Strategic Growth Planning for Business Leaders: How to Overcome Obstacles and Execute Like a Champion!

In order to lead a business, you need more than just a good attitude and a handle on the day-to-day grind. To take your team from Point A to Point B and beyond, you need to have a vision, both long-term and short-term, and a strategy for how to achieve it. And, even more importantly, that strategy needs to be something that your entire team understands and buys into. That means that, in order to really be successful at what you do, you need to do a whole lot more than just show up.

In today’s fast-paced and cut-throat business world you need to plan strategically, prepare for obstacles, and not be afraid to pull the trigger. You need to set aside time for strategic planning, as well as execution, understanding that success in one part of the equation doesn’t guarantee success in the other. While a lot of business leaders get caught up in who’s on their team, it turns out that what’s more important is how that team works together - which, of course, all depends on leadership.

Why Building a Dream Team Doesn’t Matter

“The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.” - Aristotle To be a great business leader, you have to be able to answer one fundamental question: Why do some teams excel while other teams fall behind? Most leaders, including those at the top companies in the world, like Google, have long believed that the best teams are created by putting the best people together in one room. For example, creating a team with a handful of MBAs and a few PhDs should, on paper, lead to great results. Unfortunately, this belief has a tendency of crashing and burning when sent out into the real world. According to Julia Rozovsky, the people analytics manager at Google, and Abeer Dubey, Google’s director of people analytics, it’s not about designing a “dream team” at all.

Instead, it’s all about considering intangibles. While you can spend hours upon hours as a leader looking at personality traits and individual strengths, trying to balance teams to optimize for success, the truth, according to Dubey, is that most of the ideas business leaders hold onto as truths have never actually been studied. That means, a whole lot of ineffective guesswork is going on, leading to a waste of both time and resources. What more and more of the top business leaders today are recognizing is that individual employee performance optimization really doesn’t get teams very far. And, considering that the majority of workplaces are needing teams to work together more than ever before, that’s a big problem.

In a Harvard Business Review report released in 2016, “the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades, something that business leaders need to recognize in order to properly course correct. If communication amongst a team is taking up the bulk of day-to-day activities, then making sure the team works well together, and having a strategy for ensuring that happens, is the biggest determinant of overall success. According to Google’s Project Aristotle, group norms are the critical piece of the puzzle that are being overlooked by business leaders. Rather than looking to create the “dream team”, leaders should be innovating ways to incorporate traditions and behavioral standards that dictate how their team functions, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Want a jumpstart on creating an “enhanced” team of your own? The results of Project Aristotle discovered that these five key characteristics are the foundation of all successful teams:

1. Dependability. Make sure your team members understand and respect the importance of meeting expectations and getting projects done on time.

2. Structure. Set clear goals for your team and define roles within the group for clarity.

3. Meaning. The more you’re able to help your team members find personal significance in the work they’re doing, the better they’ll work individually and together.

4. Impact. Somewhat overlapping meaning, great leaders know how to help their teams understand the positive impact their work is having in the world.

5. Psychological Safety. Create an environment for your team where individuals feel safe to take risks by voicing their opinions and asking questions. When your team feels comfortable enough to let their guard down, magic happens.

Getting a Grip on Strategizing

According to surveys of top business leaders, 80% of them “feel their company is good at crafting strategy, but only 44% at its implementation”. Most surprising, only 2% of these same leaders are actually confident they will achieve 80-100% of their strategy’s objectives. The problem, perhaps, is that the majority of business leaders spend much more of their time and resources on strategy implementation than they do on strategy creation. (70% of leaders spend less than one-day a month reviewing strategy, according to the same survey linked above.) And, when asked how teams feel about their strategies, “only 5% of employees have a basic understanding of the company strategy”.

Needless to say, something is being overlooked. Leaders today are struggling to implement strategies because their teams aren’t offering the support they need to get the job done. In other words, these assembled “dream teams” are falling short and business leaders are paying the price. While there is no global definition of business strategy, in general, leaders agree that it’s some sort of “action plan for the future”. This definition, while broad, indicates an underlying problem, which is the belief that a business strategy is something that can be created in isolation by an intelligent and savvy leader.

In other words, leaders feel like they can craft a successful strategy in one night on their own and then focus all of their attention on getting it to be executed by a team who has, until this point, been left in the dark. This is why, when asked if implementing strategy requires more time than crafting a strategy, an overwhelming 98% of business leaders agreed that it does. Shifting the understanding of what it takes to develop and implement a business strategy is, then, critical for success. Business leaders need to understand that it’s not just that the strategy and the team that matters; it’s the creative co-creation between the two that counts.

The 11 Traits Every Business Leader Needs to Maximize Their Strategy

Successful leaders don’t just strategize with their teams for success; they strategize for failure, too, making sure that there is a plan in place when obstacles arise. The best leaders not only understand their own power to dictate success, but they utilize their team to its maximum potential, appreciating the group as a whole, rather than singling out one or two “star” employees. In order to make sure your strategy is implemented effectively, you need to be constantly working on honing your skills as a leader, which includes working on sharpening these eleven traits:

1. Self-Management. If you can’t manage yourself, how can you expect to manage others? Taking responsibility for your own actions, which means doing things like prioritizing your time and paying attention to your emotions, especially when you are stressed, gives you an advantage as a leader.

2. Forward Thinking. In a report published by Harvard Business, today’s leaders need “to adjust their strategies to capture emerging opportunities or tackle unexpected challenges”. Staying positive in the face of adversity and being flexible to new ideas are both attributes of this type of thinking.

3. Effective Communication. The best leaders understand when it’s time to talk and team, creates an environment where implementation and innovation happens naturally.

4. Accountability. Owning up to your mistakes as a leader helps set a tone for your team that fosters psychological safety. Not only does it build trust with the members of your team, but it sets an example for them to do the same, helping everyone to be more productive and efficient.

5. Goal Setting. Every successful leader achieves his or her success because they know how to set clear goals and then go after them. As a leader, helping your team see where they are going and how they are going to get there is the best way to bring people together. If your goals aren’t clear or if you don’t communicate them with your team, then you’re not going to get far.

Effective implementation only happens when your team feels like they are part of the big picture, not just small, individual tasks.

6. Optimism. Leaders need to be thinking about the future constantly. And, while there are bound to be obstacles on the horizon, the more optimistic and upbeat you can remain, the better you’ll be able to lead your team. Enthusiasm breeds enthusiasm which means your team will have the momentum they need to keep going even when they feel like giving up. The most effective leaders in business know how to keep their eyes on the target, integrating new ideas as needed, but without ever getting distracted or changing the overall plan. The more flexible and adaptable you are as you take your team closer to your goal, the more naturally optimistic you’ll become.

7. Problem Solving. The best leaders are able to implement their strategies effectively because they know how to make decisions quickly, even as circumstances change. No matter how complex an environment becomes, successful leaders can confidently choose the right direction, taking their business in the right direction without missing a beat. To do this, leaders need to stay up to date with current trends and changes, especially those with the potential to be disruptive to the industry or business as a whole.

8. Innovation. Leaders are natural risk takers, people who aren’t afraid to go against the grain. The more you remember the importance of experimentation, the better you’ll be able to inspire creativity and innovation within your team. And, when obstacles arise, this type of attitude will help you and your team adapt seamlessly, becoming skillful at handling challenges without losing sight of the overall goal. Creating time for your team to brainstorm together, even coming up with prototypes for new ideas and systems, will help you ingrain the importance of innovation, planting the seed in each of your employees.

9. Team Building. Because teamwork is so much more important than developing individuals in today’s business world, team building should become a priority for you as a leader. The better your team can work together, the more effectively you’ll be able to implement your strategy. Not only will your team be better able to communicate with each other, but they’ll be excited to work together, which means the goals you set out for your company will be achieved even more quickly than you hoped for.

10. Relationships. The best leaders have the ability to inspire employees so that the goals they set become more than just an extrinsic concept. By fostering real relationships within your team, you help to drive internal motivation towards company goals, which comes from your employees understanding that they are both valued and appreciated.

11. Learning. If you are always learning as a leader, you are preparing yourself to adapt to any and every situation. In order to make sure your strategy is implemented the right way, you need to approach each day with agility, understanding that, while individual factors might change, the overall goal doesn’t. Staying curious and open-minded through self-development and personal education will allow you to keep your team on the correct course, one that will ensure success no matter which way the wind blows.

Throwing away the idea of a dream team and, instead, focusing on creating an actual team, one that knows how to work together for the greater good, is the goal every business leader should have. And, once that team is in place, recognizing that there is more to strategic development than brainstorming in isolation will help ensure that the overall vision for the company is not only understood, but also accepted wholeheartedly by the team. Implementation of a business strategy by a team is, after all, something that can only be successfully accomplished if everyone involved is onboard and excited about their role. 

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Craig Francisco, Founder & CEO 419-345-9113 8600 S. Wilkinson Way Perrysburg, OH 43551 [email protected]