4 Practical Steps For Strategic Planning As A Leader

This resource first appeared in issue #88 on 20 Aug 2021 and has tags Strategy: Other

4 Practical Steps For Strategic Planning As A Leader - Anthony Boyd

One hard things for new leaders to really come to terms with is that they typically have a lot more freedom in what their team does and how their team does it than might be comfortable.

Defining a strategy for how to do whatever your team is charged with doing is a big responsibility. And it’s a lot scarier than staying focused on the day-to-day of routine work. As a result, I see lots of teams or organizations with no discernible strategy whatsoever, muddling along with whatever tasks come their way - or, maybe worse, following through with zealous dedication on some idea that three years ago someone said seemed like a good idea.

So I keep an eye out for resources on defining strategies. Lots of them are way too “big” - focused on enormous organizations. Or they’re hyper-focused on things like SWOT Analyses or Business Model Canvases or Wardley Maps - which are all, you know, great, but they’re just devices to nudge thoughts and discussion into directions that might be fruitful. A 2x2 matrix or canvas or map isn’t a strategy. A concrete set of goals and priorities, informed by the context of the team and the environment in which it operates, that’s a strategy, that’s something that can help guide the routine day-to-day decisions you and team members make, and serve as a nudging guardrail to make sure you and your team are moving in the right direction.

In this article, Boyd describes a very down-to-earth process for defining and following through on a strategy, that he learned and developed during his time as a union leader. It’s simple and pedestrian and it’s all that strategy is - routinely spending some time thinking of the big picture and its context, so that the day-to-day work is steered properly.

Boyd’s steps (followed by a course correction step) are:

Think laterally - brainstorm with a large number of ideas before falling in love with any; “Use lateral thinking to create as many strategies as possible then sort through your options and use vertical thinking to drill down into the best option. “
Set goals - without clear goals for your team, unit, or organization, you have no way of knowing if you’re doing well or not, or if any small decision is taking you closer to or further from your goals
Set priorities - which is going to mean saying “no” or “not now” quite a bit
Develop and implement a plan of action
Make adjustments according to changing conditions

This can be done by yourself or with the team, and involving your manager; or you can get feedback from your manager before striking off in a direction.

For brainstorming, whether by yourself or with others, the steps laid out in another article I saw this week, Shopify’s Brainstorming Session Template, can help - in particular the iterative approach of brainstorm, assess, brainstorm …. distill. And yet another article I saw, more for large organizations, about running a strategy offsite for a leadership team, is worth skimming if only to see that it’s the same as Boyd’s steps, but done in a group. One line I like from that last article - “Choose clarity over certainty”.