Tag Archives: strategic leadership

Use tools to help you, not hinder you

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A friend and I are building a house. Some days more than 50% of our time is spent fixing the tools before starting actual construction. I find myself asking questions when this happens.

Similarly, I read a strategy plan for a national team in our organization once that contained the following:

  • SWOT / BEEM analysis
  • Capacity audit
  • Stakeholder analysis
  • Resource audit
  • Forcefield analysis
  • Balanced scorecard
  • Portfolio analysis

All very well. I concluded that a member of that team was taking an MBA.

Three years later I visited the country that wrote that strategic plan. We could hardly do any work at all because the internet didn’t work and people either didn’t have computers, or the computers they did have did not work in any reasonable timeframe.

I found myself asking questions in my head about their strategic plan.

Does it take 7 types of analysis to determine that the internet should be fixed and working computers supplied to staff?

Do you find yourself trying to fit the tool to your application, or does the tool IMMEDIATELY help you?

If the tool doesn’t help you immediately, then do something else. A tool is something that is supposed to make your work more effective, not less effective. If you spend more time playing with, or arguing about, a tool then do something different as you lead strategically.

Any tools hindered rather than helped you in strategic leadership? Leave a comment with things that helped and things that slowed you down.

Continuous Strategic Leadership vs. Periodic Strategic Planning

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Basically, I am against annual planning. Annual planning implies that once a year we sit down and draw up our plans of what we are going to do that year. However, on the ground, nearly all the work we do is project based. Our projects could be product developments, outreach campaigns, events or other tasks. So, our annual plans are really a summary of plans for the combination of projects that we will progress during the next planning cycle period to most effectively move ourselves towards our vision.

Some projects in the year take longer than a year, and some take less than a year. Let’s say that the planning cycle runs January to December. What happens if a brilliant opportunity for a 6 month project to most effectively make progress towards our vision appears in March? Where does it fit in the strategic plan?

What happens if we think of the strategic planning process as the ongoing assessment and management of implementation of the projects that would jointly help us to most effectively achieve the vision? When we do this, then the planning cycle need no longer exist at that project level. However, most of us lead departments or parts of a larger organization and our projects are sub projects to a wider program, or at least contribute towards a wider program. At the program (or higher level) there may be a desire to periodically (either calendar initiated or program phase initiated) review strategy and progress of our projects. When this happens all that needs to be done at the project level is provide descriptions of the current strategy and status of our projects to those looking at a wider picture.

In other words, the our strategic plans should not be driven by the cycle or reporting needs of the wider picture, but driven by the cycles of our own projects and shared with those who might need the same information for other needs at other levels in other cycles.

If the only planning that we do is annual and driven by wider needs then there is a strong possibility that we are not being strategic with the use of all of the resources that we have at our disposal in our domain of influence.

Let me give an example. At ADC Telecom there might have been 100 projects (product developments) across the company at any one time. Each of these projects was reviewed throughout the product life-cycle for most effective implementation, and for most effective use of the overall company’s resources. However, once a year the corporation had its reporting cycle based around the SEC reporting requirements, In addition the board needed to show the shareholders good value in use of the shareholder’s resources at the annual shareholder meeting.

The annual cycle of the board did not drive the strategic planning at the divisional and product line level. At the divisional and product line level strategic planning was continuous, driven by the product life cycles. However, annual reviews at the divisional and board level just collected the current views and data sets from all of the product lines and reviewed them en-masse.

The strategic planning cycle was dead, but long lived strategic planning as part of day to day strategic leadership.

Creating a Culture of Strategic Leadership

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Creating a culture in an organization where people engage in creative thinking, planning and execution to most effectively accomplish the vision is a culture change.

To create this culture requires use of culture change management. There are well thought out processes for doing this based upon a lot of experience. John Kotter describes one of the most respected processes for culture change in his book “Leading Change“.

Kotter outlines the process that he observed to have worked the most often. It has 8 steps as follows:

  • Establish a sense of urgency
  • Create the guiding coalition
  • Develop a change vision
  • Communicate the vision for buy-in
  • Empower broad-based action
  • Generate short-term wins
  • Never let up
  • Incorporate changes in the culture
Personally, it’s been a long time since I learned any change management theory, and I can’t remember much of it. However, I do remember that the key was to utilize “change agents” to create “critical mass” of people who operate according to the new cultural principles. I think that I remember that a critical mass had to be between 30% and 40% of the population of an organization for it to reach the tipping point where everyone else would adopt the change.
Anyway, food for thought when thinking about introducing a culture of strategic leadership.

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.

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.