Andrea Belk Olson If you’re Presiding, You’re not Leading
Your CEO announces its strategic planning season. Every department head is asked to develop and deliver their strategic plan and budget for the coming year. Because they all have proprietary subject matter expertise, each one brings their vision to the table. The presentations are reviewed, some superficial tweaks are made (often in the area of budget) and approved. Then the year continues on, with the CEO checking in periodically to make sure everything is on track.
But the strategy isn’t a function over which to preside. Presiding instead of engaging in the creation of organizational strategy is a major leadership mistake. It is fundamentally abdicating the responsibility of being a leader. If I was a board member and the CEO informed me the CSO had created our strategy, I would believe we didn’t actually have a real CEO.
Department leaders often push for strategies to support their own area, not always the interests of the company as a whole. Strategy is an integrative discipline, not simply a siloed function. It requires collaboration, integration, and alignment to maximize the value of the department efforts put forth. Yet still today, organizational leaders are cobbling together disparate department plans and calling it a strategy.
As businesses have grown, there’s a larger and larger need for coordination and control – therefore, we have created layers of management who don’t produce, but supervise others who do. Major business schools teach management as an academic discipline. But at the same time, domain specialization has increased, and becoming an expert in one specific area, such as finance, marketing, or human resources.
But this comes with a flaw – where CEOs misinterpret their role as watching over these specialties, rather than engaging in each area continually. But as business leaders, we need to suck it up and learn, not just preside over, the work of our functional heads.
Consider this – how can we be true evaluators and assessors of a department strategy we don’t fully understand? Or be an advisor and mentor to a department head when we have no understanding of the job, they do each and every day? We wouldn’t hire a supervisor which didn’t know their subordinate’s job or how to evaluate their performance. Why as leaders do, we often defer this responsibility when we reach higher levels in the organization?
We cannot be intimidated into believing that we don’t have the necessary subject matter expertise to engage in strategy development. Not only can you do it, but you must in order to truly lead.
About the Author
Andrea Olson is a speaker, author, applied behavioral scientist, and customer-centricity expert. As the CEO of Pragmadik, she helps organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to Fortune 500, and has served as an outside consultant for EY and McKinsey. Andrea is the author of The Customer Mission: Why it’s time to cut the $*&% and get back to the business of understanding customers and No Disruptions: The future for mid-market manufacturing.
She is a four-time ADDY® award winner and host of the popular Customer Mission podcast. Her thoughts have been continually featured in news sources such as Chief Executive Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Financial Brand, Industry Week, and more. Andrea is a sought-after keynote speaker at conferences and corporate events throughout the world. She is a visiting lecturer and Director of the Startup Business Incubator at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, a TEDx presenter, and TEDx speaker coach. She is also a mentor at the University of Iowa Venture School.
More information is also available on www.pragmadik.com and www.andreabelkolson.com.
