Experience and equipment don’t substitute for strategic leadership

Without the right goals and the plans to get there, teams lose their way

The example of Lewis and Clark seems apt: you can have a great team, solid gear, and experienced guides and still get very lost because you didn’t think things through before setting out.

As a business leader, you need to rally your team and engage in strategic reflection to identify your path through your rapidly evolving realities. Your plans are best established through a disciplined and straightforward strategic planning process — which includes engaging in strategic foresight, identifying and researching options, selecting a route forward, developing and prioritizing a set of initiatives, followed by disciplined execution and tracking of progress.

In the absence of strong strategic leadership, unintended consequences can occur — the equivalent of a bunch of dead horses and lost gear.

Here are three examples:

• One company spent hundreds of millions on a North American manufacturing transformation that was never questioned, never piloted — and that didn’t work. The company planned to implement a beautifully conceived continuous manufacturing process that neglected the fact that the company’s product is best built in batches. After three years of work, leadership tossed out the plans, sold off the equipment they couldn’t use, and started over.
• A financial institution used agile techniques to drive a series of marketing campaigns. In the mad rush to get stuff done, the team put several critical aspects of the campaign into the backlog (like testing messages and sorting out production and distribution issues). They not only missed the time window for most of the program, but they also failed to get meaningful results due to the lack of client message testing.
• A clothing retailer decided that it needed to adopt an agile culture to shorten the cycle time from design to putting garments on the retail floor. Folks learned agile techniques and the company hired scrum masters who assigned self-directed teams to work on design, merchandising, sales, and marketing initiatives. Individual teams made several isolated process improvements, but they skipped the part where they convened to paint a picture of what the holistic destination would look like and how all the initiatives fit together. They spent inadequate time building insights into what the customer wanted, and they underestimated the competition. They assumed they knew — just like Lewis and Clarke did. The upfront work to enable the teams to go in the right direction had been replaced with the clarion call of speed, speed, speed.

In all these cases, there was a failure of leadership. The right questions weren’t asked, the journey wasn’t charted, risks weren’t considered, and/or the destination wasn’t defined. The teams had the best techniques, training, and tools, but critical thinking and planning were glossed over.

Leaders need time to think strategically and provide direction

If you want to get there fast — and safely — be sure the horses have riders who know where they are going, are prepared for the worst, have a good understanding of the territory, have a solid roadmap, and are all pulling in the same direction.

Contact us

To learn more, please reach out to Mary Larson, National Lead, Strategy Consulting Practice.