What Leaders Really Do

What Leaders Really Do, by business and change thought leader John Kotter, is an article I reflect on and draw from often. It connects how management and leadership work in tandem and the importance of both to organization success.

Kotter points out that “management is about coping with complexity — bringing about order and predictability to a situation.” And how in today’s environment of accelerating change, that’s not enough to create sustainable success — organizations have to adapt. 

Leadership, Kotter points out, “is about learning how to cope with rapid change.” He details further how the distinctions play out below:

• “Management involves planning and budgeting. Leadership involves setting direction.”

• “Management involves organizing and staffing. Leadership involves aligning people.”

• “Management provides control and solves problems. Leadership provides motivation.”

Leadership is often improperly used to describe a style or innate characteristic — instead of a set of acquired or developed skills.

• Can you appreciate the distinctions and need for both in your organization?

• How honed are your leadership vs. management skills?

• How does your organization invest in developing the leadership assets and skills needed for sustainable success today? 

Strategy as Hypothesis

The more accepted view that strategy and execution are separable activities sets organizations up for failure in today's world of accelerating change and complexity. Small gaps in execution begin to seed performance failures or losses when initial strategies are not altered based on new information or insights.

It's helpful to think of strategy as a series of hypotheses. 

• Hypotheses about the environment — a view of what's going on, implications that arise

• Hypotheses about proposed solutions — strategies or approaches to address things

• Hypotheses about execution — actions to implement the strategy and manage things

It shifts engagement to more of a constant learning approach — prompted by two critical questions from execution/experimentation:

• Is our strategy working, and what do we need to ensure successful implementation?

• What hypotheses are possibly wrong or need to be revised?

Putting Strategy Ahead of the Strategic Plan

Recently, I’ve been asked to help leaders with strategy — only to find that most of their focus was on operational plans. The real work, is helping leaders continously look up and out — to widen perspective and shift their focus from the business to stakeholders.

A strategy captures thinking around challenges and opportunities. — what’s needed, what you’re pursuing, why it’s important, and what it enables for stakeholders. A strategic plan provides detailed actions and implementation paths to achieve the strategy.

They each serve entirely different purposes.

We see a lot of plans that leave out the underlying thinking and rationale for the decisions embedded in the strategy. It makes it much harder to share engage other authentically and much harder for people to actually determine what actions are needed. They have to follow the plan.

A strategy must be implementable — it doesn’t exist without action. But it’s one thing to explain the strategy and actions that accompany it. It is something else to explain the detailed plans required.

A good strategy document has an explanation — a basis for developing more detailed plans and programs of change — and its thinking.

Gauging Strategy Through Behaviors

To informally identify what an organization’s strategy really is, or has been, flush out its persistent pattern of behavior over the past few years. What outcome have people pursued and delivered — beyond tactical, short-term, or irregular activities? How has the strategy built up over time? How has the consistency of actions and behaviors developed?

Often there is a difference between strategy as discussions and strategy in action. The organization says it is doing one thing but persists in a pattern of behavior and activity that is different. Why might this be?

It might be that the written strategy has not been communicated and socialized. Perhaps the management team is not leaving the room telling the same story. Maybe it was created to justify an investment or another decision.

Examining persistent behavior patterns is an easy way to explore where you may need to adapt and change — and why that change is necessary.