Julie Williamson, Ph.D, Chief Growth Enabler at Karrikin’s Group. I am interested in how leaders can realize ambitious strategies together.
Strategies are helpful in outlining a vision of the future that looks different than today. But they are insufficient as a tool for leaders to transform an organization. The hard truth is that you can’t transform just by looking at your destiny and hoping for the best, no matter how beautiful the strategy slides may be. You actually have to lead differently to get there.
Therefore, as leaders, you must commit to leading Through your strategy, not Unpleasant your strategy. It may sound like semantics, but it’s a powerful restatement of the purpose of strategic work.
When you lead Unpleasant a strategy, you set it up as an end state – a place where you go. Your arrival time is a factor of when you leave and how fast you go. Here’s the problem with that framing: It’s far too easy to let today’s reality take over and wait until tomorrow to leave metaphorically. And before you know it, months have passed and nothing has changed. You’re not making any progress toward the destination, but there’s still time…until it’s gone. Two years later, everyone is wondering why the company never changed direction when where to go was so clearly marked in the strategy game. Meanwhile, your market, your competition and your customers may have left you behind and instead of rapid transformation, you are in crisis mode.
When you lead Through the strategy, you immediately start using it as the lens through which you make leadership decisions. It enforces a degree of clarity about strategy and how to use it in day-to-day decision-making. This creates a platform for potentially difficult but strategically important conversations about investments of time, money and energy. Leadership decisions can be deeply ingrained in people, so you have to work hard to change how you prioritize, what you reward, how you set goals and where you direct resources. It can be very difficult to change the default settings on these things, especially when work takes over and life gets hectic. If you force yourself and others to follow through on your strategy by incorporating it into your daily habits, your transformation will move forward in small, meaningful ways every day. Before you know it, months and then years have passed and, through steady progress, you’re in a completely different place, doing amazingly cool things with your colleagues and customers in your markets. And maybe at the same time you are faster than the competition.
There are three ways I’ve seen, as a key growth driver, people succeed in leading Through their strategy, not only Unpleasant their strategy – and they are all things you can try today:
1. High Visibility: Share with your colleagues how you feel about the strategy and how it plays a role in your decision-making. Creating visibility around your own thinking and how you activate the strategy as a tool is a powerful signal that the organization is moving in a clear direction.
2. Unrelenting Consistency: Before any investment decision, go back to strategy and insist that your peers do the same. Over time, they’ll develop a habit of using the strategy to drive higher-impact conversations and make more informed decisions.
3. Ruthless Honesty: When it comes to strategy, it’s amazing how often people twist their logic and interpret data to make something fit instead of making tough decisions and saying no to something that isn’t strategically aligned. Don’t do this and leave your comfort zone. Just because you can make it fit doesn’t mean you should.
If you are tired of repeating the same strategy year after year and frustrated by a lack of progress, try to rethink your thinking and consider leadership Through your strategy, not Unpleasant It. As a leader, if you develop new habits and strengths, the results can be huge.
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