The Process

Setting strategy involves the following basic steps:

First, review the vision of the company. If you haven’t clarified your vision, do so. In particular, ensure that the current mission is clear. As you recall from Chapter 4, your mission (which is the third component of vision, after core values and beliefs and purpose) is analogous to the specific mountain you are going to climb.

Next, do an internal assessment of the company’s capabilities. This is analogous to examining capabilities and resources of the expedition team.

Third, do an external assessment of the environment, markets, competitors, and trends. This is analogous to studying pictures of the mountain, examining weather reports, assessing new trends in technology that might help you in your ascent, and paying attention to competitors who seek to reach the summit ahead of you.

Finally, taking the internal and external assessments into account, make key decisions about how you intend to go about achieving your current mission. This is analogous to mapping out the route you are going to take up the side of the mountain.

The first step is to make sure that all key people have a copy of the vision, strategy, and the current year’s strategic priorities in front of them at all times. They should be brought to every staff meeting. They should be referred to constantly.

Bill Hannemann of Giro keeps a copy of the strategic priorities with him at all times. Not a staff meeting goes by without his referring to it. “I always try to make sure that our priorities are always being worked on in some specific way,” he says.

Most likely you have more time than you think to develop your strategic agenda. While people expect fresh perspective from a new leader, a new style, and probably a new energy level, most do not expect a wholesale new direction, at least early on.

There’s a lot to be said for effective listening and for not sharing plans prematurely. Not only does it tamp down the amount of potential distraction within the organization, it also nips public scrutiny and second-guessing in the bud. The last thing a new leader needs, especially in a crisis situation, is to have the media and industry pundits questioning, analyzing, and deconstructing your plans even more than they already will be doing. Big pronouncements, especially early in your tenure, make big impressions that can come back to haunt you. “If you’re going to make big calls, you better be right,” counsels Steve Bennett. “Because if you come in early and you make big calls and you’re wrong, the whole organization is going to lose a lot of confidence in you.”

Vision for vision’s sake is counterproductive. Determining a course for the organization is a process that usually requires more time than most people foresee. It should be iterative, building off your strategic agenda, sharpening and clarifying the path based in experimentation and feedback.

Ten Guidelines for Crafting Your Strategic Agenda

1. You have more time than you think. You don't have to deliver a fully baked strategic plan on day one… or even in the first hundred days. Find the right balance between creating a compelling picture of where you want the organization to go and not becoming prematurely locked into your plan.

1. In developing your agenda, diagnose the company’s (or department’s) problems starting with the customer perspective and continuing with a grounded view of what the company stands for.

1. Strictly limit the number of themes and priorities so that they can be easily remembered by the organization.

1. When crafting your short-term agenda, always endeavor to underpromise and overdeliver.

1. Build the strategic agenda in a joint effort with your team versus in a silo.

1. Incorporate an explicit plan to address cultural issues and barriers to change.

1. Define the operating mechanism / process - the meetings, documents, and report formats to conduct the day-to-day business.

1. Secure some early wins; look for obvious flaws in the organization and fix them quickly to establish your credibility as a leader.

1. Expect pushback on your agenda, but rather than resist, coalesce that input in a positive way to maximize buy-in.

1. Don’t be a perfectionist; your strategic agenda is by definition a work in progress. Use it to help you and the organization make decisions, see how they work, and make adjustments as necessary.

1. Goal setting/intention.

Why are we meeting? What can this group uniquely accomplish? There are always a ton of relevant conversations that could happen, but there is usually a very small set of conversations that a particular group, at a particular moment in history, can have and move forward, given their capacity, resources, time, focus, and beliefs. The organizers should have this question at the center of their planning for the event…

The goal can be relationship building—this is often the most necessary piece of work in terms of strengthening a group’s resilience and capacity to move together. “Don’t thingify,” Taj offered me recently, when I was in a moment of pressure to produce “outcomes” at a large gathering. “Humanify! Shifting our way of being is our tangible outcome. Systems change comes from big groups making big shifts in being.” And remember, passion is a more valuable force for action and accountability than obligation, so let the goals be inspiring, uplifting what will inspire the most passionate conversation and participation.