I’m convinced that we have to stop leading strategy the traditional way. Focus on commitment – not consensus.
Angela is one of the best leaders I know.
Last month, right in the middle of planning the traditional, cookie cutter back-to-work strategy session, she stopped.
Strategy mattered like never before – and they couldn’t afford to get it wrong.
She looked around the room at her team — the diversity of ideas, wisdom of lessons learned in the trenches — and pictured the way they would leave the meeting.
Would her leadership feel ready for 2023? Invested, passionate, deeply connected to the work?
With her brightest minds in the room, she led a session that got to the heart of what really mattered.
It boiled down to just two things:
- Make sure people throughout the organization really care about their work
- Create a culture where everyone is personally inspired to contribute + take action
She determined that what 2023’s plan required was the spark of inspiration that each member of her team could bring to the organization.
Forcing everyone to water down their passions in favor of a simply stated set of common goals wouldn’t cut it.
Not after a year with so much change.
Not with a year ahead with so many possibilities for how to work and what to focus on.
Angela made the smart move. She scrapped the Mission/Vision/Values approach that was designed for consensus and replaced it with Commitment Narratives, designed to make sure everyone could see themselves in the game plan for the year ahead.
The problem with focusing on consensus?
We lose the nuances of the extremes.
And, our passion lives in the extremes.
When it comes to people getting excited about the coming year, we need to see ourselves in the organization’s roadmap.
But, too many offsite sessions, start-of-the-year meetings and strategies work too hard at boiling things down to an average or reducing diversity of opinion to a homogenized set of success factors.
That’s where the bland creeps in. That’s where the passion diminishes.
Instead of focusing on wordsmithing strategy, Angela focused on making sure that everyone came away from the planning offsite with a burning desire to give the plan their own twists.
To see their unique individual contribution as vital to the combined effort.
We must stop doing strategy based on AVERAGES.
We need to take a strong stance, and build strategy with these priorities:
- Everyone must see themselves in the strategy
- Everyone must feel agency over how to make the year ahead succeed
- Everyone must feel essential
- Everyone must know what to do and must be dying to get started doing it
This year, when we gather our teams to look at the year ahead, let’s spend 20% of the time on common themes and goals.
Let’s focus the next 80% on how the diverse perspectives from the team we’ve gathered can embolden our ambitions, uncover aspects of the customer experience we’ve barely touched, and bring impact to the community.
And, let’s make sure we leave the sessions with everyone feeling a personal sense of commitment.
This year, let’s go for commitment over consensus.
Andrea Kates is a San Francisco-based expert at moving innovation to revenue. She focuses on uncovering untapped opportunities and galvanizing strategic vision.
For 20 years she’s led bold initiatives in virtually every sector and every geography that help companies figure out where to place their bets on emerging products, services and technologies and to scale dynamic business models.
Today, Andrea works with leaders to discover their best future with a tangible, practical set of steps called: ➡ GET TO NEXT
