While strategic planning sessions can certainly create strong focus and promising leadership momentum in the boardroom, the majority (up to 90%) do not translate into results.
Here are five crucial leadership steps to become part of the successful, elite 10%:
- Have a Fierce Focus. When it comes to strategic execution, less is more. As a leader, you cannot afford to pay attention to more than the “critical few” areas that have the most strategic leverage. Set a high bar when it comes to prioritizing and selecting the key strategies for the year. Only allow the few initiatives that matter most to you and to your company to survive and become part of your strategic plan - table the rest.
Keep asking yourself and your team, “When push comes to shove, which strategic initiative could we do without compared to the others?” Then identify which move carries 50% of the weight in terms of its impact on hitting your targets. Then agree upon the initiative that has at least 25% of the remaining weight compared to the rest. Keep refining and narrowing until you settle on only 2-3 strategic initiatives—THE very few moves that will have the greatest impact. One is not enough and five are too many.
Strategic Traps Avoided: Taking the time and effort required to identify ONLY the critical few moves will help you to avoid four common strategic leadership traps that catch 90% of leaders:
- Overwhelm: Too many goals, priorities and actions that spread resources too thin and blur focus
- Irrelevance: Not compelling or urgent enough for people to change or follow
- Time Problems: Perception of not enough time or of too little importance to warrant the time
- Ambiguity: Unclear goals, roles, actions, or success metrics that create confusion
- Overwhelm: Too many goals, priorities and actions that spread resources too thin and blur focus
- Identify and Play to Your Strengths. Leading companies are true to who they are and honestly assess what makes them and their company different and better in the eyes of their target clients. Understanding what truly makes you special and how best to leverage your strengths enables you to effectively align strategies with your culture, marketplace, and core business. The slightest misalignment is a recipe for resistance and failure.
Strategic Traps Avoided: Playing to your strengths and aspirations helps you avoid five of these common leadership traps that inhibit strategic execution:
- Culture Misalignment: Overlooking, ignoring, or discounting the importance of culture and people
- Team Incompatibility: Having the wrong leaders, team, or people to get the job done
- Distraction: Straying too far from your core business
- Competition: Underestimating or ignoring competitive pressures or positioning
- Ignoring the customer: Not sufficiently customer- or market-focused
- Culture Misalignment: Overlooking, ignoring, or discounting the importance of culture and people
- Commit. Once you identify the critical few moves and play to your strengths, you need to commit yourself 100% and apply the full weight of your company to each and every initiative. You must show the courage and resolve to see the strategy through. This means playing to win by monitoring and managing, supporting and rewarding, even favoring, anything aligned with your strategic initiatives compared to all else. When you commit as a leader, you send a clear and compelling message that you are certain that your strategic plan and the associated assumptions are the right ones for your organization.
Strategic Traps Avoided: Leadership commitment helps you to avoid three additional common leadership traps:
- Insufficient Resources: Inadequate resources (tangible, intangible, people) for the task at hand
- Implementation Problems: Underestimating the difficulty of implementation
- Lack of Measurement: Un-managed or un-monitored progress
- Insufficient Resources: Inadequate resources (tangible, intangible, people) for the task at hand
- Communicate. Unfortunately, it is rare to find companies that effectively communicate their strategic vision at the depth and consistency required to mobilize the troops. One-way emails and all-hands meetings do not create the belief, passion, or action required to initiate and substantiate organizational change. Imagine if only a few synchronized swimmers knew the routine or if only half of the football team knew the play.
Effective communication ensures that everyone understands the content and context of the strategy. To succeed, your strategy must be understood by everyone, directly link to everyone’s work, persuade that it will lead to the desired results, and be perceived as worth the struggle. If you want any chance at success, strategic clarity must start with the executive team and weave like a golden thread throughout the entire organization.
For your message to be believed, your leadership team must also be perceived as competent and sincere, have the resolve to see the strategy through, be open to acting upon criticism, and care about the impact on their people.
Strategic Traps Avoided: Clear, consistent, and persistent communication of strategies helps leaders to avoid these three common strategy traps:
- Ambiguity: Unclear goals, roles, actions, or success metrics that allow people to sabotage change and hide miscues
- Complacency: Being blinded by previous success or by a lack of motivation to initiate change
- Resistance: Natural opposition to change
- Ambiguity: Unclear goals, roles, actions, or success metrics that allow people to sabotage change and hide miscues
- Follow Through. Experienced leaders do not underestimate the amount of effort, conviction, and follow through that it takes to implement strategic change.
It is critical that you and your leadership team keep a continuous watch over how things are going so that you can identify roadblocks and quickly adjust your plan. Great leadership teams calibrate weekly, monthly and quarterly to continuously fine tune their plans. They do not skip or cancel any follow-up meetings; they hit key deadlines and targets; and they frequently share progress and status reports.
As with any change initiative, the higher the degree of active involvement by those impacted by the change, the easier it will be to win their hearts and minds to overcome the inevitable and natural resistance that occurs.
Strategic Traps Avoided: Strategies that are consistently followed-through and highly participative help leaders to avoid three additional common leadership traps that curb strategic execution:
- Unacceptable Risk: Unmanaged, too much, or too little risk compared to the task at hand
- Lack of Buy-In: Strategies that are “told” vs. co-created that never gain enough support
- Inadaptability: Speed, flexibility and continuous improvement to accommodate an ever increasing rate of change
- Unacceptable Risk: Unmanaged, too much, or too little risk compared to the task at hand
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