Welcome to Hacking Your Leadership. I'm Chris and I'm Lorenzo. And Lorenzo in
this episode, I want to talk about strategy. Oh, I like to
talk about strategy. Strategy is fun. It is fun. It's as you
move up in leadership roles. You know, we talk about the difference between
tactical and strategic work. The more you move up in an organization, the
more you become a leader of leaders or you know, move up within your
career, the less of your day is spent doing tactical things and the more
of your day is spent doing strategic things. And so when you're talking about
creating strategies, this is a large part of the job of a leader,
especially if you have if your team is the one who has to execute these
strategies, hopefully you are involved in the creation of them, and hopefully you're
involving your team in the creation of them too. The reason why I want
to talk about it is that, you know, I've been in situations where
a strategy was developed and you know, we had the right people in the
room and we can go to kind of go through everything to make sure that
it's the right strategy moving forward, and we go to execute it and it
doesn't work, and somebody, either myself or somebody else can be very quick
to say, oh, well, it was clearly the wrong strategy. This
part was missing or that part was missing, or you know, hindsight's twenty
twenty, we should have done this instead or that instead, and we can
start picking apart the strategy itself. And I came across an article on LinkedIn
by a person his name is doctor Mark Snookus, and he had this kind
of infograph that talks about how there are seven things that can destroy a strategy
that is otherwise a good strategy, and they have nothing to do with what
the strategy is, but in actuality, how it's put together, and how
it's implemented and shaped and put out to people to be executed. And so
I like this because there have been times in my past where a strategy that
didn't work was cast aside and a new was brought in and that one didn't
work either, and we didn't stop to think, wait a minute, maybe
it wasn't the strategy that was wrong. Maybe it was the execution of it
that was wrong. Maybe it was a way we put it together or made
certain assumptions about who was involved those kind of things. So I like this
and I think it's a good topic, especially if you're listening to this and
part of your job is developing strategy that you know has to be executed.
Yeah. No, I love it because I think that you know, over
time, what you learn when it comes to developing strategy is that it does
take a lot of kind of effort. It takes a lot of collaboration,
It takes a lot of you know, not just your own self reflection about
the strategy and your own opinions, but those of others as well. If
you want this to be a solid strategy that's successful, it takes a good
amount of investing in that strategy. And there are many times when you have
kind of, you know, enough tenure and confidence in a role that you're
just like I can kind of like copy and paste this a little bit.
I know this is the work before I can go down the same exact plan.
But to your point, like, I think it's so important always to
learn from the strategy. Sometimes it is just execution, but there are parts
of why it wasn't executed that I think you also need to think about,
Like where did the execution stop? Where where did it hit a hurdle or
a speed bump or would it just completely hit a brick wall? Like what
was it that caused that to happen? And have you done enough due diligence
to really understand and not just understand it, but you'll be able to explain
your strategy to someone, which I think is really really important. My favorite
mention of strategy and anytime I can get a South Park reference into the show,
I try to, But my favorite is the underwear g nomes and it
was like they had their little whiteboard, remember yep, Step one steal underwear,
Step two, I don't know, step three profit right, and like
that was the joke was like we don't like, we don't even know what
we're doing or why we're doing it, but we feel this is going to
lead to profit. And I think that same way some times with strategies is
that we have an idea, we have a thought, or maybe we found
some success in something similar before, and now we want to just implement that
and we just assume it's going to work. And if you haven't thought about
some of these things in in the preface of your strategy, then I think
you have to review them if you have an issue with the strategy being executed
right right, it's the old uh you know, step step one is this,
Step two is you know some some something, and then step three is
the way yay, we won You know, like they that that something something
is something like that means something and you have to figure out what that is
and define it that that is true. There there are a lot of people
out there who they they will validate their own strategy by talking about whatever the
outcome is, but there really isn't a clear tie in between the strategy and
the outcome. It's just this is the desired outcome, and so we're gonna
put a strategy in place and assume that will be the outcome. And I
guess sometimes it works. But if you don't have a direct tie in of
how A plus B equals see, you can't just hope that it's going to
turn out that way. This has to be actually executed in this way.
The things that doctor Snukis talks about in this article. The first thing he
talks about inconsistency. And I like this because when I've seen a strategy not
work because it is applied inconsistently to me, what that says is that someone
in the creation of the strategy felt differently about what was going to be done
than other people did. You couldn't come to a consensus, you couldn't ask
for a consensus, and so it was kind of tabled for later, or
it was just assumed that whatever the decision was, that everybody was just going
to abide by it. And then people leave the room and it's time to
execute, and you'll have some people who absolutely disagree with the way that it
was supposed to go, and then they'll do it their own way. They'll
just decide arbitrarily in the moment to do it a different way. Now,
that doesn't mean the strategy wasn't good. It means that it wasn't executed in
a consistent way. And maybe that's why it failed. Or maybe they're right
and and and when the way that the consensus consensus came to, maybe that
was the wrong way and the outlier was the one that was correct. But
but but either way, what this says to me is that there wasn't a
clear agreement with everybody in the room when it was it was the one two
three ready break where everybody kind of gets together and says, Hey, you
know what, I know that there's parts of all of our ideas in this.
This is the strategy we've come to together. If there's a if there's
a reason that you feel like you can't execute it exactly like we all discussed
together, then let's just keep talking. Let's talk this out again, because
the moment we leave here, we have to execute and and we have to
all be able to rely on that even if it wasn't exactly the way we
wanted it to go, that we're all gonna execute it in this way because
that's the only way we're gonna know if the strategy was right or not.
It's the only way we're gonna know if it works is to be consistent.
And so I think I think that parts maybe missed in a lot of conversations,
and it's just assumed that hey, we all we all said we are
agreement, So I guess we're all gonna actually go out next in exactly this
way. That doesn't always happen, yeah, or sometimes it's like the lack
of honesty in the skill gap. Because that's what I think of when I
think of the insistency, is that the strategy is built by some people that
have specific skills and capabilities, and they just assume that everybody is capable of
delivering it at that same level. And then what you find out is the
strategy that was built works well for the person who built it, and then
the others that are trying to make it happen are not as consistent and they
have different actions and decisions. And it's not that they're not trying, they're
just not at that skill capability to deliver on the same level of consistency that
the other person has. I think that when that happens, you know there
a strategy can't just be high level. We're gonna do this high level thing
and then all of a sudden we win. That's why a solid strategy has
to have component parts of it that where you can benchmark along the way whether
or not those things are there. And so if a person is is not
being able to execute, if you don't have the ability in that moment to
figure out whether or not they're not executing because they're not bought into it,
or they're not executing because they don't have the skills to do it. If
you're not able to look very quickly and see which one of those things it
is. It means you didn't bake in the right controls into the strategy to
figure out, you know, whether or not you can validate your actions going
forward. You know, a strategy is nothing without your ability to validate it.
There are two other ones that doctor Snuocus mentions on here. One is
rigidity inability to adapt or change, and another one is conformity no creative edge.
I look at those it's really similar to each other here. You know,
when it comes to people executing a strategy, they will be more likely
to buy into that strategy when they can put their own personal touch on it
as well. So if you're if you're hyper defining every single element of this
to the point where people can't bring their own elements of who they are to
the process, it's going to be really difficult to have buy in from people
to make that happen, unless you're talking like the military or something where it
has to be rigid and you know step one, step two that have three.
In most organizations, a strategy doesn't have to be that rigid. The
rigid part can be you know, the things that that we must get done,
the things that we can't change, and then everything else. Everything else
should kind of be left to people, local leaders or leaders of smaller teams
or individuals to kind of bring their own spin to it, because that's a
how you figure out whether or not it's being executed correctly in some parts of
an organization versus others. But it also allows them to feel like they're not
just being told what to do when they're a robot. They're being valued for
the the kind of the nuances they can bring to the execution, and they're
being asked to just work exactly like their coworkers might be working. I agree
completely. You have to create some space here to allow leaders to leverage their
strengths and then be able to kind of make up for their opportunities. So
I think like I think of it like in this context of a larger strategy
for maybe like a company, an organization, or like multiple markets or whatever
that might be, you're going to have some some adaption that needs to happen
as a result of maybe something going on locally and in the UH. It
could be everything from hours of operation to demographics of customers to whatever that might
be. But there needs to be a little bit of movement there that you
can have to change it slightly to still be able to fall within the framework
of the strategy, but allow there to be some some uniqueness to it,
and then then the conformity like like you have to. I think the best
strategies are ones that are clear in in an impact. They're clear in what
the result is that we're going after. It's aligned with the uh the priorities
of an organization that they defined. But they also give the teams a little
space there to say, like, you know, there may be a little
bit of a different take that you could take onto this that would be helpful.
There's a little bit of a different way that you might be able to
to make this a little bit more localized to the team, and that matter.
That matters a lot with strategy. It feels much better. You can't
always have everybody in the room and there's always going to be strategies. It
kind of have to be like here. It is like like those in the
room to help develop this larger strategy have been here, this is what's been
decided. Here it is for you. But there has to be a little
space in there where a team can be a little creative and make it theirs,
because then that that I think has a lot more impact and a lot
more stickiness when a team can take a larger strategy kind of in the macro
and bring it into the micro and say, and let's make it our strategy.
So I definitely agree with that. Yeah, And looking at this list,
are there any on here inconsistency, complexity, rigidity, ambiguity, conformity,
inertia, and diffusion any of these seven that you look at and the
first thing you think, it takes you right back to a time when this
exact thing happened to you, When when a strategy when you could see it
was a good strategy, but it just wasn't working because of you could see
one of these things was happening, and it maybe you have like a you
know, extra spidy sense that goes up when when one of these things happens
all the time, right now, right right right now. There's a strategy
that I've had to reread the strategy in the math around why we're doing something
like four times, and I still don't understand. It's so complex. It
like like if you can't explain it in sixty seconds, it's too complex,
Like it should be that easy at least for like the big picture of what
the strategy is, about, what it's solving for, what the goal is,
what some of the expectations are. You don't have to get into all
the minutia of it. But once it starts to like get all over the
place, and if this, then that, if this, like if it
feels like a thousand character Excel formula, you know, and I'm just like,
where's the comma and the parentheses? Like it's just too complicated. I
see that happen a lot. It makes sense for the person who made it,
it doesn't make sense for those that are trying to execute it. Absolutely
for sure. I think the the diffusion for me is not that it's necessarily
like no clear priorities. It just might not be aligned with the priorities that
we just talked about thirty minutes ago or yesterday. So constantly like changing priorities,
yeah, like that that will destroy a strategy so fast because then I'm
like, well, wait a minute, Like this isn't even aligned with what
we talked about yesterday. So like I don't know how much I'm gonna put
effort into this, like because now I gotta kind of I gotta I gotta
hedge my bets here, like which one is going to win? So like,
I don't know if I'm gonna get my full effort into this. So
that's definitely something that I would say sticks out to me that as a leader,
I'm like, oh, you know, I don't know. I don't
know if I need more clarity here. I need to understand this because it's
not aligned with what we just said. Yeah, I think another thing that
I think of when I think when I hear no clear priorities. And this
is just from a long history of seeing this happen, even if you don't
have, you know, two competing parts of the business who seem to have
different priorities, and now you're left thinking, Okay, which whose coattails do
I need to stand on here? Because one person's you know, drive or
push for the organization. You know, the organization has that person's ear right
now, but maybe not this person. So I need to, you know,
choose my priorities based on the almost the politics of the moment. But
what I see also happen is when priorities change and they start conflicting with each
other over time, not not when you have to choose between two in the
same time. But when there's a priority for a quarter and then another quarter
comes up, and then the priority is not just different than the previous quarter,
because that's fine, you can priorities can change, But when the strive
for the priority of the current quarter actually goes in the opposite direction or in
the spirit of being against the priority of the previous quarter or a previous year,
and it's almost like, how many times can you tell your people something
that changes or that differs and expect them to just forget what they pushed for
three months ago or six months ago or a year ago. You need to
really have a compelling reason as to why the direction is changing so much so
where the priority is not just different than the previous one, but goes against
the previous one. If you're gonna do that, it's not all it's not
always a bad thing, but you need to be able to explain very articulately
why that's happening. Otherwise you're gonna people who think that these goals or priorities
just change arbitrarily based on whatever number you want to move on a scorecard,
and that's not a good way to make people feel like they're part of something
larger than themselves absolutely, And one thing I would highlight is I love the
fact that he calls out that this is destroying a solid strategy, meaning that
there are minimum expects, that there are bad strategies and they're just bad strategies.
But this is like, this is a good, solid strategy that is
not being executed because of one of these things. So I love that part,
and with that it brings us to this episode is a one minute hack,
but first a few worse from our sponsors. All right, for this
episode, one minute Hackers wants you to do. So think about the last
strategy that you were in charge of implementing or designing or executing that didn't work
out the way you wanted it to the last strategy that failed. It's very
easy to pick apart a strategy and figure out where it failed if it was
a poor strategy. But if you're scratching your head and thinking, I don't
know why this strategy failed, think about it in the context of these seven
things. We'll put the descriptions in the We'll put the words in the podcast
descriptions. You can read them. Inconsistency, complexity, rigidity, ambiguity,
conformity, in inertia, and diffusion are all reasons why a solid strategy can
fail. So before you throw out a strategy that may have been a good
strategy and assume that there was something you're missing somewhere that it just wasn't a
good strategy, think about it through the lens of these seven things and make
sure that it wasn't just a great strategy that wasn't executed in the right way
as opposed to going back to the drawing board and redesigning a new strategy.
Yeah, I think it's a great woe in a hack and it's you know,
so much of this And I think just in learning, in in leadership
development and self development is around the just idea of self reflection and thinking about
you know, uh, when these things fall apart to your point, like
a bad strategy of bad strategy, Like there's a lot of things that can
The timing was wrong, the the you know it didn't it wasn't it was
maybe like kind of like tone deaf to a degree of what's going on.
There wasn't any collaboration that was done. There wasn't any dialogue, you know,
like there's it's pretty easy to be like why I can tell you exactly
why that didn't work. Right, It's much tougher again when you're scratching your
head being like this really should have worked. I don't like where did this
go wrong? These things, I think are the great, great examples of
like where to start, what to look at, what to consider, and
then starts to like, you know, to peel that back and like maybe
where were there some assumptions that were made on behalf of those building the strategy
or things that that weren't considered when you're you're thinking about like lack of clear
direction, right, and from an ambigu standpoint, you could say, like
I thought it was pretty direct with like what we're going to do here,
but if if your team is not clear in the direction, not you thinking
that you're clear, but if it landed with a team in a way that
they were not clear about it. You need to get that insight. You
need to spend the time asking some of these questions. And that's probably what
I would do with this, is like, all right, what do I
think it was? But what questions would I ask? How would I verify
or validate that it was inconsistency that caused this, or how did I verify
it it was it was too complex or not. Was I able to explain
it in sixty seconds? Was my leader who I shared this with, were
they were able to explain it in sixty seconds or less? Like these are
things that you can do to really verify and validate what was going on.
Yeah, that's spot on. I also think this is a good list to
keep with you when you're creating a strategy because some of them are truly about
the way it's the execution is, but some of it can be referenced during
the course of creating a strategy, things like complexity or you know, or
or diffusion of not having clear priorities. These are things that to consider as
you're going through the strategy because when you're creating one, to be able to
check off some of these boxes and say, Okay, it's not overly complicated,
it's not too rigid. It lets people kind of bring their own spin
on things. These are things that can help the strategy. When you leave
the room with the people will all put it together and you have to say
ready break and you go execute it. Now, going out of those meetings
with this in mind will probably make those people more likely to execute it in
a way that sets it up for success, and you'll have to do,
you know, kind of less of this reflecting later on to try to figure
out why a strategy that was otherwise good failed, because it's really tough to
revisit a good strategy that has failed, even if it was a good strategy.
Meaning if this, if these are the reasons that failed, but it
was a good strategy, it's much harder to get people's buy in and kind
of reinvigorate them round a process that has already failed once. So if you
can prevent it from failing to begin with, that's always a better route.
Absolutely, And with that it brings us to the end of this episode.
This is Hacking Leadership. I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and we'll talk to
you all next time.