vision and help them understand how everything they do impacts the business in some way. You need to pull back from a reactive habit of spending your days putting out fires. You need a way to win people over to your cause. Whether the leaders you’re working alongside are investors in your small, one-person shop; shareholders in a huge, multinational corporation; board members of a nonprofit organization; or the other leaders at the executive table—they are looking to you for strategic leadership, and this book is your guide to delivering on that need.
Finding Your Ground Amidst Disruption
Your career is at a crossroads. You have the opportunity to lead. To win. To build something from the ground up and be successful. But first, you must make a great shift: from tactical, gets-stuff-done worker to strategic leader.
Have you ever been told you need to be more strategic? Or maybe you need to work on getting to the point, not presenting endless details, numbers, and facts, but distilling your case into a motivating vision. Your counterparts are moving up in the organization, and you can’t figure out why you’re not. Have you been passed over for a promotion because you fail to see the big picture? Are you starting your own business, knowing you need to set yourself up for success but unsure of how to go about it? If you’re anything like us when we were on the receiving end of this feedback, you probably thought, what the heck does that even mean?!
Meanwhile, out in the world around you, everything keeps changing and evolving. Technology is replacing jobs traditionally thought of as human-only pursuits, and that’s a scary thought. Simultaneously, technology creates the need for new skill sets, including many that are difficult to anticipate or prepare for. You may be just five years out of school and already need to update your own skills. Change has been a constant force in life for as long as humans have walked the earth, yet it continually surprises us. Think about this for a minute: twenty years ago, did anyone have the job title social media manager? What about SEO specialist, virtual assistant, UX designer, Uber driver, blogger, drone operator? This is just a small handful of positions created by changes in technology, and they in turn change the ways we live. Have you ever booked your vacation to stay in someone else’s city apartment or ordered groceries using an app? These are things the vast majority of people weren’t even thinking about twenty years ago. Now, we take such services for granted.
Think of reactions to change on a spectrum. At one end, you have those who cling to the old way of doing things. They say things like, “This is the way we’ve always done it,” or “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” At the other end of the spectrum are the people who jump onto everything new and shiny. They’re the ones who have to have the newest gadgets the day they come out and are never, ever satisfied with business as usual. The majority of people fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, trying to grapple with all the changes around them and determine when to stick with the traditional methods and when to embrace the newest fad. These decisions aren’t easy in your personal life, let alone when you’re making them at the larger scale of a business.
And when it comes to business, the workforce is changing dramatically, too. Not only are some job functions becoming obsolete while others have a nearly insatiable demand for talent, but even the ways we think about the structure of a company are evolving.
Diana
When I started at McDonald’s, it was common for an individual to climb the corporate ladder within one organization for the duration of his or her career, the way I did.
Stacey
My career journey of moving from company to company, doing independent consulting work, and eventually establishing my own firm is much more typical today.
Companies now have a mix of employees and contractors, contingent workers, and outsourced functions. They may exist across the globe, with coworkers who rarely or never meet in person. The dynamics of the worker-company relationship have changed so dramatically that it’s ever more critical that you can show how you are impacting business performance.
And these are just sweeping, global changes. We haven’t even gotten into industry-level changes—like disruptor companies, changing consumer needs and desires, economic issues, supply-side shortages…the list goes on. The way people learn has changed dramatically. In the past, if you wanted to learn something or answer a question, you had to find a library book or take a class. Today, you can google it or watch a video online. A big, important part of being a successful strategic leader is understanding all of these changes and—the magic ingredient—making smart decisions about how to manage them. Think back to that change spectrum. If you’re on the far left, resistant to change, you will quickly become obsolete. If you’re on the far right, you’ll be endlessly distracted by every new trend that pops into your inbox.
You can be the hardestworking person in your company, but if nobody can see how what you’re doing contributes to the bigger picture, then you’ll continue to be passed over for promotions.
There’s more to being strategic than managing change—a whole book’s worth! In a nutshell, when someone tells you to “be more strategic,” what they want is for you to show how you’re driving corporate strategy and adding real value. Notice the word show. You can be the hardest-working person in your company, but if nobody can see how what you’re doing contributes to the bigger picture, then you’ll continue to be passed over for promotions. Now, if you’re in sales, this may seem clear-cut. You have a quota, or you can show a dollar amount that you sold, which in turn helped your company to make money. But for every other discipline out there, it’s less obvious. Maybe your job is to develop new products—how can you show that the products you’re envisioning will be wins for your company? Or maybe you work in IT, which can feel like a cost center (or a necessary evil!). How can you show that what you do is helping to increase productivity across the organization? If you want to lead at the executive level, you certainly need to work hard. But you also need to get results, and you need to share those results in an enticing way.
In this book, you’ll learn how to do two key things: first, how to show up and be perceived as a strategic leader. Second, you’ll learn how to take your strategic behaviors and apply them through your organization for stronger results. We wrote this book for leaders and aspirational leaders who want to get to the next level. You’re in a leadership role or will be soon, but you need to do something to improve and get to the next level. By improving your leadership and showing your results, you will get there.
What Happens When Strategic Leadership Is Missing?
It’s often useful to define a concept by talking about what it’s not. In an organization without strategic leadership, everyone stays in their own silo. People keep their heads down and get their jobs done without an understanding of why they’re doing what they’re doing. They may work extremely hard, but they’re not intentionally applying their efforts to the things that will drive the company’s desired outcomes. Waste is rampant as people fail to communicate across disciplines, and the wheel is frequently reinvented in multiple places. Layoffs feel random because the bosses don’t know who is really contributing to business results. Meetings are long and unproductive as participants show up late and unprepared, and then bore each other to tears with irrelevant information.
