Author Archives: markgriffen

Visible Symptoms of Strategic Leadership

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Ok, so we hear the words “strategic leadership“, and it all sounds like a good theory. However, for the pragmatists amongst us, what does it look like when it happens? My colleagues reviewed some examples of what we thought looked like strategic leadership. Common threads that appeared across these examples included:

  • There was a realization that something is not working or effective – not getting to mission/vision.
  • There was a desire & decision to do something different.
  • The change agent listened to the people with whom they worked.
  • The grass-roots implementation teams used new resources locally developed or locally appropriate.
  • The team leaders focused on results through the changes.
  • There was exposure/training/evaluation that led to change in thinking & action.
  • New pathways were established for fruitfulness.

If you see these things happening near you, then the chances are that the people overseeing them are leading strategically.

If you have other ideas of symptoms of Strategic Leadership, then please leave them in a reply for us to see.

Doing the Right Thing Or Doing Something Right?

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How many times have you done something incredibly well only to discover that it was the wrong thing to have done in the first place?

Strategic Leadership is about causing an organization to do the right thing, rather than tactical leadership, which focusses on doing whatever you are doing the best way.

The engineers with whom I worked at Pirelli were collectively the brightest engineers with whom I worked anywhere. They all had doctoral degrees, and worked hand in hand with the primary researchers at Milan’s prestigious technical university. However, they sometimes invented products that used the most incredible technology, but that no-one was ever going to buy for other reasons. When this happens, millions of dollars of R & D expense can be wasted. This happened even though the accountants made sure that no-one overspent their budgets and the quality controllers ensured that the product always worked perfectly even though no-one would ever buy it.

Strategic leadership would have caused them to never have wasted their effort in the first place.

Do you know what the Vision and Mission of your organization are?

Given that Mission, are you doing the right thing to achieve the Vision, or are you just doing the wrong thing incredibly well?

Responding to Major Trends in the Environment

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To most effectively accomplish a vision it is necessary to understand the environment in which that vision will exist. The Vision of CCCI is that there will be spiritual movements everywhere so that everyone knows someone who truly follow Jesus. This presentation (in PDF here) summarizes the key trends in the spiritual environment in which we hope movements will be started.

Key points that spring to mind when reviewing this data include:

  • Will strategies be appropriately balanced after the Chinese population growth flattens?
  • Do our strategies address urban populations sufficiently?
  • Are we positioning city strategies for the mega-cities of 2050, or the large cities of today?
  • There is an unprecedented period of political freedom now. Are we capitalizing on it?
  • Are we giving the appropriate emphasis to the mobile phone as a communications medium?
  • The non-religious demographic is the only “religion” with growth increasing. Are we positioned to address that growing demographic?
  • The biggest job is not reaching the unreached but witnessing to people who have already heard the gospel at least once.
  • China, India and Africa will be have the most evangelical populations in 2050: are we prepared for them to send the greatest number of missionaries in 2050?

Priorities

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How many priorities do you (or your team) have?

There can only be one priority, by definition. We can have many things that are important to us, but only one priority. Strategy can tell our teams what our priority is, what things are important to achieving that priority, and what things will not help to achieve that priority.

We all have to deal with things that do not directly help. However, there is an 80 / 20 rule: Strategy enables us to ensure that we spend 80% of our time on the things that directly contribute to the priority or are important, and 20% of our time on the things that are tactical or do not help us in any way at all.

Some professions take this to an extreme. My wife is an accountant. Every week she has to account for her time, and charge as much as appropriately proper to clients. At the accounting firms in which she worked in the UK she would typically have 95% to 97% of her time billable each week. This could only be achieved by understanding her goal, and ensuring her time was spent appropriately.

Do you know what your priority is? How much of your time is spent each week on your priority? How much of your time is spent on distractions?

Strategic Leadership and Leading With Information

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Strategic Leadership causes and organization to most effectively accomplish a vision. This can only be achieved if all of the alternative routes to accomplishing the vision are assessed and the one that would achieve the vision with the best use of resources is pursued.

The best use of resources can only be determined if the resource usage of the alternatives are compared, which implies that models for each of the alternatives are developed and assessed.

These models can only be developed using information about the resource usage and outcomes of the alternatives. A leader cannot lead strategically without having access to likely costs and outcomes of alternative strategies for accomplishing the mission. To pretend that this can happen otherwise would be like trying to drive a car most economically without a way to measure fuel usage or distance travelled.

Any organization that cannot access detailed information about its resource usage or outcomes is not leading strategically.

Definition of Strategic Leadership

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My colleagues and I spent a long time trying to define Strategic Leadership. We concluded that the definition is:

Strategic leadership engages people in creative thinking, planning and execution to most effectively accomplish the vision.

This can be broken down as:

  • Strategic leadership
  • engages people in (used by all staff in the organization)
  • creative (not just more of the same)
  •   thinking, (ideas)
  •   planning and (preparation)
  •   execution (doing and checking)
  • to most effectively (best of considered alternatives)
  • accomplish the vision. (the goal is the macro result)

“No” Indicates a Strategy

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Having a strategy enables you to say “no” to pursing ideas that do not get you to the end goal that you want to achieve in the best possible manner. Being a servant and wanting to please others are not reasons for doing everything that anyone wants you to do.

I’ve observed that there is a correlation between having a strategy and saying “no” to pursuinging new ideas. More specifically, there seems to be a strong correlation between not having a strategy and not saying “no” to pursuing new ideas.

How often do you say “no” to ideas that are put before you because you know that they really are not the best thing for you to do?

To be the bset servant that you can, you need to know what the best contribution is that you can make towards the work of others, and pursue that with as few distractions as possible.

Coaching Questions For CCCI National Teams

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Some coaching questions for CCCI National Teams (NTs):

  1. At what Stage is your country?
  2. According to the definition of a Stage in the E-Team document “Stages of National Ministry and Leadership (2).docx”, what are the requirements for your country to move to the next Stage?
  3. Based upon the CCC Global Direction “inverted pyramid” diagram definition of a Movement in the document “CCC Planning Pyramid 7-11-11.pdf” how would you define a working Movement in your country?
  4. In what ways do the ministry in your country not meet your definition of a movement?
  5. What are the things that need to have changed in the current (non-movement) ministry in your country to make it comply with your definition of a movement?
  6. What are the biggest things that need to have changed by the end of June 2013 to move the (non-movement) ministry in your country the greatest amount towards your definition of a movement?
  7. What are the three things that you need to do during the next 12 months in order to effect the biggest things that need to have changed by the end of June 2013 to move the ministry in your country the greatest amount towards your definition of a movement?

The questions build upon each other, and by the end the questions are complex. However, if the questions are answered in the above sequence, then the steps from answering one question to the next should not be too great.

At the end of this process the National Teams should have a three step action plan to most effectively develop movements that move them towards the next stage. All that matters then is that each national team staff member does everything that they can over the next 12 months to implement these three steps.

The Hardest Question

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I’ve come to the conclusion that the hardest question from a supervisor to answer is:

How do you know that you are most effectively achieving progress towards your goal?

This is really hard to answer because, in order to answer it:

  • you have to know what your goal is,
  • you have to demonstrate progress towards the goal, which means that historical progress has to have been tracked,
  • you have to show that you have looked at all alternatives to achieving the goal, and that no other process will have caused you have made more progress than you have made.