soapboxI’ve written on the topic of Strategy Fueled Leadership several times, and fresh off of a great podcast interview with Gary Harpst, author of Six Disciplines Execution Revolution (stay tuned for my posting) and my recent interview with Jocelyn Davis for Strategic Speed, I am on my soapbox again.

It is critical to link leadership with strategy and vice-versa and the failure to do this is one of the root causes of strategy and execution failure in organizations.

Soft Soap:

Much of the writing and talking about leadership appropriately emphasizes the softer side of things. Creating a great working environment, building credibility, leading with fairness, providing motivation and even inspiration…all of these are important. There’s a good chunk of my half-million blog words tied to those issues.

Nonetheless, the tremendous energy required to develop as a leader and to develop leaders around you is an exercise in human relations if it is not intrinsically connected to the underlying purpose of the enterprise…solving vexing problems for others and making or generating money.

I’ll invoke Drucker’s view as to the purpose of an organization: “The purpose of an organization is to acquire and keep customers.” Choose his version or your own favorite form of  “maximize value for…” definition and the issue is still the same.

Leadership uncoupled from strategy might as well be counseling.

Unfortunately, We Kind of Suck at Strategy:

  • Year in and year out, one of the top concerns of global CEOs is the struggle that their firms face in executing strategy. McKinsey’s year-end surveys are a great source, and the recent Harvard Business Review research focused on this topic underscores this issue.
  • I regularly poll on my “walk in the door” test in workshops and consulting sessions. The question is simple: “How many of you can connect your own priorities to the strategic priorities of your firm?” You can be certain that less than half (sometimes way less) can pass this simple test.
  • In Strategic Speed, the authors identify some insane number of strategies that are abandoned due to the inability to execute. Their findings, “It’s the people, stupid.”
  • In Six Disciplines Execution Revolution, Gary does a great job of making the case that most small to mid-sized firms spend most of their useful time somewhere out of balance between strategy and execution, often getting lost in operations or fire-fighting mode while neglecting both the “what next?” and the issues surrounding “how do we execute, learn and improve?”

Strategy is Everyone’s Business:

It’s critical for everyone in an organization to be attuned to their firm’s strategies and priorities, and to be part of the execution and feedback/learning processes.  It’s doubly important for those managers making key calls every day on how people spend their time, to be attuned to strategy.

When suggesting this “everyone is involved” concept before, I’ve received pushback that it’s too cumbersome…and not everyone gets a vote. These points miss the point.  There are undoubtedly key calls that need to be made by the people operating at high levels.  However, the work of implementing happens below those making the big calls, and all of the rich organizational learning opportunities including customer feedback, competitor response and “Ah Ha” moments take place somewhere well below the C-Suite.

Leading with Strategy Creates Context:

People do their best work when they have context for the importance and relevance of the work. Strategy provides that context in the workplace.

What might be just an IT improvement project to one team charged with the responsibility for carrying it out, may well to another group be a critical enabler of strategy, that once implemented will dramatically improve the ability to engage, support and even sell more to existing customers.

It’s much like the old story of the two stone-cutters that were asked what they were working on. One responded, “I’m cutting these stones into blocks.” The other answered, “I’m building a cathedral.” Context plus inspiration!

The Bottom-line for Now:

Gary articulated the importance of getting all layers of leadership involved in understanding strategy and translating that into execution. Jocelyn and her co-authors build a compelling case that the execution problems that bedevil so many organizations, are in fact people and communication problems. I agree.

It’s time to put the strategy into leadership and start counseling and coaching with context.