Be More Strategic in Business. Diana Thomas
supportive parents who had raised me to believe I could do anything I set my mind to, and also that you can’t get something if you’re afraid to ask for it. I was working under successful leaders and on the lookout for ways to learn from them (and actually learning even more from a few weaker leaders). I had a chance to attend a series of talks by motivational speakers with our leadership team. Two that have stood out in my mind over the years were those by Zig Ziglar and Joel Barker. I felt so inspired by their presence and the messages they delivered, and I was motivated to do whatever I needed to do to become the type of leader who could make people feel that way. In fact, my own leadership platform came from something Joel Barker said in one of these sessions: “An effective leader is someone who you will choose to follow to a place you would not go by yourself.” I began to think more critically about my own personality and skills and how I could channel those into becoming the type of leader people would want to follow.
My next promotion landed me in the training department at McDonald’s, and I quickly fell in love with my new career direction. Growing up, I had always wanted to be a teacher, so training felt like a natural fit. I started working toward my master’s degree, which culminated in a thesis on leadership. Truth be told, I had a long-standing fascination with the topic. In 2002, I was named dean of Illinois-based Hamburger University and also began studying for my MBA. Personality-wise, I knew that I tended toward big-picture thinking. I was never too detail-oriented and didn’t enjoy working with data and analytics. I began learning how to channel my big-picture thinking into a strategic focus, and I also found a niche helping others around me grow from individual contributor to strategic leader. During this time, we began applying for the LearningElite, even though I felt pretty strongly that we weren’t at the level of the winning organizations. I knew that showing proof of impact was a big gap. Our first entry earned us rank #42, and I looked at that benchmarking process as a chance to grow and improve.
In 2004, I completed my MBA, and shortly before that became vice president of training, learning, and development for McDonald’s U.S. Around this time, feeling quite proud of all I had accomplished, I hosted a networking session at Hamburger University. Bill Wiggenhorn, then chief learning officer at Motorola, was one of the attendees, and it was the first time we met. We got into a conversation about growing and learning as a person, and what was on my mind was all that I had done to get to this point. Bill asked me how I was planning on staying current and abreast of the never-ending changes that would continue to impact learning organizations around the world. I was taken aback as he bluntly told me I would be dated within five years if I couldn’t keep up—and he couldn’t have been more right! Up to this point, I had succeeded largely though formal education and job training. Now that I was on the executive team, I needed to take my development into my own hands. Bill later became a long-term mentor for me, and I also added the role of learner to my own weekly compass. Bill helped me to see that it was essential to nurture my longtime love of learning by continuing to make it an essential, ongoing part of my work and life.
I first met Stacey via networking, as I was a member of the CLO editorial review board. When she came to McDonald’s to talk to me about how we could improve on the weaknesses in our LearningElite application, I began to fully appreciate her combination of deep, analytical knowledge and the ability to highlight what was important from a strategic perspective. Stacey knew how to paint a picture of what data and analytics could do for McDonald’s. I had been sharing business results with our franchisees, but I couldn’t directly link those results to training. No one was asking me to do it, but I knew that day was coming and understood the importance of being able to back up my assertions with facts. Stacey helped to fill in the missing pieces and got us started on a journey at McDonald’s. We began showing concrete results from training, taking baby steps at first (and a few wrong turns!), and it caught on like wildfire. Our stakeholders loved knowing that when they sent their people away for training, they could expect business results.
I retired from McDonald’s in 2015. I’ve realized my lifelong dream of running my own business. Today I’m an executive coach, working with blossoming leaders to help them improve the things that are important to them, as well as helping them to find a healthy balance between their careers and their personal lives.
Our shared experience
One of the benefits of having grown up in the learning industry, and now through our own business pursuits, is that we have worked with leaders in almost every discipline and sector imaginable—from huge public companies, to smaller private organizations, nonprofits, schools, and government. In addition to our work with learning industry leaders, we’ve consulted with and coached leaders in human resources, IT, sales, marketing, new product development, federal agencies, and school district administrations.
And this is the beauty of the model we’ve created: no matter what field you’re in, what type of organization you work for, there is a need for strategic leadership. You need to show your business how its investments are driving performance in the areas that matter. You need to be able to do that in a way that’s enticing to other leadership. You need to unite your team around a motivating vision and help them understand how everything they do impacts the business in some way. You need to pull back from a reactive habit of spending your days putting out fires. You need a way to win people over to your cause. Whether the leaders you’re working alongside are investors in your small, one-person shop; shareholders in a huge, multinational corporation; board members of a nonprofit organization; or the other leaders at the executive table—they are looking to you for strategic leadership, and this book is your guide to delivering on that need.
Finding Your Ground Amidst Disruption
Your career is at a crossroads. You have the opportunity to lead. To win. To build something from the ground up and be successful. But first, you must make a great shift: from tactical, gets-stuff-done worker to strategic leader.
Have you ever been told you need to be more strategic? Or maybe you need to work on getting to the point, not presenting endless details, numbers, and facts, but distilling your case into a motivating vision. Your counterparts are moving up in the organization, and you can’t figure out why you’re not. Have you been passed over for a promotion because you fail to see the big picture? Are you starting your own business, knowing you need to set yourself up for success but unsure of how to go about it? If you’re anything like us when we were on the receiving end of this feedback, you probably thought, what the heck does that even mean?!
Meanwhile, out in the world around you, everything keeps changing and evolving. Technology is replacing jobs traditionally thought of as human-only pursuits, and that’s a scary thought. Simultaneously, technology creates the need for new skill sets, including many that are difficult to anticipate or prepare for. You may be just five years out of school and already need to update your own skills. Change has been a constant force in life for as long as humans have walked the earth, yet it continually surprises us. Think about this for a minute: twenty years ago, did anyone have the job title social media manager? What about SEO specialist, virtual assistant, UX designer, Uber driver, blogger, drone operator? This is just a small handful of positions created by changes in technology, and they in turn change the ways we live. Have you ever booked your vacation to stay in someone else’s city apartment or ordered groceries using an app? These are things the vast majority of people weren’t even thinking about twenty years ago. Now, we take such services for granted.
Think of reactions to change on a spectrum. At one end, you have those who cling to the old way of doing things. They say things like, “This is the way we’ve always done it,” or “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” At the other end of the spectrum are the people who jump onto everything new and shiny. They’re the ones who have to have the newest gadgets the day they come out and are never, ever satisfied with business as usual. The majority of people