Leadership is all about direction, alignment and momentum. And strategic planning is a key tool to achieve this, but the art of strategic planning has been lost.
Strategy is simply how you intend to compete as a business – but there is nothing simple about competing effectively. Your goal should be to develop undefeatable strategies in building a great business, and nothing less should be acceptable.
But no matter how good your strategies are, they are nothing without a unified team of people to deliver them, and that team is your employees. If leadership fails to engage and win the support of employees then nothing can be achieved.
The single role of leadership is to ensure engagement with employees.
Quoting Richard Branson, “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” And competition today is all about delivering more customer value than anyone else.
Strategy – The Lost Art
Strategic business planning, business strategy, business planning – however you may describe it – is one of those areas of management theory and practice that we know a lot about and at the same time know very little about.
It tends to become regimented very quickly in company-specific tradition. For example, a company always holds its strategy workshop on the first weekend in March, the same people attend and the same process followed but possibly with a different keynote speaker each year. A strategic plan is produced and quickly filed so everyone can get back to doing what they do. Change is incremental in very small steps, if at all, and as everyone is very busy, nothing much will have happened when they all meet again next year.
Yes, I know that this is not the story for every business, but many simply don’t see strategy setting as the most important activity the business undertakes and especially not one to underpin leadership’s engagement with employees.
Strategy is also one of those areas that can often be tied down in politics and self-interest in businesses large and small. And although politics and self-interest are far more likely to occur in larger businesses, smaller businesses are often caught by the set views of the founder/owner – the ‘we have always done it this way’ mindset.
But, if used correctly, strategy setting can be a process that unites and inspires an entire business behind a single vision and goal.
The power of focus and alignment of all resources in a single direction can catapult a business into territories it never thought it could reach.
Without Employees There is No Strategy
Without a clear and articulate strategic plan, there can be no direction, alignment or momentum.
Without strategy, it’s leadership and maybe a few other loyal followers desperately trying to drag the business up the hill, day after day after day. Where’s everyone else? Well, they’re not too sure what you are up to and really have not bought into the whole deal. So most are just standing around watching you.
With a strategy, you know you have a game plan that everyone can get behind, support and know their part. You now have the entire team working the strategy and moving the business towards its goals and vision in a unified way. The likelihood of you being successful has now just multiplied a hundredfold.
Thinking And Acting Strategically
I believe this journey starts with a business beginning to think and act strategically through always:
- Making a conscious decision as to how it will compete.
- Considering the implications of its actions on how it has chosen to compete.
- Looking for opportunities to improve the customer value it delivers.
- Watching for the signs of change and moving to take advantage of them.
- Not chasing but leading competitors.
- Adopting the mantra of better every day.
- Learning how to engage employees with the purpose and vision of your business.
Once a business has learned to think and act strategically it can then move towards understanding and setting the journey for real growth and thereafter towards creating an organisation capable of decisive competitiveness. And at each stage of growth employee engagement is the critical factor.
The journey commenced has three key steps:
- Crafting undefeatable strategies.
- Setting the journey of real growth.
- Creating an organisation capable of decisive competitiveness.
The underlying attitude through all these steps is never-ending improvement. You are constantly peeling back the layers as your understanding grows deeper. And it is through employee engagement that this deeper understanding can be gathered.
Strategy, Competitiveness And Employees
Today, business success lies in delivering more customer value than anyone else. And that means engagement at the coalface, a mustering of workforce passion and an empathy for customer need that allows you to see the need before it even exists.
Technology has and is continuing to dismantle barriers to create an open global marketplace for all players. Resourcing and workforce capability continue to be more ‘open source’ and incumbency can, at many times, be a greater disadvantage than advantage.
The ability to create capital value in their business is elusive for many leaders as they feel overwhelmed with the level of competition and change that is occurring in their markets. Capital value lies in the level of certainty for that business to create an enduring income into the future, but the business leaders are often less than certain.
Business strategy is how you intend to compete in delivering on your purpose and achieving your goals. And your employees are the ones that must understand and deliver on that strategy.
So the key to being able to engage your employees in delivering your strategy is in the story of how you compete as a business. Leadership is all about direction, alignment and momentum and it is your competitive story that will allow you to achieve these outcomes.
The Story Of How You Compete
Once you have crafted your strategy you want it to tell a compelling story to engage your employees.
A story of:
- Why your business exists (its purpose) and its visions and goals.
- How it connects with and meets its customers’ needs.
- The value it delivers to its customers and how it operates to deliver that value.
- What it does better than anyone else.
- Why it is a business worth working for, which again draws back into purpose.
It’s a story that directs the entire business, aligns all its resources and draws everyone’s focus to what is most important: how you have chosen to compete.
You compete around customer value, that is, the unique way you have chosen to define customer need and to meet those needs better than anyone else possibly could.
You express how you fight the good fight through, what I term, your competitive posture. It’s the way you have decided to position yourself within your chosen marketplace to leverage your unique strengths and view of customer needs so that it is like a hundredweight falling against what anyone else in the market could possibly offer.
But it’s not a static posture, it is dynamic and allows you to move as the market shifts so you continuously ensure you maintain this overwhelming strength of market position. But the context of ‘dynamic and continuously’ requires engagement at the coalface with the people who are working daily with your customers, and that is not your board or your senior management team, it is your employees. It is these employees who must not only be engaged by your competitive story but must be able to act on it every moment of every day.
And it is this real-time delivery of your competitive story that will allow you to always outpace anyone who may seek to challenge you.
Your business must become competitively fit. Your leadership team must understand the engine within your business that centres around your employees and drives its competitiveness, and be always aligning these elements to ensure maximum strength is always present.
And finally, there must be a moral value, a true sense of purpose that permeates your business identity and allows it to have a sense of righteousness in the work that it does.
It may seem strange that a business could have such character that makes people want to work for it but your business must exist for a real purpose. A purpose defined in meeting the needs of a community of customers and because it does this so well, it makes an exceptional profit and attracts an amazing capital value. But it knows these only come from the fulfillment of its purpose and that if it suddenly focused on profit it would lose.
Undefeatable strategies are real but they start and finish with a true focus on meeting the authentic needs of a community of customers. And your strategy should tell this story in a compelling way that allows you to win the complete engagement of your employees.
Strategy is the tool which allows you to win the hearts and minds of your employees, but it is an art as it involves people and is not a science that can be mechanically rolled out.
Active Knowledge Questions:
- How is strategic business planning used in your business?
- How would you describe the degree to which your strategic plan captures the hearts and minds of your employees?
Act Now:
Do you need to rework your business strategy? Take a look at Strategy Play – Crafting Undefeatable Business Strategies.
Need to lift the leadership performance in your business? Learn how in C88 – Leadership Performance Guide and Journal.
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
