Strategy = Vision + Decisions
Strategy gets confused for a lot of things. When some people hear the word strategy, they think of big-picture brainstorming or 40+ pages of detailed, ambitious plans. For others, it’s all spreadsheets, revenue projections, cost analyses, and impact measures. And for others, strategy is seen as THE ANSWER – the singular right path to your organization’s success.
But strategy isn’t any of those things.
At its core, strategy is an interconnected set of choices about what you will and won’t do so you can accomplish your goals. Put another way - it’s a set of decisions you believe will help you achieve your vision.
Smart, well-designed, and well-executed strategy can make a significant difference in whether your organization achieves its desired mission impact, revenue goals, and operational sweet spot.
As a leader, honing your ability to provide a clear vision and direction and to make strong decisions that enable your team to focus and align their time, energy, and resources are essential to increasing the chances your strategy will succeed.
Clarifying Your Vision and Direction
First, you need clarity about what you’re trying to achieve.
That may seem simplistic, but it’s one of the biggest hurdles I come across when I’m talking to leaders who are embarking on developing a new strategy. These are smart, dedicated leaders who want to make a big difference in their communities and for their teams. But they often don’t have the time or mental space to consider important questions that can help them make strong strategic choices. They’re so busy doing that they have barely any time for thinking.
If you as a leader don’t feel clear about what you’re trying to achieve – and sorry, but your broad organization vision and mission statement don’t count as clarity – then your team, volunteers, donors, and funders will be left feeling confused, frustrated, and maybe even upset or angry.
I’ve written before about how to make time for good strategy, but once you’ve made the time, then what? There are many ways to help clarify your vision and direction – and a trusted advisor can be a great partner in this work.
When I’m advising leaders, I like to start with questions. Questions open up new areas of thinking, enable us to consider a broader range of possibilities, and encourage us to be more thoughtful and focused in our responses. You can use questions like the ones below to help you get started:
What are we really good at? Why would someone refer a community member to our organization?
What is our role in the community? What is our role in our network of partners?
What is the modern expression of our mission – what does it mean to do our mission well today and over the next several years?
What are our community members and funders telling us? How do they want to see the world change?
What do we want our legacy to be? What do I want my legacy to be as a leader?
Documenting your answers to these questions and revisiting them on a regular basis can help you revise, refine, and clarify your vision.
Making Strategic Decisions
For many leaders, being in control feels comfortable, and making choices within our areas of expertise is something we do without thinking much about it.
Years of practice in making those kinds of decisions has created enough opportunities to test the decisions, see their results, and refine the approach for the future. That strong leadership instinct that is so critical in your daily work has been honed for years through these tiny experiments in decision-making.
What we know in these moments is that there will be tradeoffs. Deciding to pursue one option means we’ll have to forgo another. The funder meeting can’t be both at 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., someone will have the first quote in the press release, and our staff, while magical in many ways, can’t be in two places at once.
When it comes to strategy, though, leaders can forget this fundamental truth – that they need to make choices if they want to succeed, and there will be tradeoffs.
Leaders may feel pressured to make everyone happy by including everyone’s ideas and pet projects in a strategy on the front end. This pressure can come from the Board, from funders, from the community, from staff, or from the leader themselves. During traditional strategic planning processes, one of the most common sentiments that comes up when a facilitator asks a planning committee to make a choice between two options is “how about we just combine these two priorities into one so we can get them all in there.”
Failure to make decisions – or to give our staff clear guidelines to help them make strong, strategically-aligned decisions – leads to a lot of unhappy stakeholders on the backend because everything is under-resourced, staff are stretched thin, and you have failed to meet (or exceed) the lofty expectations you set.
It’s a leader’s job to make these tough decisions. But outside our comfort zone or area of expertise, choices can feel harder. Too often, that means we fail to choose at all. To avoid that, we can draw inspiration from one of my favorite quotes about making big strategic choices from one of the leading strategy experts working today:
"Big choices can feel daunting, especially when our context is uncertain, when we feel a tension between the present and the future, and when we lack tools to help us tell the good choices from the bad. No wonder we sometimes fail to choose at all. But the good thing about having choices - even the very hardest ones - is that it means we can take action. We can influence the world we live in. Not just today, but into the future. We can shape our world rather than simply live in it." - Roger L. Martin, Author of Playing to Win
When you are considering a shift in strategy for your organization, programs, fundraising efforts, or operations, there are often lots of options to consider. This is another place where a trusted advisor who can help you explore the right questions can be valuable. As you consider the options available to you, questions like the ones below can help you get started:
What would it look like if we had permission to focus on what we do absolutely best?
What would have to be true for this choice to be the right one for right now?
What can we learn by choosing this option? Even if it fails, how might it help us grow?
Which of these options helps us win on multiple fronts – mission, fundraising, awareness building, and operational ease?
What do we already know? What aren’t we sure about? How could we gain more clarity?
Which choice gives us more space and flexibility for new opportunities in the future?
Exploring these questions can help you, your Board, and your leadership team feel more comfortable making big choices that affect the future of your organization. Providing clarity on what you’re choosing - and why – is essential in empowering your staff to focus on what matters and make their own decisions that are aligned with the strategic direction and choices you’ve communicated.
There are many benefits to greater clarity and clear focus through strong decisions, but perhaps the most important is that your community, your funders, and your partners will be more engaged and have their expectations met – and exceeded – more often, which means greater impact, more revenue, more trust, and better relationships.