“We’re on a road to nowhere, come on in. Everywhere we take this ride, we’ll take it. talking avatar
If your team works without a business strategy roadmap, you might feel like you’re living the lyrics to the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere” every day. What are the symptoms? Fire drill culture, meetings with no clear purpose, constant haggling with clients, uncertainty about what people are actually doing, and no shared goals or strategies to achieve them.
A study of 250,000 senior executives found that a leader’s primary role is to set strategic direction. But for many managers, the idea of setting strategic direction is shrouded in anxiety. Why? Done poorly, strategy development can take too long, lead to cluttered, ineffective meetings, and produce huge PowerPoint slides that have nothing to do with what people are actually doing. This is not necessarily the case.
After helping more than 100,000 managers set strategic direction for their businesses, I’ve discovered three keys to successful strategic direction setting: context, process, and roadmap.
- context: Great leaders understand the importance of taking a mental snapshot of the current business environment. Context includes a realistic assessment of the current business situation and its causes, mapping the desired future state, and identifying the challenges and trade-offs on the path to achieving the goal. When facilitating strategic planning sessions with executive leadership teams, I see many instances of new insights and connections emerging in these contextual conversations because managers are all on the same page about the business.
- process: When it comes to process, managers often find themselves at one end of the spectrum or the other: working in a company that doesn’t have a formal strategy process, or in a company that’s focused solely on process rather than a clear and concise end result. In the former case, there is zero consistency of approach between managers and random slides are thrown together in the hope that they form a coherent strategy. In the latter case, it becomes about providing a process and checking boxes in hopes of getting back to your real job. I addressed these issues by developing a simple and concise process for setting strategic direction that is highly interactive and inspires new thinking to create a differentiated strategy.
- Roadmap: If you don’t currently have a 1-2 page document outlining your strategic direction, the question you need to ask is “Why?” It’s not hard to do. In fact, this is actually the easiest aspect of setting strategic direction if you have already assessed your environment and followed a proven strategy process. It’s also extremely valuable because it gives you and your team a unified approach to your business. What does this unity mean? This means being consistent in resource allocation, decision-making, and executing strategies that lead to profitable competitive advantage.
A group of Hungarian soldiers got lost while conducting military exercises in the Alps. It snowed for two days. They were cold and hungry, and as the third day approached, they accepted the fact that they might not make it out alive. Then on the verge of death, a soldier discovers a map buried deep in his backpack. The detachment determined its location, stood up, and followed the map out of the Alps to reach safety. When they returned to camp, the commander asked them how they finally found their way out. The soldier took out the map and placed it on the table. The commander was surprised to find that this was not a map of the Alps, but of the Pyrenees, a completely different mountain range.
It’s important not to always have an accurate and correct map, because we don’t. It is important to develop our strategic thinking and planning skills so that we always have what we need in our minds to overcome challenges and achieve success.
