Bill Belichick, the winningest person in Super Bowl history with a total of eight rings (six as head coach and two more as an assistant), wrote, “Above all, do not beat yourself—you cannot win until you keep from losing.” In the NFL, when you commit turnovers, get flagged for penalties, and fail to manage the clock at the end of halves, you tend to lose more often than you win. The same is true in business.
While some leaders seem to feed on overreacting to every competitor move, it’s typically not the external competition that prevents businesses from being successful. A Bain & Company study of 8,000 companies cited in the book, The Founder’s Mentality, showed that 94 percent of large-company leaders identified internal dysfunction as the biggest barrier to profitable growth.
What types of internal dysfunction can derail our business strategy? I conducted research with more than 500 managers at 25 companies and identified the top 10 strategy challenges and the frequency of each challenge by company:
1. Time (96%): Sorry, too busy with other stuff to do strategy.
2. Buy-in (72%): If you don’t take the time to tell me why we’re doing what we’re doing, then don’t be shocked when it doesn’t get done.
3. No priorities (60%): Having 17 priorities and having none both equal no focus and lack of direction.
4. Status quo (56%): Oh, you want me to change what I’m doing? Yeah…I don’t think so.
5. Lack common language for strategy (48%): Research shows there are 91 different definitions of strategy floating around—no, that’s not a good thing.
6. No training to think strategically (48%): We’ve had no training to think strategically, and you complain that we’re too tactical—wow, really?
7. Poor alignment (48%): We don’t intentionally meet on a regular basis to understand and align with one another’s strategies but maybe the strategy fairy will help.
8. Firefighting (44%): The adrenaline rush from responding to urgent but unimportant issues is way more exciting than taking the time to think about how to prevent these recurring fire drills in the first place. Rinnngggggg…gotta go!
9. Lack of quality/timely data (36%): Data and information drive strategy and innovation, so bad data results in bad strategy.
10. Unclear company direction (32%): If the senior leadership team can’t clearly show us where we’re going, then we might as well all be scrolling our IG feeds—double tap heart!
How many of these challenges does your team face? More important, what are you doing to overcome them?
When I lead strategic thinking and planning workshops with leadership teams, we typically start by discussing why strategy is important to organizations and individuals. We then create a common language and understanding of strategy to get everyone on the proverbial same page. It’s a lightbulb moment for many. While it’s ranked #5 in the list of challenges, I find it’s the key to unlocking a leadership team’s awareness of the other nine issues and creates a sense of urgency to improve on them. Once they begin working from the same meanings for goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics, they are infused with the confidence to set clear direction and develop practical and useful plans. This common language also dramatically increases the velocity of the communication and execution of their strategies.
A common question I get before engaging with a team is: Can a leader really learn to be strategic? Studies of identical twins separated at birth shows that approximately one-third of a person’s ability to think creatively comes from genetics while two-thirds comes through learning. My work with thousands of executives around the world shows a 30 percent increase in the ability to think, plan, and act strategically three months following a developmental initiative. Is that significant? Consider just meetings. Have you ever sat in a meeting with someone who’s purely tactical and watched them completely derail the thing by taking the conversation down an irrelevant rabbit hole?
Here are three actions you can take to help your team overcome the key strategy challenges:
1) Create a common language. I created the GOST Framework more than 20 years ago to help people consistently answer the two fundamental questions of a plan: What are you trying to achieve? (goals and objectives); How will you achieve it? (strategies and tactics). Recently I designed the GOST Formula to break each of the four terms into their granular components, providing leaders with a clear and simple way to consistently develop their own goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics.
2) Create a strategic thinking process. Winning strategy doesn’t just pop out of an Excel spreadsheet formula. I’ve found that customizing a sequence of 3-5 strategic thinking frameworks that a leadership team can use individually and collectively on a quarterly basis (1-3 hours) is a powerful way to consistently develop strategies that lead to competitive advantage. There are roughly 160 strategic thinking frameworks so it’s important to identify the handful of tools that will be most relevant to you and your team to ensure efficiency and productivity.
3) Create strategic habits. Whether you play the piano, pickleball, or poker, there’s one universal truth: if we only do something once a year, we’re not going to be very good at it. The same can be said for strategy. Habits to create a more strategic approach to the business include intentional “strategy-only” meetings, creating accountability for insights from your direct reports to leverage learnings across the business, and practicing with tools such as the STRATEGIC Journal, Strategy Vault resource center, and Strategic Fitness System leadership development platform can all build long-term mindset and behavioral habits.
A common refrain these days is, “Control the Controllables.” Strategy is a controllable. The strategy fairy is not coming. Be strategic or be obsolete.