Strategy often stumbles because it is a collection of complicated facts and initiatives that are confusing and difficult to follow. Craft a strategy that tells a story about helping customers and creating value for others and you have got foundation for an emotionally compelling strategy. Logic and facts encourage us to think, yet stories evoke emotions that compel us to act.
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Strategic Decisions
What is the most strategic decision that you have made in the last 60 days, personally or professionally? When you look at the decision or decisions you selected, why did you consider it a strategic decision?
Focus on the Crossroads
You can do many things this year. Many will keep you busy and maintain the status quo. Other actions will serve as a catalyst and contribute to the highest vision you have for yourself and your business. Keep your focus at the crossroads.
Win-Win or Win-Lose?
If win-win is your default function, and you continue to push win-win negotiation practices when the other party is looking only to do the best deal for themself, you will get slaughtered on the negotiation table.
Paying attention to what the other party does, not only what they say, helps you determine whether or not you have a win-win opportunity in front of you.
Who Stays and Who Goes?
Vowing to throw everyone overboard and start anew or promising to let everyone keep their jobs and maintain the status quo are poor approaches to building a highly effective leadership team. Use the “filter five questions” to support who stays and who leaves the leadership team. It is a pragmatic filiter to improve leadership team performance and organizational results.
The Preacher’s Bike
It is easy to blame others for inconveniences, injustices and events that make our life difficult. Responsibility, accountability, and ownership are the foundations of our personal influence and power. When we step up, accept, and own the challenge at hand, we strengthen our self-confidence, resilience, and ability to improve things around us.
Use the Environment Around You
Organizations use sophisticated tools such as 360-degree feedback processes and multi-rater feedback inventories, yet none of these work as well as someone speaking to those people in the leader’s immediate environment and playing that feedback back to the leader, in some cases, anonymously, yet concretely.
The Art of Essential
Understanding what is essential and having the courage to act on it is what separates true leaders from clones in the crowd.
Cutting back or creating with constraints?
Have the constraints of restricted business travel, fewer or no face-to-face customer meetings, and home office isolation prevented you and your organization from achieving your goals?
Dive into Dirty Work
Addressing dirty work isn’t about pointing out blame, it’s about claiming it, naming it as dirty work and then setting out to clean it up.