Inevitably our series on Strategy has come to what we aim to do. What in BalancedKaizen we call Standards.
No journey undertaken by a mature organization starts today.
A common vanity among newly appointed leaders is to think that they can reset the path of their organization to new and glorious heights of performance whilst ignoring where their team has been heading or where they’ve come from.
Just because past directions weren’t successful doesn’t mean they’re not important or relevant.
Wherever you’re headed, your direction is rooted more in the past than the future because the past is real whilst the future can only be imagined.
Big changes are important – and sometimes they work. Big changes are also risky because they require mindset resetting to work.
People aren’t computers that can simply be reset or re-programmed.
Good leaders understand this and are careful to only make major changes when absolutely necessary. That way the changes they do make are more likely to succeed.
Whilst the new leader might be forgiven for not acknowledging the past, no such leniency should be given to the long term leader who insists on constantly changing directions.
Good leaders lay out a clear strategy and stick to it.
Strategy has to be a long term plan to solve big complex problems, so the bigger or more complex those problems are, the more vital are clarity and alignment of Objectives and Priorities.
The setting of targets is no small issue, and a clear cultural marker as well. The Culture question here is avoidance of Confusion.
Good leaders set high but achievable targets. A good strategy makes the next targets clearly visible as well. It lays out a path to a distant objective, not just a set of random targets.
A good strategy tells a story. Priorities that are changed often lose their effect because they lose meaning.
“No journey undertaken by a mature organization starts today..”
A good test of Strategy is the reaction when targets aren’t met. If priorities and objectives are changed – it’s likely that they were never really priorities at all.
In other words you didn’t have a strategy, just random targets.
Constantly changing priorities can give an impression of robust energy to cover the failure to deliver, but can lead to a vicious circle of successive targets missed, more engagement lost, confusion and failure.
Good leaders reset activities or people when targets aren’t met, or simply keep trying harder. They keep their objectives and Standards through thick and thin. New leaders should take the time to learn about what was happening before they took the responsibility of leadership, and where possible stay consistent.
Do you set targets that aren’t consistent with previous targets, or overall Vision for the business?
Does your team see consistency or are they confused?
