Be More Strategic in Business. Diana Thomas

      Companies now have a mix of employees and contractors, contingent workers, and outsourced functions. They may exist across the globe, with coworkers who rarely or never meet in person. The dynamics of the worker-company relationship have changed so dramatically that it’s ever more critical that you can show how you are impacting business performance.

      And these are just sweeping, global changes. We haven’t even gotten into industry-level changes—like disruptor companies, changing consumer needs and desires, economic issues, supply-side shortages…the list goes on. The way people learn has changed dramatically. In the past, if you wanted to learn something or answer a question, you had to find a library book or take a class. Today, you can google it or watch a video online. A big, important part of being a successful strategic leader is understanding all of these changes and—the magic ingredient—making smart decisions about how to manage them. Think back to that change spectrum. If you’re on the far left, resistant to change, you will quickly become obsolete. If you’re on the far right, you’ll be endlessly distracted by every new trend that pops into your inbox.

      You can be the hardestworking person in your company, but if nobody can see how what you’re doing contributes to the bigger picture, then you’ll continue to be passed over for promotions.

      There’s more to being strategic than managing change—a whole book’s worth! In a nutshell, when someone tells you to “be more strategic,” what they want is for you to show how you’re driving corporate strategy and adding real value. Notice the word show. You can be the hardest-working person in your company, but if nobody can see how what you’re doing contributes to the bigger picture, then you’ll continue to be passed over for promotions. Now, if you’re in sales, this may seem clear-cut. You have a quota, or you can show a dollar amount that you sold, which in turn helped your company to make money. But for every other discipline out there, it’s less obvious. Maybe your job is to develop new products—how can you show that the products you’re envisioning will be wins for your company? Or maybe you work in IT, which can feel like a cost center (or a necessary evil!). How can you show that what you do is helping to increase productivity across the organization? If you want to lead at the executive level, you certainly need to work hard. But you also need to get results, and you need to share those results in an enticing way.

      In this book, you’ll learn how to do two key things: first, how to show up and be perceived as a strategic leader. Second, you’ll learn how to take your strategic behaviors and apply them through your organization for stronger results. We wrote this book for leaders and aspirational leaders who want to get to the next level. You’re in a leadership role or will be soon, but you need to do something to improve and get to the next level. By improving your leadership and showing your results, you will get there.

What Happens When Strategic Leadership Is Missing?

      It’s often useful to define a concept by talking about what it’s not. In an organization without strategic leadership, everyone stays in their own silo. People keep their heads down and get their jobs done without an understanding of why they’re doing what they’re doing. They may work extremely hard, but they’re not intentionally applying their efforts to the things that will drive the company’s desired outcomes. Waste is rampant as people fail to communicate across disciplines, and the wheel is frequently reinvented in multiple places. Layoffs feel random because the bosses don’t know who is really contributing to business results. Meetings are long and unproductive as participants show up late and unprepared, and then bore each other to tears with irrelevant information. Pet projects receive undeserved attention while difficult change is overlooked because it’s unpopular or too hard. Everyone chases the shiny, new, innovative decisions, to the detriment of what the organization does well.

      We’re going to give you two examples of publicized situations where strategic leadership was sorely lacking. When you’re at the strategic level, your decisions are very often made on a public stage. When you make a mistake, there can be huge consequences.

      Diana at McDonald’s

      In the early 2000s, McDonald’s stock tanked. The company had just made several acquisitions of other restaurants that took the organization away from its core business of running a unified, well-loved brand experience. As a result of the acquisitions, McDonald’s had lost focus on what we had previously done so well—that is, we lost focus on the McDonald’s customer.

      I was new to the home office at this time. In fact, I had been there a grand total of two weeks. The CEO, Jim Cantalupo, had retired but was brought back to save the company. His first order of business: meet with everybody in the home office who had recently come from the field. He wanted to know what was really going on out there. I nervously shared what I had so recently seen happening in the restaurants: they were dirty, quality had gone down, and we were not listening closely enough to customers. Crew members weren’t even allowed to take orders from customers asking for a different condiment on a signature sandwich.

      Cantalupo eventually turned McDonald’s around by shedding the new acquisitions and focusing on what we could do well: listen to customers and provide an experience that would make the restaurants their favorite place to eat and drink. In this case, a strategic, big-picture view meant understanding that the company had gone too big with its strategic direction and reining in the innovation and growth until the core of the business could be strong again.

      Whole Foods

      Not long after Whole Foods was acquired by Amazon, customers began noticing empty shelves. A lot of empty shelves, actually. Photos of produce sections with only a stray lettuce leaf or onion peel trended on Twitter from customers in some of the largest markets in the U.S. Customers also complained publicly about rotten and rancid products and assumed Amazon was to blame. The problem, as it turned out, began before the Amazon acquisition.

      Business Insider acquired a copy of a Whole Foods manual describing order-to-shelf (OTS), an inventory system designed to “help Whole Foods introduce more automation into its inventory management system by streamlining food buying and other store-level decisions.”1 The system appeared to have the opposite effect, along with a crushing impact on employee morale. In the past, store employees could fill holes on shelves with products they knew were strong sellers in their stores, keeping the shopping experience appealing. Under the new system, the manual instructed employees to leave holes empty, helping “ensure that OOS [out-of-stock] items get reordered because the hole is visible.”2 Furthermore, a point system penalized employees for any products that weren’t in the proper shelf position, with the potential for department managers to lose their jobs over too many infractions.

      In many of the articles covering this story, employees are unnamed due to fear of being fired. In the past, Whole Foods has won accolades as a top employer due to its strong culture and valuing of even the lowest level employees. The order-to-shelf system is another example of a short-sighted decision from the top that wreaked havoc across the organization. By taking away the autonomy of its store employees, Whole Foods created a public relations disaster for