossed in strategic focus that the operational tasks get neglected?
Definitely. I have seen this in businesses of every size – from a small two-person business to rather large organisations. Of course, the smaller the business, the more obvious this is and the greater the damage it can do to the organisation. It tends to be only in the larger organisations that senior executives can be exclusively focused on strategic issues with no involvement in operational matters.
In the vast majority of businesses, leaders need to juggle strategic leadership with operational management – and if they err too much on the side of strategy, it can be just as threatening to the survival of the business, if not more so, than erring on the side of operational focus. My experience is that most of the leaders I work with are so immersed in the operation that they need to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the trees in order to even see the forest! And their businesses have survived – and even thrived – despite this lack of strategic focus.
The flipside is the person who is so completely absorbed in strategizing and thinking about the future that he pays scant attention to the day-to-day operational needs of the business. It is all very well looking to the creation and achievement of the long-term business strategy – but if that means that you are not generating the short-term revenues that will enable you to survive to even get to that future state, it is all somewhat meaningless. You can’t eat a strategy!
2) How do you find the balance between strategic and operational issues?
I have really enjoyed experimenting with the thinking of Stephen Covey around this. On www.audible.com I found an abridged audiobook called The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals. He refers to the day-to-day operational realities as “the whirlwind”, and it keeps whirling constantly anyway. Usually, the challenge is to ensure that you take time out to pay attention to the execution of your strategy even while the whirlwind is sweeping you along. In pursuit of this, Covey recommends four disciplines:
In his book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins refers to “obsessive, neurotic freaks” (ONFs). In respect of the four disciplines described here, you need to be an ONF if you want to be consistently successful.
In addition to these 4 disciplines, I recommend having a periodic review in which you and your team ask and answer the following questions:
3) Is it more a case of having a strategic thought process through all operational activity?
True strategic leadership means having the ability to attend to the short-term through a long-term lens. It means having a constant awareness of where you are going, despite where you actually are, and being able to make decisions about the short-term with the long-term in mind. This requires the ability to see when short-term sacrifices are in the long-term interest, and the courage to resist pursuing the short-term wins that will jeopardise long-term success – alternatively, accepting some short-term “punishment” in order to secure long-term victory. This may mean resisting the pressure to deliver quarterly results that make you look good, in favour of a disciplined and courageous execution of the strategy that is going to create real long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. This is not for sissies!
Contact Me
If you recognise that you need to start developing your strategic thinking skills and disciplines, email me on belinda@leadershipsolutions.co.za and let’s discuss your coaching programme.
1) Can one get so engrossed in strategic focus that the operational tasks get neglected?
Definitely. I have seen this in businesses of every size – from a small two-person business to rather large organisations. Of course, the smaller the business, the more obvious this is and the greater the damage it can do to the organisation. It tends to be only in the larger organisations that senior executives can be exclusively focused on strategic issues with no involvement in operational matters.
In the vast majority of businesses, leaders need to juggle strategic leadership with operational management – and if they err too much on the side of strategy, it can be just as threatening to the survival of the business, if not more so, than erring on the side of operational focus. My experience is that most of the leaders I work with are so immersed in the operation that they need to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the trees in order to even see the forest! And their businesses have survived – and even thrived – despite this lack of strategic focus.
The flipside is the person who is so completely absorbed in strategizing and thinking about the future that he pays scant attention to the day-to-day operational needs of the business. It is all very well looking to the creation and achievement of the long-term business strategy – but if that means that you are not generating the short-term revenues that will enable you to survive to even get to that future state, it is all somewhat meaningless. You can’t eat a strategy!
2) How do you find the balance between strategic and operational issues?
I have really enjoyed experimenting with the thinking of Stephen Covey around this. On www.audible.com I found an abridged audiobook called The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals. He refers to the day-to-day operational realities as “the whirlwind”, and it keeps whirling constantly anyway. Usually, the challenge is to ensure that you take time out to pay attention to the execution of your strategy even while the whirlwind is sweeping you along. In pursuit of this, Covey recommends four disciplines:
- Get clear on your “wildly important goals” – which he calls WIGs. He makes the point that you CANNOT have a shopping list of WIGs (or priorities) – that if you think you have 10 priorities, then you don’t know what your priorities are! You can really only work on and achieve success in 1 – 3 WIGs at any one time. You will have to decide what to say No to while you focus on your 1 – 3 WIGs, and you must have a clear finish line for each of them.
- Identify the key actions - Get clear on what needs to be done and what needs to be measured in order to achieve each WIG. What activities (lead measures) will produce the outcomes (lag measures) you seek? The lead measures MUST predict the outcomes you are looking for, and they must be activities that can be influenced by an individual. A sales example comes to mind for ease of explanation: in order to generate Rx of sales (lag measure), you need to phone x-number of people (lead measure) in order to see x-number of people (lead measure) and write x-number of proposals (lead measure).
- Keep a compelling scoreboard - Once you have identified your lead and lag measures, you need to measure them at consistent intervals. These “scores” must be captured on a scoreboard that is fun and motivating, simple, easily updatable, complete (it reflects both lead and lag measures) and which guides the team’s planning and indicates any need to correct course. A BIG note here: the team must like the scoreboard if you really expect them to use it.
- Create a cadence of accountability – Team members must account to each other every week for what they have done to move the scoreboard forward, and commit to the 2 or 3 things they will do this week to move the lead measures forward. Review if the predicted lead measures are producing the lag measures as predicted. If not, diagnose the problem and, if necessary adjust course or find a more effective lead measure.
In his book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins refers to “obsessive, neurotic freaks” (ONFs). In respect of the four disciplines described here, you need to be an ONF if you want to be consistently successful.
In addition to these 4 disciplines, I recommend having a periodic review in which you and your team ask and answer the following questions:
- What did we set out to achieve?
- What have we achieved?
- What is working well?
- What is not working well?
- What have we learned?
- What do we need to do differently going forward?
- More on this in the penultimate article on Strategic Leadership, in which we explore strategy as a learning process.
3) Is it more a case of having a strategic thought process through all operational activity?
True strategic leadership means having the ability to attend to the short-term through a long-term lens. It means having a constant awareness of where you are going, despite where you actually are, and being able to make decisions about the short-term with the long-term in mind. This requires the ability to see when short-term sacrifices are in the long-term interest, and the courage to resist pursuing the short-term wins that will jeopardise long-term success – alternatively, accepting some short-term “punishment” in order to secure long-term victory. This may mean resisting the pressure to deliver quarterly results that make you look good, in favour of a disciplined and courageous execution of the strategy that is going to create real long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. This is not for sissies!
Contact Me
If you recognise that you need to start developing your strategic thinking skills and disciplines, email me on belinda@leadershipsolutions.co.za and let’s discuss your coaching programme.