How Do You Foster a Strategic Mindset in Your Organization? Transcript

Ross Martin:

Yep. All right. Our next topic is how do you foster a strategic mindset in your organization? Yeah. I think one of the things that I think about with that is, but what about the low level employees? It's, it's easy to say, uh, all your VPs and above should have a strategic mindset, but you know, somebody who's just a, you know, a financial analyst, like how can they have a strategic? Yeah. Yeah.

Idris Manley:

No, I think, you know, it's one, it's a very good question. And it's a very challenging one. I think it really starts with trust. You know, and what I mean by that is, you have to be able to empower your teams and your individual contributors to be able to think strategically, which means you have to be able to give them goals and objectives to achieve without necessarily giving them specific direction on how to achieve them, right? And this kind of comes back to self-organization as well. You have to give your teams the freedom to be able to make mistakes and fail and to also to be able to come up with ideas and approaches and strategies to achieve goals on their own without laying out the specific roadmap or guidelines and how they are to achieve that. And so the more that you can trust and empower your teams to think on their own on how they would achieve the objective, even if it isn't Ideal or in a way that you would necessarily do it yourself. You're actually allowing them to develop that muscle Memory and to think on their own and to figure out how to how to achieve things without you know specific direction Yeah, I I I agree but and what's interesting about it is is I I think about

Ross Martin:

What happens is that companies want to do this, right? So they tell their teams that they want them to take on an objective or a responsibility and deliver it and not have to be told what to do. And then they shoot themselves in the foot. I've seen this a couple of times by punishing somebody who makes a mistake. And so at that point, then the person from that point forward says, well, I'm not going to put myself out there like that again. I'm just going to do my job as well as I can. And if I don't know what to do, I'll ask my boss.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. Yeah. No, it didn't. Again, you can't expect someone or expect your, your contributors to be strategic if you're going to penalize them when they take the risk and you don't like the outcome or you don't like the approach that was taken. The whole point, again, which is why I said earlier, it's about trust. It starts with trust. Trusting your teams that you can empower them and, you know, willing to allow them to make mistakes, safe mistakes, of course, but you're willing to give them the freedom to make mistakes, to learn and grow and to self-organize. And I think, you know, if you can, you know, ride that journey with them, you're going to find people are much more confident and able to contribute to much more higher levels in the company, in the organizations and departments are going to benefit from that.

Ross Martin:

One thing I've seen that's kind of interesting and in my mind even a little bit risky is actually calling out and praising a team for taking a risk and failing, but praising them for taking the risk. I have seen it from a few executives. I've never seen it at an entire company level. But, but it does send it sends messages down to the folks that they will be praised for for taking those risks.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, reminds me of a book that I read, Strength Finders. Yeah. And where the emphasis was, We, you know, as leaders, we tend to, uh, focus or concentrate on the strengths of our, of our direct employees, as opposed to their weaknesses. I'm sorry, the other way around and tend to focus on their weaknesses as opposed to their strengths. And so we spend a lot of time, you know, 85, 90% of our time coaching, you know, educating, teaching, mentoring around the areas of the week when we should be spending more of that time on areas of their strength, they're strong. and helping them become even stronger in those areas. And so I think it is important as a company that you really are not just sort of emphasizing what they're doing wrong, but you're really identifying the opportunities where they're performing and helping them actually get even better in those areas.

Ross Martin:

I agree. And then the other thing about fostering a strategic mindset in the organization, I think, are things like, you know, the processes around strategy cascading through your organization. We've talked about MBOs and OKRs before, and we don't need to rehash that completely. But the idea is, if you really want people to understand how what they do does impact the strategy and what they do, if they're thinking more about outcomes, you have to give them a way to translate their day to day work into the strategy organization. You can't just tell them to think more strategically.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, yeah. And you have to encourage them to and allow them to contribute at the very beginning stages. So when you're you know, at the beginning of that annual planning sort of cycle, you know, instead of just giving a team a plan and saying, okay, execute against these metrics, you actually have a mechanism in your governance to allow them to actually contribute to their portion in a way that it's collaborative, where they feel like they have a voice and they actually take ownership of the, of those particular areas in a way that they feel that they have the autonomy and the trust from you to be able to, and confidence to be able to deliver.