Legacy Leadership and Organizational Strategy

Jay Newman, PhD, Founding Partner, Culture By Choice

If you’re given a choice between having a great culture or having a great strategy, your best choice should always be culture. We have a saying at Culture By Choice that “Culture eats strategy for lunch!” By saying this, we are not saying that strategy is unimportant. We are simply saying that if your culture is not supportive of both the strategy and the people who must deploy that strategy, those people will never engage at the level needed for that strategy to succeed at a level that you want it to.

Strategy is very important. Without a well developed strategy, any organization will flounder. Your job as a Legacy Leader, once you’ve started creating your Legacy Culture, is to engage your team in developing the best strategies you can to achieve your mission as an organization. One of the biggest mistakes that too many leaders make is to develop too many. Research has given great insight into what makes highly successful organizations different from their less successful counterparts. Organizations that focus on one or two strategies at a time are incredibly more successful than are organizations that try to focus on 10 or more, and they are consistently more successful than organizations that try to focus on 4 to 9 strategies. Because of this research, we help our clients develop what we call Big Target Strategies.

A Big Target Strategy is one that the organization believes will have the biggest impact on the organization. When creating these strategies, team members are looking for actions that have a rippling effect. When a small pebble is tossed in a pond, tiny ripples emanate from that pebble and quickly die out. When several pebbles are thrown into a pond simultaneously, the ripples from each of those pebbles move outwards and often clash with each other and create competing ripples. The result is an uncoordinated mess of little ripples that have no recognizable direction or pattern. But, when you throw one large rock into the pond, the ripples are noticeably significant and they emanate outward for a considerable distance effecting the surface for many yards.

When creating a Big Target Strategy, an organization looks for the one strategy that will effect as many aspects of the organization, in the desired way, as possible. As team members look for that One Thing, they try to figure out how big of an impact each considered strategy will have and then select the one that they believe will have the biggest impact. One of our clients recently got its entire team to agree on a single focus for an entire year. Every week, during their leadership team meeting, each leader reported on what they had done during the previous week to help the organization hit its Big Target Goal. Then each leader stated what they were going to do during the next week to move their team further towards the Big Target Goal. Each team supported the Strategy in a different way but the actions of each team never worked against the efforts of any other team. By regularly communicating about what was going to be done over the next week, every team knew what was going on with every other team. The coordinated efforts ended up being like the big ripples from that big rock tossed into the pond. At the end of the year, the impact was extraordinary. During a time when the future was questionable, this organization increased its revenue by more than 10% and the entire team was energized and more devoted to the organization than ever.

We have seen Big Target Strategies work for many organizations and when this process is implemented it supports the culture an organization wants. It keeps internal teams from working in opposition to one another. As every team focuses on that one thing, all efforts begin to coordinate towards that Big Target. As you can guess, there are many other activities that the organization must engage in to make sure that all of the business of the organization is taken care of. But, when teams engage in these activities in the context of a Big Target Strategy, teams have a vested interest in making sure that their execution of those other activities is not done in a way that detracts from the concerted efforts towards the Big Target Goal. We believe that the Big Target Strategy is one of the best ways to help an organization achieve a Legacy Culture. Therefore, we believe that being able to use a Big Target Strategy is a must for every Legacy Leader!