When There’s No Strategy, Any Path Looks Like Progress
Knowing Self-Aware Leadership
Hello KSKOers
I naively thought all organisations had strategies. Peter Drucker was talking about objectives and purpose back in 1954 so I thought that by now, all organisations would have some sort of document in place, bringing together objectives, purpose, vision, mission and values. But it turns out, that’s not the case. Sitting at the back of my mind for a few weeks has been the question, ‘what happens when organisations don’t have strategies?’. I was spurred on by a chance encounter with Randy Silver to blog it all out. So, read on for this week’s musings - all about strategy, or the lack of it.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
What, no strategy?
If an organisation has no strategy, how does anyone know what to do? That’s the question that’s vexed me recently. I’ve always assumed that organisations without strategies in this day and age were very rare, but Randy Silver says it’s more common than you think.
As is often the case, when you think of something, the universe provides. In this case, I thought about organisations without strategy and the universe gave me Randy Silver. Randy was the presenter at this month’s The Future of Work Scotland webinar. You can watch the whole webinar, for free, on the link above/below.
Randy’s area of expertise is product and leadership coaching. What he says about delivering products is absolutely applicable to organisations that deliver services directly to people that need them or services to the professionals who provide them to others. If there’s no strategy in place, teams don’t deliver on the right things, management is unhappy, you are unhappy and the business suffers.
If your organisation is missing its north star, what happens within it will be reactive, unplanned and short-term. The potential to be blown off course will be greater without a course to follow. The chance of being sucked in to a whirlpool and spun around and around in circles before being sucked in a spat out is far more likely if you had no map pointing out where the whirlpool was in the first place.
In the iconic words of Lewis Carol
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
When I spoke to Tessa Clarke, CEO of Olio, the food sharing app, in May 2024 (episode 65), she used a phrase that I now regularly use: “mission obsession”. Tessa says that being mission-obsessed means recruiting people who believe deeply in the organisation’s mission and whose values align with it. She also says that when you bring together a team of mission-obsessed people who share the same values, living those values day-to-day becomes something quite intuitive and ingrained in culture.
But if you don’t have a strategy, a clearly articulated mission and values that are known and shared, how can you work to them? If you haven’t got a mission, how can you be obsessed with it? You might be able to find an organisation’s strap line on their website, but unless that strap line is what the organisation lives as it’s mission, then it’s just marketing!
Superhighway to Strategy
I totally forgot that I’d talked about strategy in my book, The Self-Awareness Superhighway. And having read back what I wrote, this is exactly it….
Strategy development and business planning are generally viewed as inconveniences that detract people from their work and things people have to do on top of their day job. Very few organisations or teams have cracked the code to enable people to do strategy and planning as part of their work. Maybe because it’s not something you do every day, maybe because it’s not something that involves everyone all of the time, maybe because it’s sometimes abstract and people feel they can’t contribute. Maybe it’s all of those things. It’s difficult to pin down why strategy and planning are so poorly promoted and badly received. But you only realise the importance of strategy when it’s not there and the importance of a plan when no one knows where they’re going.
And, to add a thought to that, if an organisation hasn’t changed very much in the last two or three decades, then maybe people don’t realise the point of having a strategy. If you do what you’ve always done, why do you need to write it down?
A strategy sets the direction for every single thing that happens in an organisation, from the hard things to the relational things. It’s an organisational guide map for priorities and areas of focus. It sets out values and principles against which all work life should be lived – what an organisation is going to do and what it isn’t. If you can’t make the connection between the thing you’re doing at work right now and your organisational strategy, there’s a pretty strong argument that you shouldn’t be doing that thing.
And there’s the nub. If you don’t have a strategy as the guardrails inside which you operate, people can legitimately go off on a tangent. An organisation has no means of performance monitoring people without a thing to monitor them against. If you have no guardrails, you can’t reel people back inside them. You also can’t get arsey at the people who’ve meandered beyond those invisible guardrails! If you want to be a good leader, you have to give people some indication of what you want them to do and how you want them to do it. A job description alone doesn’t form a strategy.
As you move into roles with greater responsibility and leadership expectations, being able to see the strategy and the bigger picture will become necessary. Knowing there is a level of detailed implementation underneath the strategic objectives, and a set of detailed actions under that, will become increasingly important to you as you move up the career ladder.
That’s right. If you’re now at a level in your organisation where you’re responsible for ‘ensuring operational activities are aligned with the strategic direction of the organisation’, there needs to be a strategy, or delivering on this is going to be a bit tricky!
I had a conversation with strategy expert Jeroen Kraaijenbrink (episode 16). Jeroen said strategy is about relationships, both in terms of developing strategy and implementing it. Strategy only works if it’s a participative activity, meaning that strategy relies on relationships and, as you know, relationships rely on self-awareness. There needs to be organisational awareness of vision, mission and principles, along with individuals’ self-awareness of their behaviour in building relationships for strategy development and implementation. The social engagement you create through the strategy development process is very important. When you have clarity of direction, you can work out what skills you need in your organisation to effectively reach your goals. With awareness of the self and awareness of others, you can build a team that works towards that direction.
If you don’t, you can’t!
If you want to develop effective working relationships and capitalise on what increasing self-aware leadership can achieve, you need to establish it from your strategy: the thing that gives life, soul and aspirations to your organisation. Then you have to bring your strategy to life through the behaviours that are encouraged, celebrated and rewarded throughout your organisation.
Oh - so now, strategy guides behaviours. “So, if we don’t have one, then what?” You get the idea!
The Last Word
When you strip it all back, strategy isn’t a luxury or a leadership buzzword, it’s the glue that holds everything together. Strategy is really important when you have one. Strategy is absolutely critical when you don’t have one.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else”
Yogi Berra
It’s what stops business as usual becoming a collection of random acts of well meaning people. It’s what allows people to work with purpose instead of reacting to whatever happens next. Without it, organisations drift and meander. With it, they move intentionally in the direction of their mission.
And maybe that’s the real point. Strategy isn’t about predicting the future, it’s about shaping it. It’s the promise you make to your people that there is a road, that you do know where you’re going, and that what they’re doing matters in helping the organisation get there. Without it, everyone’s just taking a walk in the park, and any path will do.
Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a strategy and operations leader.
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