Demystifying Strategy

If you know something, you can say it with nuance and complexity.

If you understand something, you can say it simply.

Strategic thinking is not a mystical power reserved for the rarified leader with acronyms for titles. It is, in fact, an innate talent to most people. What makes a great deal of difference, however, is whether that talent is nurtured and developed by courageous leaders and mentors, or if those talents are kept in the shade without sunlight - stunting their growth.

A zero-sum thinker believes that strategy is BIG and that it is the job of someone with BIG titles to do BIG thinking. Too many organizations are set up to support the false belief that the merit of senior leaders is that their thinking is what leads to the organization's success. This kind of culture suppresses team wins and unwittingly endorses ego.

If you need proof of this, look no further than incentive structures that pay predictable, recurring wages to low-level employees and pay variable, bonus-upside pay to "big-thinking" executives. Would you willingly put your total compensation in the hands of other people's thinking? (most don't)

Is Strategy a Natural Talent?

Think back to your playground or classroom years as a kid. If you have ever gotten a group of kids to coordinate their activities to accomplish a goal - you have been a practitioner of organizational strategy for some time.

• Working with your siblings to get your parents to agree on a big decision
• Consistently winning at a game of... well, pretty much any team sport or game
• Group mischief where you didn't get caught (think about that)

An individual can also have strategic thinking for their personal aim:

• Accomplishing a long-term personal goal
• Getting into a college of your choice
• Winning over the affection of your crush

In the context of leadership, this article is about organizational strategy, which I have depicted here in this image.

Simply put, it is aligning people to do interrelated activities to gain a competitive advantage.

Let's Break It Down

Reverse engineer your strategy by first thinking about what is a "win"? Team sports are an easy (although admittedly an overused trope) way of thinking about this. A coach may define a "win" as the state championship. Then the coach works backwards from there:

3. We need competitive advantage. We can do this by a couple of routes: leveraging our strengths, improving our weaknesses, neutralizing the other team's strengths, or taking advantage of their weaknesses. (Or a combination of the routes.)

2. We need all of our habits to be interrelated. Practices will focus 70% on building our strengths all year long and 30% on adapting those strengths to exploit the weaknesses of upcoming opponents. We will hold weekly strategy practices with the 3 players who are most socially influential on the team. We will have 1-2 of the coaches work exclusively on analyzing opponent's game tapes from the week prior to our match.

1. We need to align our coaches and players to the goal. Tryouts will focus on skills alignment and team chemistry. Let me structure the team of coaches so they are doing what they're most skilled at most often. Since all the players communicate through text, I'll get comfortable with group texts to send motivational quotes, upcoming focuses, and tips about upcoming opponents.

Organizations are really just teams. And yes, we have "opponents." Perhaps not in the same win-lose mentality of organized sports, but we absolutely have competitors in our market. Not considering your competitive advantage is like showing up to a game with a random assortment of players with a random assortment of sports gear from different sports. All the heart in the world cannot sustainably overcome great strategic execution.

Mischief Managed

You are likely pretty good at strategic thinking. If you're like most people, where your leadership skills can really take off or differentiate you from the pack is learning execution management. I had a great conversation with an expert in that field, Monte Pedersen, in this episode of Level Up Leadership Podcast: Execution Management.

Every strategy is really just a hypothesis. It's an educated guess that your team will head in the right direction to achieve it's "win". So keeping that in mind, use the roadmap of agility over rigidity. As the saying goes, be resolute about the destination but flexible on the route.

A few quick takeaways to help in your journey of strategic leadership:

• Reverse engineer your strategy from first defining the "win"
• Use a strategic framework to organize your thinking. A good place to start? Google: business strategy or organizational strategy. Then, dig in. You don't need an MBA. You need a starting point and a framework that resonates with you.
• Think about competitive advantage from the lens of your customer - not you. It's easy to over-glamorize our own "better and different" story, but if your customer doesn't see it, it doesn't exist. What is your team just better at than other teams? How will you leverage those strengths to CREATE competitive advantage? True competition helps our customers.
• Ensuring that all the activities of execution are interrelated is vital work by a leader. As much as you measure results, you should be spending even more time making sure that resources are available, teams are correctly assessed for talent/skills fit, and that your activities are supported and, in fact, wholly endorsed and owned by senior leadership. [Hard truth: if you are not aligned with your senior leadership's strategy (or if they never articulate it to you), you will never feel aligned to your true work (passion).]
• Getting the strategy right and executing it is by far and away most dependent upon the members of the team. This does NOT mean just hire the right people. It first means be the right leader. Improve your own abilities and skill in this endeavor. Align the people who will support you but also hold you accountable as well. Create the right mechanisms for identifying who the "right people" even are and definitely have clear guidelines for eliminating the wrong people. Sometimes the best way to get a good flow going again isn't adding water to the stream, it's removing a rock from the stream. (Even if that rock is you.)

While zero-sum leaders think their ideas must reign supreme to validate their place in the pecking order, an infinite-minded leader curates the best idea from within the team. I have learned this lesson the hard way, and I still am practicing how to lead from the back of the room. It's okay that we're not perfect at this. In fact, that's kind of the point.

Lead well, my friends. Live your legacy today.

-James Lee