Lessons for Leaders: Effective Strategy Requires Trade-offs
Do you want to get really good at creating effective strategy? Here's a critical skill you can start honing today.
Practice making trade-offs.
It sounds easy, but it's a skill many leaders struggle with, because they:
Want to make everyone happy
Feel pressure to "do it all"
Don't feel comfortable pushing back against unreasonable requests
Don't want to make the wrong decision
But learning how to make trade-offs is essential.
At it's core, strategy is a series of choices about what you will - and won't - do to achieve your goals. This is something leading business strategists have been teaching for years:
Roger Martin - "Strategy is choice. Strategy is not a long planning document; it is a set of interrelated and powerful choices that positions the organization to win."
Michael Porter - "Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs. It's about deliberately choosing to be different.... A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions.”
While multiple-win scenarios are absolutely possible and worth exploring, trying to do everything and be everything results in confusion, frustration, and reduced (or no) impact.
Strategic clarity requires you to understand who you are as an organization or a leader and to choose your direction and path forward in alignment with that.
Unless you've practiced making trade-offs in your day-to-day work, making the bigger trade-offs involved in effective organizational strategy can be really difficult.
To hone this skill, try practicing these day-to-day trade-offs:
Set a boundary and keep it - e.g., set one day a week where you don't take meetings so you can do deeper thinking and focus on other work. Decline or reschedule meetings - even important ones - so you can maintain this strategy for being more productive, thoughtful, and focused.
Choose something to invest in more fully - whether it's professional development for your team, a specific fundraising approach you're testing, or a consulting project that will boost your team's capabilities, choose one thing to start with and invest there rather than spreading your budget so thin that it reduces any chance of impact.
Say "no" or "not now" to something - it may be a fantastic opportunity if you had the bandwidth, but if it's pulling you and your team away from the work you've already chosen to pursue, then it's a distraction.
Practicing day-to-day trade-offs builds your capabilities for creating effective strategy - and for sticking with it when more difficult trade-offs arise.
If practicing making trade-offs is a leadership skill you want to hone, reach out to learn more about our Practical Leadership Advisory services that combine the benefits or coaching and 1:1 leadership development support to help you grow your leadership skills on the job.