Does your organization have a strategy? Do you know what it is? Does everyone feel a sense of ownership over executing that strategy? In far too many organizations, the answer to those questions is “no.”
It makes me so sad how few people have experienced the power of a great strategy. It makes me really angry when I see leaders passing off something as a strategy that is no such thing. And you know me, when I get mad and sad, I get writing.
In this case, I’m spilling my strategic planning process (at least at a high-level) in hopes that you can get strategy working for you (even if it’s only building a strategy for your team.)
I’m dividing this into two parts. The first part is “What is a strategy and how do I get one?” The second part is “What are the two things I should do with my new strategy?” Stay with me. I’m ranting. Let me know if you think this is worth ranting about.
Part I: What is Strategy and How Do I Get One?
I find the succinct HBR article by Michael D. Watkins useful in defining strategy and putting it in the context of the various other terms in the business planning constellation.
Watkins defines strategy as:
“A set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making.”
Let me highlight the good bit: Strategy is guiding principles. A strategy is NOT, as many people seem to believe:
- A vision (as in “our strategy is to make a world where no child goes hungry”)
- A mission (as in “our strategy is to make cycling the primary mode of transportation”)
- A goal (as in the unhelpful statement “our strategy is to reach 1,000,000 users”)
Vision is your why. Why do we work our butts off in this organization? Why is it worth it? Why can’t we give up? Visions are great (well, to be fair, some are great, and some are completely lame). Having a sense of purpose works for people. Develop a vision statement. Just don’t call it your strategy.
Mission statements, goals, objectives, and BHAGs (to use Jim Collin’s catchy acronym for Big Hairy Audacious Goals) are your what. They’re fantastic, they’re super important, you need them. What do we have to achieve? What will we have accomplished if we’re successful? Please, craft a mission and create clear and compelling goals. Just DON’T CALL THEM YOUR STRATEGY!!!
Getting to Your Strategy
If having read this, you realize you don’t have a strategy, I’ve got you. Here’s the handy-dandy process I use to get a team from a blank piece of paper to strategy on a page. (If you are feeling good about your strategy, jump down to Part II.)
Step 1: Purpose
Start with the purpose of the organization (or department, or team). Why do you exist? Be fussy, don’t let anyone slip anything on the list if you wouldn’t make seriously difficult trade-offs to protect that purpose. (I’m realizing that I could write a post about each of these steps. Let me know if that would be useful.)
Step 2: Goals
Move to the goals. What do you need to achieve by the end of the strategy period to know that you’ve made enough progress? Again, only primary goals make it to this list. Anything “nice to have” doesn’t make the cut. Don’t have one goal about profitability and one about employee engagement if you will always trade engagement for profitability. Seriously. I really hate that. It’s so demoralizing to see leaders paying lip service to issues. If employee engagement is just a means to an end, that’s ok, just be transparent about it. If both profitability and engagement are primary and each will win some battles, then having both is fine.
Together, I call the purpose and the goals the North Star. I like using the north star because some will find the purpose the most compelling while others will find the goals more motivational. This way, when you refer to the North Star, your people envision whichever is most meaningful to them. (Many, many people have told me how their leaders use a revenue number as a rallying cry and that it leaves them cold.) Everyone in the organization should be walking toward your north star. Refer to it relentlessly.
Step 3: External Context
Next, lift your eyes to the horizon and look at all the trends emerging in the external world. Which of these trends creates opportunities and which creates threats for you? Build your list with as much input and diverse thinking as possible. Do NOT allow people to include characteristics of your organization on this list. Someone will try to talk about your lack of offices in the Midwest as a threat. It’s not a threat, it’s a weakness. The call is coming from inside the house. Step 3 is for external trends only.
Step 4: Internal Assessment
Now, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your team, department, or organization and determine where you have strengths that will help you capitalize on opportunities or mitigate threats. Then put on your objective, skeptical hat and get deep into the weaknesses of your organization that might exacerbate the threats or make it challenging to capitalize on the opportunities.
Step 5: Focus Areas
Combine the outputs of #3 and #4 into a list of the most important issues facing you (again, this could be for your team, your department, or your whole organization). How does the SWOT analysis help you see the issues you must solve if you’re to be successful?
For example, if you’re the group from the example above with the mission to get people commuting on bikes, you’re looking at the opportunities created by Covid where people are avoiding public transit. You’ve got a window where there’s less traffic on the roads and more opportunity to do construction. You know infrastructure spending is likely to be a major pillar of economic recovery and you have an a-ha moment about needing to capitalize on this situation to get more bike lanes that will make people feel safer riding. You put that together with your weak relationships and connections in municipal government and realize you have got to get busy with building out a team, and skills, and partnerships, and campaigns in infrastructure advocacy.
Step 6: Strategic Imperatives
That list in #5 should include a variety of different issues, some focused externally on growth, competitiveness, and value for customers, some focused internally on efficiency or effectiveness. It’s from that list that your strategy will emerge in a set of Strategic Imperatives (my name for the singular unit of a strategy). It’s a bit of a struggle but fight for it. What are the four, maybe five things you MUST do if you’re to be successful?
My all-time favorite strategic imperative was from a tech company that realized that they didn’t have the resources to go head-to-head with the #1 player in the market and that they’d have to gain momentum by innovating in niches. Their imperative was “Be Cool.” It guided the types of products they developed (computer animation and gaming versus boring old desktops), the marketing deals they did, the way they ran events, the people they networked with… it changed the way they interacted with the world.
There you go, now you have a strategy!
