Strategic Leadership vs Tactical Decision-Making

August 24, 2021
|In Article
|By lawrenceandco

“For enduring growth, CEOs and senior leaders need to escape so they can think and work on the longer term.”

Do you practice strategic leadership or are you more operational in nature?

What percentage of your time do you spend making short-term tactical decisions versus those that will help and impact your business in the long term?

For enduring growth, CEOs and senior leaders need to escape so they can think and work on the longer term. And the CEO must get over the burden of dealing with day-to-day issues. (That’s why many companies have a COO or President.)

For those who use the One-Page plan that means you should be involved in decisions that impact the business three years down the road. That’s easy to say and hard to do because a lot of people are very tactical and operational, caught up in putting out daily fires.

And there are often different reasons leaders get caught up in the tactical weeds:

  • sometimes it’s simply the style of the CEO
  • the strength of their team isn’t where it needs to be
  • the dynamics of the business
  • what the business requires now – or what the business required five years ago, and the strategy hasn’t been changed.

Three P’s of Strategic Leadership

Here are three different areas you can look at to improve your ability to be a more strategic leader. This will allow your business to grow better, faster and more sustainably. You might even enjoy yourself more.

  1. Focus on long-term development and acquisition vs short-term performance.
  2. Get involved in decision-making that impacts the business three years down road vs quarter to quarter.
  3. Work on things that refine the long-term value of the company vs the short term.

The Challenge

  • What two things can you stop doing that keep you too involved in short-term and operational aspects of your business?
  • What can you start doing to be more engaged in the longer term (a three-year-plus horizon)?

For more about this, check out episode 70 of The Growth Whisperers podcast.

Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.

We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.