Are Your Leaders Thinking Upstream of Strategy?

Why do so many talented leaders get labeled as "too tactical," and what does it actually take to become a truly strategic leader?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson explores one of the most misunderstood concepts in leadership: the difference between strategy and tactics. Drawing inspiration from Sun Tzu's timeless wisdom, Ed explains why tactics without strategy create confusion, while strategy gives purpose, direction, and meaning to every action a leader takes.

Ed challenges the common misconception that strategy is simply a collection of initiatives or plans. Instead, he demonstrates how great leaders build organizations by first creating alignment around purpose, culture, objectives, and the realities of the ecosystem before defining the strategies that guide decisions long after the leader leaves the room.

You'll also discover the SCOPE Framework (Strategy, Culture, Objectives, Purpose, and Ecosystem), a practical methodology that helps leaders clarify their mission, align stakeholders, strengthen organizational culture, and develop strategies that empower teams to execute with confidence rather than simply follow instructions.

Whether you're leading a department, a growing company, or an enterprise organization, this episode offers actionable insights to help you stop reacting tactically and start leading strategically. Learn how to build stronger communities of effort, create meaningful alignment, improve decision-making, and develop repeatable leadership systems that produce lasting results.

If you've ever been told you're "too tactical" or wondered how strategic leaders consistently inspire clarity, ownership, and execution, this episode provides the framework you've been looking for.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

If you're leading a team and you feel stuck in chaos, conflict, or constant pressure, then Leadership SOP podcast is for you. And your host, Ed Tyson.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. These words have always carried a heavy weight with me, conjuring terrible visions of young men and women suffering pointless deaths during ill-conceived and completely avoidable battles. They are not mine, of course. They are attributed to translations of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, which stands as the first known holistic treatise on strategy, one which shockingly predated the word itself. Think about that. Writing an entire book without a word to describe your topic. This is why he called it the art of war. To Sun Tzu, the art of war versus the science of war or warring itself is a kind of holistic preparation for battle designed to define success and organize thinking and action. This preparation went far beyond just considering size and location of the enemy, or the resources under their command. They thought beyond contact with the enemy or even a full military campaign. It included deep thought about the conflict itself, about the objectives of the war, and war in general. These holistic preparations were meant to structure the why, what, and how so well as to allow the general to conceive of, communicate, and orchestrate political, psychological, and physical combat. His aim was to broaden perspectives beyond the immediate battlefield and ensure victory before blows were exchanged and the first warrior falls. While not very inspiring, the slowest route to victory still promises markedly better outcomes than the noise before defeat, establishing a clear preference for ordered strategic thinking over unfocused and untamed tactics. But notably, it does little to actually define either concept, leaving many still today with the notion that strategy and tactics are somehow like two opposing forces akin to yin and yang, which bring definition to each other by their glaring contrasts, light and dark, becoming and unbecoming, order and disorder. This, of course, is not the case with yin and yang or strategy and tactics. It is more so that one organizes and yields to the other. A strategy gives shape and meaning to bundles of tactics, which in turn represent the strategy's intent, giving it, in turn, life and therefore meaning. Yet this understanding is not very pervasive or well understood. In fact, what is well understood 2,500 years later is that being called too tactical is a biting critique of any leader, a sick burn, which rarely comes with any curative relief. For even though we now have a name for it, strategy. How to get more strategic remains a mystery for most, particularly when the work we know best is so clear and accessible. Hello, and welcome back to the Leadership SOPs podcast, where we help enterprise leaders structure, operate, and perfect the communities of effort they need to succeed. I'm Ed Tyson, leadership author, coach, and consultant, and creator of the Leadership SOP's methodology, framework, and digital platform. In our first three episodes, we explored the purpose, work, and process of leading, establishing why we lead to cultivate communities of effort, what the work is structuring, operating, and perfecting those communities, and how we should do it through step-by-step repeatable systems of action or processes I call leadership SOPs. But in all three episodes, we flirted with, but stopped short, of something very critical: specific examples of SOPs, my ideas and yours for scoping the work, setting the pace, and developing the might. So today, we are going to take a hard right turn and do just that, starting with structure. Your community of effort exists beyond and in spite of the physical boundaries of your current geolocation. Neither its limits nor its essence are defined by the four walls of any physical structure. So what does define your community of effort? What binds your members together? What describes the core and the edges of what you lead? An employment agreement? A paycheck? Your legal structure? A chart of boxes and lines displaying the chain of command? Or perhaps the members. Who you lead, define what you lead. Those who choose to follow to participate. Clearly, volition, the choice to follow, is an important factor in this existential equation. Leadership, after all, requires willing followers as a precondition, a willingness to be a member of the community, to accept interdependence and exude effort. It's a must. Without the will, you just have ambition, you have your vision, and maybe even ideas, but you do not have a community of effort. Likewise, with will alone, you have unchanneled effort, at best focused on an individual, but undirected, shapeless. You have tactics, absent meaning, and you have Sun Tzu's noise before defeat. And so we find ourselves back at strategy. Not just because it sounds bad to be known for avoiding it and being too tactical, but because you can't really lead without it. In fact, we do leaders a disservice when we tell them to be more strategic, or that we think they are too tactical. Not just as I've said before, because this feedback isn't clear, but also because what we really are saying is they aren't leading at all. Leading a community of effort starts with giving meaning to the team and its tactics via strategy. If you aren't doing that, you aren't doing the job you were hired to do. That's what you're trying to say. When you're saying somebody needs to be more strategic or that they are too tactical, they are not leading or leading enough. They are doing the team's work, not their work. And so it goes that the foundation for your structure, for your community of effort, rests on the strength of its why, what, and how, and the metaphysical mortar I call membership that fuses it all together. The stronger this foundation, the stronger the structure, the stronger and more resilient the community of effort. Tactical leaders follow and issue orders. They ignore the high-level why, what, and how and mistake compliance for membership. Strategic leaders create a deep sense of why, what, and how with their communities of effort. So they don't have to tell them or sell them. It is their why, the team's why, their what, and their how, because it is their community of effort. But of course, the real question is how do we do it? When do we do it, and who do we do it with? A very common method is to start with an environmental assessment of some sort, like a SWOT analysis, looking at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, for instance. Then defining and refining the mission, vision, and values before setting objectives and then diving into strategy. I created the scope framework to help myself and the leaders I coach remember the five foundational dimensions within that kind of best practice methodology. They are strategy, culture, objectives, purpose, and ecosystem. Strategy, culture, objectives, purpose, and ecosystem. When using the scope framework as a methodology to do strategy, to get strategic, your aim is to create strategies which pursue the cultural and business objectives, which need to be known first, and to use those objectives to point the way to your core purpose, which itself must respond to your dynamic ecosystem. In other words, strategy is the first word in the acronym, but it is the final deliverable, not the starting point. You have to work the process backwards and then reiterate it as you define it. Tactical leaders forcing themselves to finally do strategy often start here, or at least close to here, with strategic initiatives acting like tactics in disguise. Strategic leaders know that bundled or even ordered actions are not strategies. They are not the starting point. Those are plans. Plans are the chapters, paragraphs, and words of a book. They bridge you from start to finish with a clear beginning, middle, and end. But strategies are the powerful themes which guided the author's hand and once absorbed by readers, live on for eternity. Strategies are themes. They are themes for qualifying your route to success, deploying resources, and taking action. If your team can read your strategy and follow it step by step, it's a plan. Or maybe an SOP, but it isn't a strategy. Strategies inform decisions and actions when you're not in the room, when you're absent a clear plan. That's a strategy. Strategies elaborate on the route to victory, carving out a niche or fulfilling an unmet need in the ecosystem. For example, being the most convenient versus the most exclusive solution, lowest cost versus highest quality, or fastest versus most bespoke. They also identify where and how dollars, technology, expertise, people, time, and other assets will be used. And they allude to tactics just a little bit, at least the most important repeatable bundles of tactics or routines expected to bring about success. Maybe the plays you might call again and again. But if the conversation starts here, you are assuming alignment and understanding regarding the cultural and business objectives that the strategy is meant to achieve. You are assuming the fundamental purpose is clear and that we all see the same risks and opportunities when we look at the ecosystem. And that is why we start with the E in scope. We first align on the dynamics within the ecosystem, which are yielding the most important opportunities, constraints, and risks. We then ensure our purpose, the value we must deliver to the ecosystem, is clear and shared. Because it is only then that we can discuss and define the short-term, long-term, and visionary objectives that will mark our journey to fulfilling that purpose. And of course, we must consider the culture, the culture we have, the culture we want, and even the cultural forces we will have to overcome, ensuring our objectives are modified to include sufficient people objectives, and that our strategy is not devoured by unspoken cultural considerations. Then, and only then is it time to debate those strategies. This may seem like a throwaway concept ordering this discussion, but how many hours have you already wasted in your career stuck in passionate arguments about the right strategy, which were really a reflection of different goals or beliefs regarding the marketplace dynamics, aligning on these things first, and then the strategy to react, respond to, realize the opportunities they hold. That is the key. Just like the word implies, scope draws an ideological and aspirational circle around the ideas that inspire current and future members of your community of effort, giving it an identity, defining the highest level why, what, and how connecting and motivating them and informing their action. If you lead leaders, each one of them has a scope. And their multiple scopes define your scope. And your scope either is or is a part of the broader organization's scope. And all these interdependent scopes are traveling and changing through time and relative to each other, so they must be tended to continuously, not just from within, but across the organization. I trigger my scope alignment SOP annually. Since the power of a scope is just as much in the alignment as it is in the thinking behind it, other factors which might trigger the need for a scoping session include everything from new members to new products, to new competitors, to new distractions. Likewise, crushing your objectives or being crushed by changing conditions could spark a refresh. And for sure, for sure, anyone being told they are too tactical should consider that feedback as a bright, flashing red light. Of course, new roles, additional functions added to your organization also justify a new scope. Generally, when I scope my community of effort, I try to keep it on that annual schedule and synced to my budget process. I refine the scope by going through the process at least three times, iteratively improving it each time before I translate it into messages and action. Let me explain. First, I create a straw man to assess need and prepare for stakeholder engagement. Walking through the scope in this way by myself makes sure I am confident that the timing is right and that I know where I'm going and who to involve. Next, I engage stakeholders and use them to develop consensus around strong options. I cast a wide net during this part of the process to alert the organization that a new scope is coming, that they are participating in it, and that their ideas matter. Then I work with decision makers to finalize it. I make sure the decision engine, the process for making the decision, and the roles are clear up front, and that those with a voice in parts of the process, but not others, understand their role and are not surprised by it later. I try to use senior participants of my core team throughout the process and make sure they are included also as decision makers, along with other executive stakeholders from my broader community of effort to ensure that those stakeholders who might not naturally be a part of my planning process are bought in, that I have the proper authority I need to execute, and that the broader organization is evolving in alignment. For some leaders, this high-level overview is enough. Create a straw man by yourself, brainstorm proposals with others, and then finalize it with decision makers. If that's you, you could sign off here. Or you could challenge yourself to sit through the details of a broader, more detailed process and see what you take from it. Step one, conduct a needs assessment by assembling that straw man scope. Running through the straw man scope gives me a sense of what's changed, what's at stake, how we might need to adjust, and who might need to participate in the discussion. Step two, establish a plan to plan, including the relative timing and key participants, given the potential impact and complexity of likely proposals. When possible, I'd like to cast a wide net and make sure collaborators, customers, and competitors all have a voice through this process. Even if it wouldn't be practical or appropriate for them to have an actual seat at the table, I want their voice heard in a way that it cannot be ignored. Step three, align with executive stakeholders on my needs assessment as well as my plan. There is nothing worse than figuring out halfway through your strategic planning process that you either overbuilt it or underbuilt it for the opportunity at hand. Alignment is critical. Step four, brainstorm the ecosystem dynamics, evolving purpose, key objectives, cultural considerations, and potential winning strategies. Depending on time constraints, I like to approach each of the scope dimensions at different times as separate brainstorming meetings, a meeting to discuss the ecosystem, a meeting to discuss our evolving purpose, a meeting to set our objectives. I like to do this so that we can let the conversation sink in and mature, get challenged and improved in the hallways, etc. But what I never do is combine the brainstorming, even if I do EPOCS all in one brainstorming session, I never combine that with step five, decision making. I'd like to make sure there is ample time to pressure test, socialize, and analyze assumptions and proposals. And as I mentioned before, I'd like some of the deciders to be from my senior team, my core team, and some of them to be outside of that team, my supervisors and other executive stakeholders. Depending on this role, this could be your boss and select peers, or this could be an advisory or fiduciary board. Either way, this forces me to start over and explain myself to some of the new stakeholders at the table who are close to the action but haven't been on the journey. If you're listening carefully, this really means there's a hidden step or process between the brainstorming and deciding steps, which includes formalizing and analyzing the proposal itself, the likely impacts, and even assembling a rough change management plan for the deciders to review. Step six, align and execute. This step links your strategy to communication and assumes many other steps to create the action plan, linking everything you do, every following tactic to your strategy, and making you and your leaders more strategic. But our job isn't done, not yet. We've handled the metaphysical structure, but not the physical one. The ideological things, but not the actual org chart. Is your organization custom built for this strategy or the last one? Now that's a conversation worth having. Next on the Leadership SOPs podcast. Subscribe to and review our show. And if you have questions or suggestions, visit askedon.com. Find, follow, and message me on LinkedIn or the Leadership SOPs app. And as always, lead on.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

So that's it for today's episode of Leadership SOPs. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 value VIP Day with Ed Tyson and stuff. Be sure to head on over to Leave Defensope Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Ed gift. And join us next time.