Landing Execution and Strategy without burning out
Getting out of the "I don't have time to be strategic because I'm too swamped with execution or fixing issues at hand" trap.
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Client: My manager and team are asking me to build a strategy for my area. However, I’m so busy with day-to-day work of execution that I don’t see how I can find the mental space and time to work on strategy. I know I need one. But how can I do it without burning out?
Strategy Speeds Up Execution
This happens to the best of us: You are swamped with the work related to day-to-day execution. There are decisions that need your input, important details to be communicated to your partners and stakeholders, nuances to be flushed out, and documents or content to be organized. You simply cannot find the time or mental space to build a strategy and take on more work for yourself and your team.
But, to what end? Where is the team going? What will be achieved with all this execution? What logic or tradeoffs are you using, implicitly or explicitly, to prioritize your work and the work of your team? How aligned are you with your leaders, your partners, and the rest of the organization regarding where the team is going and what the team is delivering?
Example: let’s say you are in the army leading a group of men in training exercises. Every day, you time is taken up with exercises, food, hygiene, clean up and prep for the next day. But why are you doing the exercises? What exercises are most important to prioritize? How long should you do them for and why?
A lack of clear strategy creates more work and rework. It makes communication onerous and lengthy because everyone has different assumptions and contexts. This creates more debate about what should be done and why. It slows down the execution with interruptions and changes in direction. In many organizations, without an aligned strategy, execution grinds to a halt or is plagued with rework.
If you are consistently running into disagreements with your team, confusion among key stakeholders, or lack of clarity in decision-making, it is likely because you don’t have a clear strategy to align and execute against.
What Questions Will the Strategy Answer?
Before starting any work, it’s important to hone in on what questions the strategy will be used to resolve. Often, well-intentioned executives and managers ask for a strategy when what they truly need is a detailed roadmap, a set of decisions made, or an inspirational narrative. A strategy will contain elements of each of those things, but it cannot solve all of those things all at once. A strategy is a set of choices made based on scarce resources (e.g. time, materials, people) that gives the best chance of achieving a goal.
Therefore, the first conversation to have with stakeholders is about what questions they want to be addressed from the strategy and why. Here are some good open questions to ask:
How will this strategy help your work?
Why do you think a strategy is needed? What confusion do you see?
What other strategies have you come across at the company that is similar to what you’re looking for here?
Who do you think should be involved in the creation and execution of the strategy?
Has this question been addressed before? What happened?
In the case of the army, some common critical questions to address and consider may be: What type of terrain will the team encounters? What type of weather? For how long do they need to endure? What resources will they lack? What resources will they have access to? How does this compare to others?
A strategy will only be as good as how it is framed and the questions it addresses. Being absolutely clear on why a strategy is needed, and what it’ll be used for, is critical.
How to Make Time for Strategy Work
The first way to make time for strategy work is to decide what projects and tasks should be paused until a strategy exists. This could be all, some, or none of the work you are currently pushing forward. The assessment criteria are simple: Will this task go faster, more effectively, or have more impact if there was a clear strategy? If the answer is yes, then it should be paused.
The second way to make room for strategy work is to delegate. Are there day-to-day meetings, conversations, or written work that you can delegate to others? Do you have ambitious partners or team members eager to step up and grow? Delegation will give you the capacity to work on strategy while the trains keep running.
Lastly, just start. The activation energy is sometimes the biggest hurdle. When you’re not working on strategy, it feels like time is taken up by everything else (and it is). When you start working on it, time magically comes — because other tasks get pushed to the side and either not done or done more quickly. This is okay because strategy work is the higher priority. Sometimes, the best way to prioritize something is to just do it.
A Strategy is About the Process and the Output
The process of creating a strategy is almost as important as the outcome. Many people step into it thinking: “Okay, I’ll just gather some data and research, write a nice document, and share it. Voila.”
Unfortunately, creating a strategy that sticks takes much more effort than that. Here are the three critical steps to strategy creation:
Creating a shared base of knowledge and context
Discussions and reviews of tradeoffs and choices with stakeholders
Getting to and disseminating an agreed-upon set of decisions that together lead to a direction, holistic solution, or position in the market
When creating a strategy, one of the first tasks is to gather data, research, historical decisions, and opinions. This process helps everyone have all the information. In the process of talking to everyone, gathering information, and putting it down in one place, you are simultaneously spreading knowledge and context.
Armed with knowledge, you create and discuss optional directions and tradeoffs. It’s important to work into this part of the process debates and lingering questions stakeholders have about the work. This is the time to face those seemingly unimportant yet constantly re-asked questions head-on. By shaping a set of questions and decisions into logical choices, you are helping people see what is possible and what is not.
Finally, after heated debates, large group reviews, and sweating through executive conversations, it is time to formalize the decision on a path forward. This last step gives everyone the chance to disagree and commit, and for the group to move forward with a clear direction.
Each of these steps involves not just written work but also conversations. Many conversations with stakeholders to gather information, share ideas, discuss tradeoffs, or share decisions. You’ll end up talking to people at least 4 to 5 times in the course of a few months. This is normal.
Example strategy output: I will train my men to do hand-to-hand combat on hilly terrains in hot weather. We will have access to basic amenities and enough calories a day for nutrition but may be at times short on water. Hydration and water-finding training will be of highest priority.
The Yin and Yang of Strategy and Execution
For a team to be firing on all cylinders towards impact, it needs both strategy and execution. Execution without strategy means your chances of moving efficiently towards a goal are very low, and your chances of facing disagreement due to confusion or perceived misalignment are very high. With unlimited resources, if you can shoot 10000 arrows at a target, then one will hit. But it’s very inefficient.
A strategy without execution is just useless. It’s an empty analysis that took a lot of time and capacity from valuable resources sitting on a shelf. A possibility that was never realized and eventually, no longer relevant. This is why knowing what question you’re trying to answer with strategy is so important. You do not want to invest months of work to end up with a strategy that doesn’t address the heart of the question or decision that needs to be made.
Example: Without a strategy, you can train your army for all types of weather, terrain, etc. But with limited time and resources, they would be less prepared for each and perhaps not prepared at all for high risk scenarios (e.g. low water supply). Without execution, just talking about training will not result in a prepared team.
Therefore, the most optimal scenario is to have a strategy and solid execution behind it. However, if only one is possible, it does make sense to err on the side of strong execution.