Simplify your Strategic Leadership Framework With These Four Components

I have been fortunate enough in my leadership roles to hit a point where the way in which I was operating was becoming less effective and I recognized I needed to make adjustments in order to allow my teams to be successful. I subtly noticed I was becoming the bottleneck across my teams and needed to operate on a higher level of abstraction in order to get out of my teams way.

It was then that I made the decision to shift from a purely tactical leader to a strategic one focused on providing clarity, direction and focus to my teams while giving them the autonomy to succeed.

When I set out to make this transformation, I realized how easy it was to get lost in the overloaded terminology and marketing buzzwords surrounding Strategy. I couldn’t help but feel at the center of all of these frameworks and tools was a set or core components with specific intent and value.

This is the first part in a series where I will share the simple components of the Strategic Framework I use across my teams. My hope is to minimize the effort for those on a similar journey as my own by providing a simple starting point.

What is Strategy?

Strategy is an overloaded term and has very different meanings depending on the context in which it is being used. The one that resonates the most with me and the foundation of the framework discussed in this article is Strategy is a framework for decision making.

One of the biggest challenges in transitioning from tactical to strategic leadership is maintaining the confidence that your teams will continue to be successful when you are not in the room. This can only be achieved through elevated leadership intentionality focused on providing clarity, direction, and autonomy.

What are the components of a Strategic Framework?

At a minimum, a Strategic Framework should consist of the following components, each serving a specific purpose and collectively providing the foundation for deploying an effective strategy:

• Direction — Where are we heading?
• Guiding Policy — How do we make decisions?
• Structured Goals — What do we focus on right now?
• Performance — How do we measure progress?

As you continue reading, you may notice that you already have some of these in place but refer to them with a more specific name (e.g. Vision, KPIs, OKRs, etc). While details of different implementations may differ, I believe they are ultimately irrelevant to their overall purpose.

Direction

Where are we heading?

Examples: Mission, Vision

The Direction is the compass to your strategy and provides clarity and purpose to a team by enabling them to look beyond the constraints of local maximas.

Guiding Policy

How do we make decisions?

Examples: Guiding Principles, Tenets, Values

Guiding Policy provides the constraints and expectations for how decisions are made in the direction you intend to head. It drives consistency and alignment into decision making across teams within an organization.

The term Guiding Policy is from Good Strategy, Bad Strategy in which Richard Rumelt refers to the kernel of a good strategy consisting of the diagnosis of a problem, an appropriate guiding policy, and a set of coherent action.

Structured Goals

What do we focus on right now?

Examples: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Management By Objectives (MBOs)

Defining Structured Goals brings an element of focus to individual teams by scoping down larger strategic objectives into tactical milestones focused on desired outcomes.

Performance

How do we measure progress?

Examples: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Balanced Scorecards (BSC), Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

Performance measures the effectiveness of a team or organization against their goals and objectives. It should be measured in a way that provides insight into progress against short term structured goals as well as the long term strategic direction allowing continuous adjustments and course corrections if needed.

Summary

While any of these components individually will serve you well, using them together will help provide an effective framework and foundation for deploying strategy across your teams.

If you are starting from scratch, start with one of these that will create the most leverage and allow it to be iterated on before moving onto the next.

If you are further along and have one or more of these components in place, continue to refine them in order to ensure they are evolving with your organization and providing value.

In later posts, I will dive into each of these and explore examples, use cases, and different implementations as well as share some of the lessons I have learned along the way.