How often do you feel you are sweating out the day’s tactical work feeling as though you are losing site of a future? If you feel this way then how might your team feel? Are they engaged with the purpose behind the work and does everyone understand their contribution is building the roof overhead? The scene looking out over this palm hut is The Gandhi Memorial and a colorful vibrant street scene showcasing vendor carts of spices, fruits, silks… and the most amazing ocean sunsets ever. But in the fog you can see none of this!
Setting frequent time aside for strategy and strategy checkpoints is critical in today’s global economy.
Tips on cutting through the fog to see the castle:
- Engage your team and share the plan! It is important for employees to fully understand their contributions are building something beautiful, important and meaningful. Everyone wants to see a beautiful sunrise and sunset.
- Engage your customers and potential customers! If you, your staff and especially your sales team can not see the future clearly most likely the customers (present and future) will not see the future. Invest in time to tell your story to the constituents of engaged customers for feedback and deeper relationships. This will only prove to be beneficial to your company’s growth journey in the long term.
- Spend time weekly on strategy and then spend time connecting the the strategy to the day to day tactical activities everyone is so invested in overachieving. Knowing why this hard work matters improves the productivity of the team overall.
- Careful not to get lost in strategy, all talk makes for no action, makes for a set of different issues all together. Execution is critical! But the roadmap is essential especially if there are plans to break new ground.
- Growth through learning. Collaborative technologies and lower experimentation costs are major game-changers for business economics. Today learning quickly is key, not over-planning so strategy evolution is important. Companies that organize their business model to maximize their learning from every customer or potential customer interaction will capture the majority of the returns. To extract the value from ongoing key learnings, companies will need to be much more agile, from how their operations work to how their sales people adapt to customer situations.
- Big company, entrepreneurial endeavor and small company ….strategy, planning for the future matters greatly… know you are never too big or to small to stop, take a breath, plan the future, check in on your plans often to test the viability and keep on moving!
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Teresa Spangler is on Twitter @composerspang you can also follow us @plazabridge. Teresa often speaks on trends, disruptive technologies and human adoption, leadership and growing during rapid economic changes. She is the author of the Game of Life Book Series, a contributing author to OpenForum. Click to learn more about Plazabridge Group.
