Making strategic decisions

Making Strategic Decisions

As a general rule, it is a wise leadership practice for CEOs to ask your leadership team, “What do you think?” before making strategic decisions.

I work with companies to review and update their strategic plans every quarter. Strategic planning preparation involves the use of a prework survey to explicitly ask people, “What do you think?“

The survey is administered anonymously, and each participant completes it in isolation. I encourage people to argue for what they believe is in the best long-term interests of the company without being influenced by the opinions of the CEO or other team members.

I collate the anonymized information and send a report to the leadership team 7 days before the strategic planning session, so they have a shared understanding of the key issues and opportunities put forward by the survey participants, 

And specifically, I want to give the CEO sufficient time to consider these inputs and discuss their preferences with the leadership team prior to the planning day.

I do not recommend waiting until the planning day to choose strategic priorities from a “pick list” of suggestions contained in the prework survey. 

I also discourage using a “consensus” or “majority rules” approach. Decision-making by committee typically leads to suboptimal outcomes.  

My recommendation is for the CEO to “seed” their preferences with their senior leadership team by adopting the following approach:

“Thank you for sharing your input via the prework survey. After considering the key issues and opportunities put forward, here are my thoughts on the key priorities for this coming year/quarter, ranked in order:

#1 Priority
#2 Priority
#3 Priority  
And the #1 Metric we need to focus on is… 

I’m happy to be challenged, and will reach out to each of you in the coming days to stress-test my thinking.”

Schedule a series of informal discussions with your senior leaders to invite their feedback. Be willing to change your mind if someone makes a compelling argument. 

It is still your job as CEO to make the strategic decisions, but strive to get broad directional alignment with your senior leaders (and board of directors) before the strategy session. There should not be any surprises or new ideas introduced on the planning day.

It is also helpful if the CEO shares their priorities with me so I can facilitate more effectively on the day.

During the Quarterly Strategic Review sessions that I facilitate for my clients, we discuss and align on these 3 time horizons:

Past: After Action Review

  • What did we achieve during the last sprint?
  • What went well? 
  • What could be improved? 
  • What lessons did we learn?

Present: Confront the brutal facts

  • Are we on track to achieve our BHAG and long-term strategic moves?
  • What trends are we seeing?
  • Do we need to make any course corrections?
  • Does our SWOT analysis accurately represent the current reality?

Future: Clarify next steps

  • What are our strategic priorities (projects/metrics) for the coming quarter?
  • What does success look like by the end of this sprint?

Everyone leaves the planning meeting fully aligned, focused, and ready to hit the ground running . 

We sprint hard for another 12 weeks.

Rinse and repeat.

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Until next time…
Stephen