Strategic Leadership
Your Strategy, your Objectives, your Application, your Results
According to KPMG, 85% of all strategic plans fail. It is clear that strategic planning requires more than just a plan to succeed. It requires an objective partner to support, coach and ask challenging questions so that the strategy is robust and the organisation/leadership is held accountable for implementation as well as monitoring and measuring results.
Planning That Works
Leaders need to ensure the strategy they determine becomes a reality – often strategy ends up with no-one taking responsibility or ownership.
Workable strategies must be rationalised before determining the tactics, thereby going into action with clear operational focus. Leaders need to engage the workforce and cascade the vision throughout the business, so that all teams know where they are going and why.
The further away the strategy focuses the greater the degree of uncertainty, hence short term objectives must be congruent with your longer term strategies.
Ultimately we work with you to have clear business objectives, identify the work streams that will deliver the desired outcomes, recognize the attitudes and behaviours that will generate the energy for the team and create a highly effective working environment.
We work with leaders in their ability to:
• Think Critically
• Interpret
• Decide
• Align
• Learn
• Develop and Maintain a Vigilant Attitude
Think Critically
If you swallow every management fad, herd-like belief and safe opinion, your company loses all competitive advantage. Critical thinkers question everything. Do you:
• Get to the bottom of things, in terms of root causes?
• Challenge the current status quo, including your own mind-set?
• Uncover hypocrisy, manipulation, and bias in organisational decisions?
Interpret
Ambiguity is unsettling. A good strategic leader coordinates information from many sources before developing a viewpoint. Do you:
• Seek patterns in multiple sources of information?
• Encourage others to do the same?
• Question prevailing assumptions and test multiple hypotheses simultaneously?
Decide
Many leaders fall prey to “analysis paralysis.” Do you:
• Carefully frame the decision to get to the crux of the matter?
• Balance speed, rigor, quality and agility. Leave perfection to higher powers?
• Take a stand even with incomplete information and amid diverse views?
Align
A strategic leader must foster open dialogue, build trust and engage key stakeholders, especially when views diverge. Do you:
• Understand what drives other people's agendas, including what remains hidden?
• Bring tough issues to the surface, even when it's uncomfortable?
• Assess risk tolerance and follow through to build the necessary support
Learn
As a company grows, honest feedback is harder to come by. Without it how can you know how well you are doing? Do you:
• Encourage and exemplify honest, rigorous debriefs to extract lessons
• Shift course quickly if you realize you're off track
• Celebrate both success and (well-intentioned) failures that provide insight
Vigilant Attitude
Are you good at anticipating and exploiting change. Do you:
• Look for game changing information at the periphery of your business?
• Search beyond the boundaries of current, prevailing views?
• Recognize potential changes before the competition does?
• Connect the dots of incipient trends by triangulating weak signals?
• Entertain multiple hypotheses about causes of change?
• Encourage mavericks in your company to say what they really think?
• Organize provocative, interactive sessions to tap wisdom inside your company?
• Build wide networks inside and outside the organization?
Inspired by Paul Schoemaker and the Inc.com Online Article, 'The 6 Habits of True Strategic Leaders'
Do you have an objective partner who will raise awareness through coaching in the Strategic Planning process?
