Your Best Strategists are Hiding in Plain Sight
You don’t have to hire an expert and spend days to make progress in your team’s strategy.
Apologies to all my brilliant and valuable friends and colleagues who do strategic planning. (Even my sister is one!) Big-S Strategy work, with a multi-phase process with multiple meetings and the input of multiple stakeholders, is crucial. It’s satisfying and important to have a big-S Strategy. That work, that time to step back and reflect as a group, is usually quite FUN.
And yet, it can be hard to get that time. And it’s a rare group that does that for themselves more than once and year. Also, traditionally, the usual suspects for Big-S Strategy are not frontline staff (or customers/clients).
So here’s my suggestion:
Look for the hidden strategists in your organization. Sprinkle strategy discussions into everyday work.
Most leaders want to hear from staff at all levels, and even customers or clients, regularly, about the big picture. There are many reasons why we don’t:
TIME. We are moving fast. It’s hard to find the time to look up and talk ad hoc about vision, direction, strategy. For our staff team, we can be reluctant to ask for their input because they are so busy, too.
POWER and status. Most organizations are set up to value the words and ideas of the people at the top of the org chart, and other high-status people like boards of directors.
OPPORTUNITY and inclusion. Related to power and status, we don’t want to get people’s brains churning and hopes up, if we can’t use their input. We don’t want to ask the question if we can’t deal with the responses we get. We have all been in situations where we are asked for input, and we suspect, or we are certain, that our ideas aren’t going to be used.
Even with these barriers to making progress on vision and strategy between the Big-S Strategy sessions, we can find ways to add more voices, more frequently. Here are ideas and examples of things to say:
Let your team member or colleague speak first. So many great ideas for my work have surfaced when I start a meeting by stating a general goal for a project and resist jumping in with my plans and helpful ideas. Strategy questions like, “Do you agree with our goals here?” and “Before we move to implementation, what do you think about our priorities?”
Be clear about the opportunity to influence the team’s direction, to solicit good ideas but not set people up for frustration down the line. You can say something like this, if you expect the pace of change to be slow: “I want to work on this. And I want your brain and your partnership to help. The work may be slow, so it might seem like I forgot your input or this has stalled out. But I won’t let it die out, and I will keep you updated.”
Or, if there are many cooks in the kitchen, but there is still a legitimate opportunity to influence decisions and priorities: “There are many decision-makers involved, so we might not see your or our ideas in the final decision. Here’s what I know about who owns the final decision, and the process….”
You could call it micro-strategy. Just enough strategy discussion that everyone gets to be smart and contribute.
This idea is inspired by two scenarios:
First, in my early days of working on process improvement in health care, about 15 years ago, the CEO of a hospital system turned to the woman who had been working at the front desk of a primary care health center and asked her what she thought about improving workflow and patient experience.
She rattled off three or four really smart ideas, and she stopped only because she became tearful. "No one has ever asked me what I thought before, and I have worked here for 18 years."
She had been sitting at the front desk for years, day after day, watching patients come and go, seeing which doctors and other staff stayed on schedule. Being the eyes and ears of the place. The CEO gave her a hug at the end of the conversation, and the group went on to implement her ideas. The health center was a better place for patients and employees because of her responses to the CEO’s questions.
The other thing that inspired this topic is a keynote speech I'm giving next week. I'm speaking to a group of health IT executives and staff, encouraging them to assert themselves in strategy conversations. In too many organizations, in health care and beyond, the IT team are seen as mechanics of hardware and software only, not as systems thinkers who have strategic vision and a systems mindset, as well as practical execution expertise. I will reflect to these leaders and their staff how IT is more than the help desk and ensuring system uptime.
What do you think about small-s strategy? Is weaving strategy questions into regular work something you do in your organization?