Be More Strategic in Business. Diana Thomas
organization, and as a result they inevitably see their share prices tumble.
What’s the secret to strategic leadership? It’s the ability to see the big picture and think through decisions in a way that connects to the right actions and gets the right results, taking the company where it needs to go. In spite of change all around, strategic leadership never loses its value.
We wrote this book for the people we consult with, the people we coach, and even for the people who we ourselves were earlier in our careers: leaders who need to do something different to take themselves and their organizations to the next level. You may be a high-potential employee, used to succeeding and performing well. You want to win, you want to lead, and you want to drive real, measurable results in ways that matter. You’re seeing other people around you succeed and be promoted while you stay in the same place. What’s the difference between them and you?
What’s the secret to strategic leadership? It’s the ability to see the big picture and think through decisions in a way that connects to the right actions and gets the right results, taking the company where it needs to go.
Some people are visionaries. They’re fired up by new ideas, excel at having a macro point of view, and want to race ahead to implement a grand vision. Others are detail-oriented and love being in the weeds with specifics and data, working to understand the intimate details of how work gets done. The world needs both types of people. Strategic leaders harness elements of both personality types by becoming aware of their own strengths and then creating a personal development plan for gaps or looking to outside resources (collaborators, hiring new staff, etc.) to compensate.
The fact that you picked up this book means you know you want to evolve in some way. We can’t underscore this point enough: if you want to be a strategic leader, you must be ready to change yourself, change your department, and change your organization. Willingness to change and improve underlies our entire model.
Imagine this: you are part of a team evaluating something in your organization that’s high-profile, expensive, and beloved. Maybe it’s a national advertising campaign, an employee productivity platform, a major training curriculum, or a sales channel partnership. Whatever it is, it’s near and dear to your department and well-known throughout the organization. When the findings from the analysis begin to roll in, you find out that the program isn’t working. You thought it was successful, but it turns out those success metrics aren’t driving business results. You’ve just learned that you are pouring money into an initiative that’s not doing what it’s supposed to. What decision do you make? What are your options?
Reading this scenario in a generalized format, it’s relatively easy to say, “Of course I’d pull the plug.” But put yourself through the mental exercise of coming to such a finding about your flagship initiative. The one for which you personally pushed to get funding, and then promoted to everybody with lots of grand promises about a huge ROI. It’s personal, and it’s painful. It’s so painful that those kinds of findings are often shelved. People make excuses: the evaluation model was flawed, or we didn’t have access to the right data to prove the impact, or the political climate is such that we need to stay the course, or the CEO loves this program, so it has to stay.
Here is where we stop and tell you that if you aren’t ready to cut your pet project after finding out that it’s not delivering the value the company needs, then you aren’t in the right mindset to read this book. Set it aside and come back when you’re ready for blunt honesty, a truth that is sometimes agonizing but leads to better things. You can make a huge difference, but it all starts with your willingness to change in order to drive smart, organizational change. And sometimes willingness to change means we have to let go of the things we love. It means asking hard questions and running the risk of appearing foolish. It could mean you have to tell your boss that she made a critical mistake or confronting naysayers when you typically avoid conflict. It also means asking for help and advice from those around you, reaching out to connect with supporters and denigrators alike. Above all, willingness to change means being the kind of leader that your organization so desperately needs you to be.
What’s All the Fuss about Change?
Driving change can be scary when you’re acting alone. Throughout this book, you’ll notice a common theme: pulling together all available resources to get the job done. Strategic leaders don’t work alone in a silo—they connect with their colleagues around the organization in order to gain a systemic perspective on the business and ensure that they are meeting the needs of internal and external customers. Strategic leaders also make smart, informed decisions based on robust evidence that has come from all types of data. When it comes to thinking about and using data, many people get overwhelmed. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of vendors, tools, techniques, databases, dashboards, scorecards, frameworks, and all the other options available for managing and interpreting data. But when it comes right down to it, using data is all about driving change in a focused, strategic way.
Evaluation and analytics take data and turn it into information. Information provides you with knowledge, which you can synthesize into intelligence using your experience and understanding of your organization. From there, you are equipped with what you need to make strategic decisions, which in turn drive change. Understanding the change you are trying to drive will inform all of your efforts. Decisions that require a change to something (a strategy, a system, people, a program, an investment, etc.) should be based on data. Evidence-based (i.e., data-rich) decisions result in change that improves outcomes, reduces risks, and optimizes investments.
You’ve probably heard about evidence-based medicine, which has only grown in popularity since it was introduced by Dr. David Sackett in the late 1970s. Evidence-based medicine is the “idea that decisions in medical care should be based on the latest and best knowledge of what actually works.”3 This is the same concept we apply to leadership in the business world—that leaders make decisions based on data. If you think this all sounds crazily obvious, consider this: “Studies show that only about 15% of [doctors’] decisions are evidence-based,” which means that although there is a ton of medical research in existence, doctors aren’t using it.4 The same applies in organizations: we have absurd amounts of data, but instead we make decisions based on gut feelings and what someone else is excited about. One caveat: it’s possible to go too far with data-driven decision-making, too. You always look at the big picture along with what your data is telling you. Strategic leaders use a combination of information to make smart decisions.
The subject of using data brings us to the topic that we know makes many of you without a strong mathematics background cringe. It’s okay. You aren’t alone, and you don’t need to revisit college statistics to become a strategic leader. No matter what area you work in, you have the opportunity to look at business results and determine whether you’re doing the right things to get those business results. Some disciplines have a strong, obvious connection to business performance (sales, for example). For others, it’s less obvious. A good example is the field we came out of: learning and development, or training. The learning department was traditionally considered a cost center because training the workforce was considered a cost of doing business. We knew we needed to train people so they could perform and we could stay competitive and innovate. But when times turned tough and the workforce dwindled, training seemed like a luxury. We could no longer take people away from their jobs to participate in training, and we didn’t need as many people building and delivering training. This is not a strategic approach, because it stifles the competitive and innovative nature of business. However, it has, in the past, seemed like a sensible business decision on the surface due to a lack of proof that training was impacting the desired business results. So, why keep investing in something that may or may not be working? There was no clear evidence either way.
Because we came out of a field that struggled to connect its investments to revenue, we can confidently say that you can find