S1E3 - Strategy - If Everything's A Priority, Nothing Is

Everyone loves the word strategy… until they realise it means saying “no” to things. In this episode of Leadership Matters, Glenn Price and Terry Reynolds cut through the corporate noise to expose why most “strategies” are really just oversized to-do lists disguised in PowerPoint.

They unpack the courage it takes to choose, the danger of rewarding busyness over progress, and the magic that happens when a team aligns around just three or four genuinely strategic bets. From drowning the puppy (don’t worry — no dogs harmed) to the power of version A, B and C plans, this episode gets real about what strategy is, what it isn’t, and why subtraction is a leader’s secret superpower.

If your strategy could double as an operational plan… or a wish list… this is the episode you need.

Transcript

Welcome to Leadership Matters, a podcast created by the LeaderShape Consulting in order to help leaders deliver results. In this podcast, we wanted to focus mainly around the second driver. in our previous podcast, we talked about the importance of vision. Once we've got that vision, then we need to move to strategy. in the book we write, look, strategy isn't what you write, it's what you're willing to say no to.

That question, what are you prepared to say no to, is probably the most interesting question you often ask at off-sites because it really does get that executive team to start to think about going, we often don't say no to anything. We're willing, wherever there's income or revenue or result, that's where we're going to go. And I think narrowing it down to two or three or four things becomes extremely challenging for most people. So true, isn't it? I mean, I can't count the number of off sites I've been to or segments even during COVID doing it online. And everybody loves the word strategy, right? It sounds intelligent and ambitious and exciting. And so like you said, it's not even smart a lot of the time. It's almost show and tell from each department going, this is what I want to do. And by the time you add up each department's areas of projects that they want to do, all with the right intent.

There's probably 20, 25 things and I can't help but think is that a strategy or is that an operational plan? We often ask clients that. It's funny, mean, it's probably nine times out of 10 when organisations say, you want to have a look at the last strategy to give you some ideas of where we were focused last year or the year before, et cetera. I would say that most of the time it is an operational plan.

I would say most organisations, they don't fail for lack of strategy, right? They've got something that they're working to, but with all of those different options and having not gone through the strategic thinking process of reducing those, they fail because they can't let go of the noise, the distraction. Do you think that most people would write all that down and say, you know, what's the most important bit? Well, everything's a priority. 

For some, actually what it really does mean is if everything's a priority, actually nothing is because they're not willing to put it down. And that links back to our previous podcast on vision. if you've got the vision component right and it's the litmus test for decision making, then you should be able to go, is it a priority based on will it help us correct course back to true north towards the vision or a good friend of ours, Ben Hunt Davis would say does it make the boat go faster? it help us go in the right direction? It's funny, you you look at, you know, that busyness, activity-based… …because people just want to get stuff done, don't they? So they get addicted to activity. And when you've got a great strategy, you're only focusing on three or four things. Maybe people feel like they're not going to be as busy. They don't have a bucket of things that they're going to be running at. I was recently in an organisation and I would say that the executive team itself, bad example, but they wore the badge of honour of busyness. Couldn't get into their diaries, running around from meeting to meeting. They were busy. And what was interesting about that was actually they had no strategy. And they really did not have a strategy. People just got busy.

Yeah, look, I think we can all come up with examples of similar things. The thing that scares me is my assumption is that that organisation was rewarding activity instead of progress. Without a doubt. And so back to those, you know, whether you've got a flight path with base camps, whether you've got McKinsey's one, two or three horizons, whatever it may be, showing people the journey that you're on, but measuring progress as opposed to just busyness. I reckon that rewarding activity, organisations that rewarded their activity instead of the progress. That's what kills execution completely. I also sort of think that it probably drives a little bit of false alignment, right, by having lots of things to do. So everybody leaves the room going, well, I'm busy, therefore I'm important. I think if you've got it down to three, four, five things, people have to ask themselves,

What am I doing with my time? And specifically, what strengths am I bringing from a leadership perspective right here? you know, even strategic thinking, the huge difference between strategic thinking and creation of strategy. How many times have we seen a sales strategy and they've never talked to a customer? All the time. They're making opinion based decisions, not data based decisions. It's all looking in the rear vision mirror with their data and analytics instead of looking forward. So it's prescriptive. And so I think coming down to those three, four or five things is critical. I would say, and it's a word that you mentioned in our first podcast, courage. I think it takes courage for a leadership team to actually choose, especially when saying no could be a career limiting choice to one particular individual who might put up their hands going.

This is not for me. I remember back in our previous business, we had adjusted the strategy to market conditions and the room went really quiet. And all of a sudden one partner put up his hand and said, look, I still want to be part of the business, but clearly I'm operational and my strengths don't align to that strategy. So I'm clearing up a space on the leadership team for somebody to step in who has those, those competencies, those strengths that's needed for the strategy for the next 18 months to two years. That's incredibly vulnerable and I don't think it happens enough where a team of people or an individual has that courage to choose. No, I'd agree. I mean, every choice in strategy is a statement of belief, isn't it? At the end of the day, mean, choosing one path really does mean you're walking away from another so that, you know, what's in what's out becomes a level of conviction when you're sitting around the table to go, we've got to go after that. 

Yeah, I love, I mean, I took this from working with Kraft when we were in the Middle East, but they had three phases, discuss, debate and decide. And I love the inclusivity of discuss where everybody's throwing ideas about where that organisation could go. Anybody, this was the key. It wasn't the CEO that moved phases. Anybody in the room that you had brought in the smartest, best athletes in the room to try and help something move forward. And they're moving from the discuss phase and suddenly someone would say debate. And that means we're coming down to a few choices. And then finally, the decision. I think it would be remiss to say that courage needs to be balanced with that behaviour that says disagree and commit. Is that once we've decided that that's what it is, then that's the last word that's said. And we need to be able to capture the decisions that we've made and be able to articulate them in a strategy narrative. Something that I would say nine out of 10 organisations that I've seen have no strategy narrative. They simply go, but I put them in a pyramid or I put it on a slide or marketing's come up with a model that makes it look good. But the most powerful one, and I'm thinking of a large property company we work with, the CEO's out there every single day bringing that one slide to life with strategy narrative, with examples, with stories, he's catching people out doing stuff really well. 

And I think that's where it helps team members, colleagues, employees and customers to be honest, be understood. We often talk about the one or two slide test, right? Can you capture your strategy and the difference that it makes on one slide or And people wanna do the small font so they can put more on it. Yeah, let's stick to 12 type font. The funny thing you say there is what you talk about this discuss, The Strategy Narrative decide piece. For us, we're going to be talking about that next, aren't we, around this alignment piece? Because I think you want people to walk out of the room going, we're all in. But, you know, don't you often see that there are people that walk out and then the shiny new toy, whatever it is, appears, it's not part of the strategy, but they're going to go after it anyway. They want that flexibility to be able to do that. They don't want to be tied down to four or five things, particularly when that new toy arrives. ⁓

In our own businesses, we've done exactly that mistake where we've held onto something. won't count on this series, where, especially if you've invested time or resources or money or talent into this idea, and it's a terrible turn of phrase, drown the puppy. I own a dog, no dogs were harmed in this example. But taking something that you've loved, that you've spent time on and agreeing to say no to it or putting it on ice. We saw this during COVID where there was distinctly two different types of companies, ones that had worked through their strategies and they had version A, B and C based on certain metrics and they put it away in the safe. And when we hit those certain metrics, they executed whatever those plans were that were able to reflect market forces or internal capability that they needed to shift. And then we saw companies go, I don't know what I'm doing, so I'll just take a deep breath and hold on. And I'll just hope that that works for my employees and for my customers. And we know hope is not a strategy, right? And so look, I think once we've got that guiding vision, that true north about where we're heading, strategy and people, as I said before, get excited about the word, it's simply a plan to add value.

Saying less is better than saying more, but having the courage to say no to things, to be strategic in what you choose to do, where you lay your big bets absolutely matters. And then as you said on our next podcast, we're going to talk about, how do you get people aligned to that that may have a different perspective? 

Here's some top tips for leaders on how you can drive your strategy so that it sticks. Number one, define the edge of the map, right? A good strategy says what's out, not just what's in and that clarity of boundary like you talked about before Terry creates freedom of movement. If you don't give them a sort of frame to work within people move too far to the left and the right and then get disappointed or they lose energy when it doesn't meet the strategy plan. 

Two, run the subtraction test for every new initiative, remove or retire one strategy without pruning creates clutter, we say in the book. And so trying to make sure that we focus on those key areas. 

Make trade-offs visible. Don't hide the hard choices in board papers. Let people see the tension. I know I often say that people judge us on the decisions we make, not the choices we had. But if we were able to share both, then we've got a chance that we can help people believe in what we're doing and may even give us feedback and help buy into the strategy with it the amount of effort that we need to deliver it. 

And then last of all, turn strategy into a rhythm. We get calls from companies that says, can you come on our annual strategy day? We've seen organisations, many of our clients move from three to five year strategy plans to a rolling 18 month written in pencil, right? So we want to embed the big choices into meeting agendas, into budgets, into KPIs. We want those KPIs aligned.

Otherwise, the strategy just ends up living in a PowerPoint deck and we bring it out every three years and we fill in the template. This thing needs to be alive, not only in our storytelling, but in our practice. So that's everything that we wanted to share about strategy. Remember, we've got our guiding light vision strategy helps you get there. In our next podcast, we're going to talk about the importance of alignment. And I guess always we finish our podcasts with a reflective question. If your strategy doesn't follow a tough decision, it's not strategy, it's just a wish list. So is your strategy a tough decision or is it just a wish list of things that you'd like to get done? Hope you got some value. Looking forward to seeing you on our next podcast.