Everyday Strategic Leadership: Strategic Leaders Focus on the Right Outcomes

Last week, I wrote about the first of the six practices of strategic leaders—they strategically invest and protect their time. In my research for the book, I found that the second practice of strategic leaders is to focus on the right outcomes. 

That sounds obvious, until you think about how subjective the “right outcomes” are in organizations. People’s beliefs about what’s most important to focus on differ based on their varied information, incentives, and perspectives. That’s why strategic leaders actively work to shape a common view of the right outcomes to pursue. 

This is as much about effectively communicating their thinking to enable others to follow their rationale as it is about listening to understand everyone else’s thinking to gain alignment. The selfish upside of effective communication and listening is that leaders can improve the perception that they are strategic, simply because others better understand why what they are working on matters most. 

As leaders rise, focusing on the right outcomes may also mean widening their perspective. I asked the CEO of a venture-backed healthcare company how he would describe strategic leadership. He told me this: “There are three sides to the strategic triangle—serving the customers’ needs, treating employees well, and making the bottom line. Great leaders find solutions that serve all three. In my experience, junior leaders put most of their attention on the customer and employee sides of the triangle, whereas senior leaders see all three sides.”

In other words, some leaders come across as “not strategic” because their perspective is too narrow. They are perceived as missing part of the strategy, even if their approaches are thoughtful.

Finally, I found that strategic leaders improve their odds of focusing on the right outcomes by instituting routines that help them better see the patterns of what’s happening. This enables them to more quickly shift when there’s a need to update yesterday’s understanding of the right outcomes to those that are right for today. Without those routines, there is a greater risk that leaders will simply react to the issues and information right in front of them, while failing to see the critical connections and insights.

There are various versions of those reflection routines. They range from daily practices, such as reserving time at the end of the day to review their notes from that day’s meetings, to regularly scheduled team step-backs where they formally review and update their strategic thinking.

The key thing is that strategic leaders don’t take for granted that the insights they need to make good decisions will occur naturally. That’s why they have routines to set them up for success.