Power and influence
An article in the 'Leading Strategy' series
In Questions...and answers I wrote about how asking relevant questions - well-structured and carefully framed - can drive the strategy process in an organisation: the challenge of working together to answer these leads to the critical and deep enquiries and rich conversations that are at the heart of developing organisational strategy effectively.
However, it is the quality of these conversations that matters - and the openness, honesty and transparency. And that’s not always straightforward - there are pitfalls in these conversations that leaders need to be aware of (and might also be the cause of, deliberately or inadvertently!).
In any organisation the tone is set by those with authority. The responsibilities of leadership are significant, and the impact not always fully recognised. Not only is there an expectation that the organisation’s leaders will initiate and define the strategy processes, but the signals that they communicate will determine how people go about these. Their words matter - at every stage of any strategy work that the organisation undertakes.
Like any process in an organisation, strategy work needs guidelines to shape it: its purpose, its focus, its horizons, the intended approach, and who should be involved. The ‘brief’ matters: if the scope is very open and the questions requiring deep or wide exploration, then the process required will be very different from a more specific articulation focused on a narrower horizon. So the words that are used at the start of a strategy process will influence what path it takes, and what those involved feel they can or should consider. It isn’t just the written words that matter, but also how this is described verbally in any of the conversations that begin to shape how people in the organisation approach this: the degree of urgency, the challenges to focus on, the way the work is organised, who should be involved.
These early conversations are so important in shaping the process that follows - and the more thought that is put into this, resisting the natural inclination to ‘rush off and get started’, the better the ensuing process is likely to be. Using my favourite ‘Strategy Journey’ metaphor, it is the preparation before setting off, however keen you are to reach your intended destination (in this case conclude this particular piece of strategy work).
It isn’t just at the start of a strategy process that the words that are written and spoken matter, but throughout the entire journey. In the conversations of strategy, words and how they are spoken can have a significant influence on what transpires.
Imagine a workshop of Board members and senior managers. Maybe they are discussing future trends that might have an impact on the organisation, or considering how a competitor might react, or perhaps how a key stakeholder might respond to a strategic option. All it takes is for one person with positional authority or influence to say, “That will never happen”, and consideration of that scenario is immediately ‘off the table’ for the rest of the strategy process, regardless of the likelihood or potential impact, or the merits of the proposed option. The closing down of any thinking or conversations about a possible future could have major implications, and leave the organisation blind-sided and vulnerable to developments whose possibility it has in effect dismissed from its consideration.
Another dynamic within organisations is saying what you think your boss (or the senior management team) wants to hear - trying to second-guess their response to an idea, and structuring your subsequent thinking accordingly. The strategy narrative is constructed to achieve approval, not necessarily because it is right for the organisation at that time.
There are those who influence the strategy process too, perhaps insisting on using a particular strategy tool even though it has limited relevance, or raising a specific issue as ‘important’ and inadvertently diverting attention away from addressing a much more fundamental question.
These examples are not exclusive to strategy work, of course - they are an inherent aspect of organisations generally, and navigating group dynamics is part of everyday working. But the impact on the process and outcomes when they occur in strategy work can be very significant; and the purpose of highlighting them here is not because they ought not to happen - they’re almost impossible to prevent! - but because being aware of the effect of positional power and other individuals’ influences means that a leader is more likely to recognise when this is happening and so be able to take appropriate steps to deal with it. (It’s not a criticism that this happens - it’s just reality!)
Perhaps more difficult to deal with during a strategy process are the subconscious biases that we all have: viewing a situation through an over-optimistic lens, thinking that because something has worked out in a particular way in the past that it will do so again, assigning causality where the reality is coincidence, and over-estimating the degree of agency that the organisation has. Such biases play a part in our thinking and hence in how we might influence strategy conversations - and they are often not apparent to ourselves or others, hidden in the flow of ideas and the quest for progress and outcomes.
Navigating these icebergs that might threaten developing a successful strategy feels like a daunting challenge for any leader. It’s helpful to realise, though, that no strategy process is perfect, there’s no ‘ideal practice’ that guarantees a successful outcome!
Perhaps that is the mindset with which to approach this: that strategy is a journey for the organisation, and the challenge is to navigate that as best as you are able, individually and as an organisation. Being aware of how positional power and influence can affect the course of that journey, observing and sensing how the interpersonal dynamics are impacting the conversations, nurturing sensitive antennae to the people aspects of the strategy process - all these can help prevent strategy conversations being diverted.
We like to think that our organisation’s strategy process would be faultless, and the resulting strategy a brilliant distinctive articulation that will guarantee success, however the future might unfold. But that’s not realistic: it’s like thinking you can plan a perfect career. What really matters is your ability to navigate whatever happens, and whether you can steer your organisation along the next part of a chosen path and equip it to deal with whatever it encounters along the way.
Creating the environment - the space, the time, the patience - for strategy work to explore openly, for rich conversations to develop, for genuine listening and deep shared thinking to occur; accepting that the aim is not a perfect strategy, but a sufficiently clear and robust articulation that guides the next steps of the organisation’s strategy journey; and understanding that above all and at its heart strategy is not a sophisticated analytical science but about people and how they see their organisation’s future - these are what strategic leadership is all about.