Time for Strategic Work Is Not Optional and Does Not Need To Be Earned
If you want to up level your work and be more strategic, don't wait for an opportunity or "get other work done first." Prioritize strategy conversation first, and the rest will follow.
When I was a PM lead at Thumbtack, I would often try to get my execution-level work done first, so that I could “get to” strategic thinking and relationship building. I made sure my emails were answered, the team and leadership had what they needed from me, and the backlog was in great shape. By the time I opened a strategy document, it was Friday at 4 pm. And every time I felt good about execution, there would be an emergency or a change of plans or a new idea, and I would get pulled back into the weeds. I was unintentionally deprioritizing strategy by how I was sequencing my work.
Then, my leadership saw how busy I was with execution work and refrained from pulling me into higher-level conversations to respect my bandwidth. This made it even harder to get any external pull to focus on strategy. Over time, it solidifies the perception that I was great at execution but lacked leadership potential.
When we prioritize our work based on execution level work, we can also become reactive to inbound asks. By not leveling up and centering your decisions and team on a strategy first, prioritization becomes murky. Suddenly, everything feels like and becomes a priority. Or, different members of the team make different prioritization or trade-off decisions, and you find yourself scrambling to catch, discuss, and remake them. The secret to breaking this cycle of being stuck in execution mode is to put strategy work first.
When you find yourself in this cycle, the best way out is a forced reset. The goal is to create and maintain a different positive flywheel that pulls you upwards in to strategic work:
Force the time for strategic work: I don’t mean “look for” an hour. To really reset your cycle, it requires completely shuffling your calendar and status quo.
Take a look at your next two weeks and pretend you are going on vacation. Clear all the meetings and 1:1s that are not absolutely critical for you to attend for 1-2 weeks.
Delay any cross-team / partner team meetings where you are sharing updates / discussing future work for 2 weeks (this won’t be useful until you have a strategy)
Decline any meetings where you are simply being informed of information, or it is recorded.
Consolidate the remaining meetings into blocks of time where possible. Note the meetings you cannot move, and shuffle the other meetings to be around them.
Create three half-day blocks (e.g. 9am-12pm or 2pm-5pm) for strategy work.
Use the first block as thinking time. What strategies do you need to build? Is there a higher-level question or decision you’ve been punting on? Draft an initial set of questions and tradeoffs for your project or team.
Use the second block as conversation time with key stakeholders. Have 1-2 low-stakes “let me float this idea” conversations with people you trust. Refine your thinking and trade-offs based on further input.
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Use your third block as planning time. Who needs to be brought into the strategy? What forums are required for decisions? What might change about the execution work you do? What other teams are affected? The goal is to look forward and make a plan for how the strategy becomes decisions and what that means in terms of execution work.
Shift your calendar ongoing. At this point, you’ll have gained a sense for what strategy conversations need to happen and the direction the team may want to head. Send those meeting invites and book those conversations. You’ll have likely created some small execution fires, so it’s time to get back into execution a bit more. Your calendar might look like 80% execution and 20% strategy before, try for a 60% execution and 40% strategy going forward.
This type of forced reset helps you realize that you can “go on vacation” to work on strategy without everything burning down. It also creates enough of a foundation and momentum for strategy that it’s much easier to keep prioritizing strategic conversations afterwards. This is what creates the positive cycle. When you make the time for strategic conversations, you’ll find yourself being pulled by others into more strategy discussions. And this in turn makes it easier to stay at a higher level in your work rather than getting pulled into the execution weeds constantly.
That’s all folks! See you next week at 3:14pm.
Yue
Great article. It can be such a challenge shifting out of that tactical mode.
I found this very useful, thanks for sharing it!