Holistic Strategy
For as many business owners I hear from who struggle with sales, there are more I hear from with a working revenue generating engine yet lack the ability to scale. They hold back on growth because they don’t have the employees, the management team, or the infrastructure to support it.
Their business falls in unpredictable and frustrating cycles of hunting work, then doing work, then panicking because there is no work, then going out and hunting more work. All the while employees are pulled and pushed, hired and let go, to address the operational swing of the day.
You may know businesses that run like this. It may be yours.
Fueled by impatient energy to get going and get into the game, the thought of pulling back and making space for deeper strategic thought and planning can feel like a colossal waste of time. Why dream when you can do? Underneath this sentiment there’s concern that the pace of change is so great, the future so uncertain that plans can quickly become obsolete.
This is true if strategy is viewed as a once-and-done process with no life of its own. In this form, strategic planning can feel structured, stuffy, academic, and fruitless.
Not taking the time to define and plan your strategy IS a strategy in itself and, most likely, not an effective one.
Effective strategy doesn’t sit on a shelf but flavors the dynamic of every conversation. It drives decisions, aligns teams, and points the way. Focusing on changes that increase the long-term competitive strength of the company, it’s agile, shifting and evolving with the rhythms most appropriate for your business. Effective strategy is Jim Collin’s Flywheel Effect — turn upon turn, more is revealed, lessons are learned, new information is applied, and momentum builds until growth begins to breakthrough.
To build a long term sustainable and scalable organization takes focused and disciplined reflection and action. It requires that you, as the leader, get really good at listening to both the external and internal landscapes the company is operating in so that you can more effectively respond to changing needs.
THIS is strategy… and holistic in a way that it’s not just focused on growing the financial metrics of the organization but considers the internal infrastructure to support the growth and the maneuvers to sustain it as the market shifts and swings outside of your control.
Your business is a complex system. The more operational noise you are drowning in and the less time you feel you have for strategic planning, the more you need it.
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Leadership Development Practices to help you engage with these concepts in your own leadership development journey:
Opening to a Wider View: Learning to lead with a more strategic mindset involves developing multiple layers of specific muscles over time. One of the most basic foundational muscles is learning to step back from the urgency and immediacy of the moment and open to a wider of view.
This week once a day as you enter a new room, take a moment to ground in your own presence, connecting into your breathing and your body as it experiences the space. As if you haven’t been in the room before – pay attention to colors, textures and light. Notice subtle irregularities, nuances, and features from this intentional stance of broader awareness. What more is available to you from this wider space?
