The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do

Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter coined the phrase, The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. 

I was reminded of this recently when a friend who is a Chief Development Officer shared with me that she and her team are struggling to make their major gift program work.

This one surprised me because it seems like such a natural fit. The organization has very high name awareness in their market. Their cause is a popular one — donors understand the need, and support the cause with gusto. Their CEO is well known, and well liked in the community. And the team is full of smart people.

As we unpacked the issue we could see that her responsibilities had grown to include managing 8 direct reports across four different disciplines. Looking at her calendar it was easy to see that her average day consisted of 4-6 hours of internal meetings. There were weekly meetings with each direct report. Team meetings. All staff meetings. Project meetings. Prospect management meetings. Planning meetings. Meetings about meetings. It was insane!

On top of meetings, she had coaching, performance evaluations, database conversion planning, etc. Most of it important, for sure. And all of it urgent.

None of this appeared easy to cancel, delegate or decline. She was stuck in the trap of putting out urgent fires instead of focusing on high priority, high potential work. The fun stuff. The work that leads to transformational change in an organization.

And she knew it. I don’t think she’s had fun at her job for at least the last year. She’s stressed because she’s not meeting her revenue production numbers. And she’s stressed because the task of changing her situation feels incredibly daunting.

She was stuck.

As I watched tears well up in her eyes, I knew how she felt. We’d been in a similar place in our business in the past. I had been through a very similar experience personally.

What I was able to share with her helped her shift focus and make the change she needed to make to put herself to work on the highest priority tasks for the organization.

You can go through this process individually, with a team or department, or even as an entire organization.

It’s super simple, but difficult to begin.

The process requires you vetting everything you do (I mean everything) on a daily basis. Then aligning this with your strategic plan goals and priorities.

You then go through and line-item out the things in your day-to-day workload that don’t match up to your strategic plan priorities or goals (this is called the STOP part of the exercise). This will be incredibly difficult to do — at first. We have so many priorities, and so many commitments — we’re so important. You might be thinking, I can’t possibly get rid of this task. But the reality is, there are probably at least a half dozen things you’re doing right now (maybe a dozen or two, even!) that you’re doing that you either shouldn’t be doing, or don’t need to be doing.

The questions I ask myself to get at this Stop list are:

• Does this task help me achieve one of our strategic priorities?
• Does it need to be done now?
• Is it essential that I be the person to do this specific task, or can I delegate?
• What’s the impact of me personally not doing this task?
• What am I not able to focus on if I do this task?
• Who else on my team or our staff could do this task in my place?
• Can we outsource this task?

I list this part first, because it’s mentally freeing and fulfilling to get through this portion of the exercise where you are proactively identifying the things you won’t do anymore so that you can free up the time and space to do the things that are more critical to your success.

At this point, you need to decide if the things you will stop are important enough that you need to delegate to someone else on your team, freelance out to someone who can do them at a lower cost than it would require for you to do them, or if they are not in fact essential, you simply decide they never need to be done.

Stop	Keep	Start

Tip: Most people won’t identify enough things to stop on their first try. I sure didn’t! You’ll probably need to revisit this section at least once more before you’re done, and you might even want to enlist the help of your supervisor or a trusted partner in your organization who can ask you the tough questions.

Once you’ve created your STOP list, move on to your KEEP list. What’s on your plate right now that actually will help you deliver against your plan? Those are the things you need to continue focusing on regularly.

Lastly, you need to create a START list. Since you know what you’re stopping, and what you’re keeping, this hopefully gives you the guidance you need to identify the things you’re missing right now that are essential to your success. It shows you the gaps in your work. In those gaps, you should be able to identify what you need to start doing today that will help you meet your goals tomorrow. Those become your START list.

Tip: Most people at this point in the process will have a start list that is TWICE as long as their stop list.  Think about that carefully. If you’re only stopping a handful of things, can you realistically put two dozen things on your start list? This is where strategic thinking comes into play. It’s essential to your success (and your sanity) that you find enough things to say no to so that you can take on the really important things.

This is a process that I also coach individuals, teams, and organizations through. If you’d like to talk about how I can help take you or your team/organization through this process, leave me a comment below and I’ll get in touch with you.

 

Image courtesy of ddpavumba at FreeDigitalPhotos.net