the six factors for strategic leadership. These factors are essential for anyone who needs to be more strategic in organizational contexts—public and private companies, non-profits, government, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and start-up founders. That’s because, no matter what type of organization you’re working in, you need to be able to look across the landscape of your jungle and ensure you’re focused on the things that will get the results your organization wants and needs to see.
In my work helping leaders and organizations build trust, I’ve noticed that the lack of trust costs individuals and organizations dearly—what I call “Trust Taxes.” Similarly, if you are too tactical in your approach to understanding your business’ needs and providing solutions, your influence and career will be taxed or limited. Conversely, there are “Trust Dividends” that are earned when you wisely extend trust, increase your credibility, and behave in ways that inspire trust with your stakeholders. So it is that there are significant benefits when you intentionally choose to be strategic in your work of leadership and influence.
I’m confident you will enjoy both the destination and the journey of becoming more strategic, and that developing this competency will increase your credibility and results as a leader. This wonderful book will show you how.
Stephen M. R. Covey
Author of The New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Speed of Trust; former President & CEO, Covey Leadership Center
When we first met each other, back in 2010, we had no idea that the needs driving our initial meeting would eventually turn into a process for you, our leader-reader, to cultivate your own strategic leadership capabilities and then apply that skill set throughout your organization. No, we got together under the premise that one of us had a missing piece and the other knew how to fill in the gap but lacked a platform for sharing her knowledge. Our relationship grew over the years as we helped each other in many ways, and eventually we realized that putting our skill sets together created a combination that is desperately needed in the business world.
We want you to know where we come from because our individual stories are the genesis of our model. Most of the book contains our collective wisdom, but occasionally we’ll share specific insights that come from one of us. We want to give you our wins, lessons learned, mistakes, and occasional embarrassments so you can turn them into your opportunity to excel.
Stacey
Ouch.
That was my initial reaction to my first performance review in my first professional job after earning my PhD at the age of twenty-nine. I was used to being the sharp and successful girl in academia, so it was pretty shocking to find out that I was too detail-oriented and that people didn’t like meeting with me, among other things. Where was this feedback coming from, and what the heck could I do to change it?
It took several years, many interactions with seasoned leaders, and an intense amount of work in the field for me to get to the bottom of what my bosses were telling me—that I needed to be more strategic. That’s a phrase that’s thrown around in a lot of employee review meetings and frequently goes unexplained. The recipient walks away with a vague feeling of something to work on but without a practical plan for acquiring a so-called strategic skill set. I loved research, digging into numbers, creating spreadsheets, and mastering the details of everything I worked on. I couldn’t understand how “too detail-oriented” had suddenly become a bad thing!
I watched my Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) colleagues gain promotions while I was passed over. I was told to be more strategic, but I really had no idea what that meant, what I was doing wrong, or where to go to learn how to become a strategic contributor. Frankly, my bosses weren’t equipped to help me. I was firing off spreadsheets full of complex calculations while they were asking for straightforward answers to their questions. Right out of academia, I didn’t yet understand how to distill my research findings into meaningful answers to management’s strategic questions. In the high-pressure environment of Andersen, where everybody was smart, successful, and competitive, I really couldn’t afford to flounder.
After a couple of years, I moved on and directed my career more specifically into the corporate training field. During this time, I realized that I loved the consulting model. It gave me the ability to dig into the details that energized my work, but at the same time I was able to be out in the world, working with dynamic individuals and tackling new problems in a variety of industries. Human capital analytics became my niche. The problem was, in the early 2000s, no one in the market knew what that was, and no one in the nascent field had figured out how to package it in a way that was mainstream and palatable to the potential customers who stood to benefit.
In the fall of 2005, I arrived late to a Chief Learning Officer conference. I rushed into a ballroom and stood at the back, only to find that the keynote speaker had already begun her talk. It so happened that this was Diana’s first keynote; she had been invited to speak at a time when McDonald’s was transforming from a struggling fast-food restaurant chain to a thriving corporation. I wasn’t sure who Diana was, but I was quickly captivated by the talk and said to myself, I want to work with this woman! I could see that Diana had the vision and drive to run a successful learning department. Diana seemed to realize something many learning leaders at the time didn’t grasp: that she needed to communicate with her stakeholders (in this case, executive leaders and franchisees) in a way that spoke to their business needs. However, when I saw the results she presented, I realized just how much McDonald’s could benefit from being able to show a true link between investments on the learning side and results in the restaurants.
After the talk, Diana was mobbed with people wanting to meet her, and I hung back. I knew I could help Diana, but I also knew that my ideas would be well over her head at this point in time. No one in the learning space was making meaningful connections between their learning data and business data. If these kinds of results were shared at all, they were loose correlations. Diana had shown how HR investments had seemed to lead to a rise in sales in the restaurants, but she couldn’t get specific about what training had done to drive those results.
About five years later, I joined Chief Learning Officer Magazine (CLO), the organizer of the conference where I had seen Diana’s presentation. My role at CLO was to create an awards program for enterprise-class learning programs. Applications evaluating nearly every aspect of a learning leader’s function were judged by leading practitioners in the learning and development industry. Winners were ranked in an annual list known as the LearningElite. The program quickly grew in popularity, and soon Diana’s team at McDonald’s applied. Nearly all of the learning departments at this time were doing little to evaluate the effectiveness of training, and those who were evaluating were making workforce learning and development decisions based on departmental data and learner surveys. No one was exploring predictive or causal models (that is, what could happen as a result of a key decision). A subset of those departments were estimating a financial return on learning investments.
At this time, the winds of change were beginning to blow ever harder in the learning industry. With the rising popularity and affordability of technology, as well as the 2008/2009 recession, corporate learning and development had gone from delivering classroom training and paper manuals to e-learning and on-demand content. The next iteration of that change was a growing attempt to become more precise in showing how learning impacted the business in meaningful ways. The term predictive analytics was gaining traction in other disciplines (marketing, supply chain analysis, etc.), and there was a small-but-growing faction of thought
