Strategic Leadership vs Tactical Decision-Making

“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.