Landing Execution and Strategy without burning out
Getting out of the "I don't have time to be strategic because I'm too swamped with execution or fixing issues at hand" trap.
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Client: My manager and team are asking me to build a strategy for my area. However, I’m so busy with day-to-day work of execution that I don’t see how I can find the mental space and time to work on strategy. I know I need one. But how can I do it without burning out?
Strategy Speeds Up Execution
This happens to the best of us: You are swamped with the work related to day-to-day execution. There are decisions that need your input, important details to be communicated to your partners and stakeholders, nuances to be flushed out, and documents or content to be organized. You simply cannot find the time or mental space to build a strategy and take on more work for yourself and your team.
But, to what end? Where is the team going? What will be achieved with all this execution? What logic or tradeoffs are you using, implicitly or explicitly, to prioritize your work and the work of your team? How aligned are you with your leaders, your partners, and the rest of the organization regarding where the team is going and what the team is delivering?
Example: let’s say you are in the army leading a group of men in training exercises. Every day, you time is taken up with exercises, food, hygiene, clean up and prep for the next day. But why are you doing the exercises? What exercises are most important to prioritize? How long should you do them for and why?
A lack of clear strategy creates more work and rework. It makes communication onerous and lengthy because everyone has different assumptions and contexts. This creates more debate about what should be done and why. It slows down the execution with interruptions and changes in direction. In many organizations, without an aligned strategy, execution grinds to a halt or is plagued with rework.
If you are consistently running into disagreements with your team, confusion among key stakeholders, or lack of clarity in decision-making, it is likely because you don’t have a clear strategy to align and execute against.
What Questions Will the Strategy Answer?
Before starting any work, it’s important to hone in on what questions the strategy will be used to resolve. Often, well-intentioned executives and managers ask for a strategy when what they truly need is a detailed roadmap, a set of decisions made, or an inspirational narrative. A strategy will contain elements of each of those things, but it cannot solve all of those things all at once. A strategy is a set of choices made based on scarce resources (e.g. time, materials, people) that gives the best chance of achieving a goal.
Therefore, the first conversation to have with stakeholders is about what questions they want to be addressed from the strategy and why. Here are some good open questions to ask:
How will this strategy help your work?
Why do you think a strategy is needed? What confusion do you see?
What other strategies have you come across at the company that is similar to what you’re looking for here?
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