From practice: Helping an executive create their own personal strategy
A principle that guides my practice is that ”the wisdom is in the conversations”, so I want to share with you an approach to creating a personal strategy that’s more conversational in nature.
I hope this article will inspire you to pair with someone around you that you trust, try creating a personal strategy in a similar way and see if it works for you.
If you want to explore two alternative approaches for creating a personal strategy, you can read how I crafted my own strategy for 2021 or about the personal strategy sprint.
Here’s the visual flow of the conversational approach:
The practical example to illustrate this is about recently helping a client of mine, who works as a Head of Strategy in a Tech company, craft their own strategy as a way forward for creating more value and for personal effectiveness in their role.
First conversation
During our first conversation, our aim was to make sense together of what’s going on in their wider professional context — Environment — and also what are the most relevant things on the Radar.
As a practical tool, we’ve used a Miro board with the Sense & Change model on it, as a visual guide for our conversation.
While talking, I’ve been taking notes as well, using Miro post-its — to use them as references and identifying some patterns maybe.
I’ve used the two main questions for these two areas: “What’s happening around you?” and “What are you paying attention to?”, along with some questions to keep the flow of exploration, like: “What else?”, “What’s the impact of this?”, “How are these things connected?”.
We’ve got to cover the various types of relevant stakeholders, where they are and where they’re heading to, along with important business, tech, organizational and personal aspects on the radar.
Finally, we’ve discussed about Capabilities, guided by the question of “What are you able to do?”. This final part of the conversation uncovered both strengths that can be leveraged going further and also awareness about development areas that might inform the personal strategy.
Solo-storming
Given the insights from our first conversation, the next step for my client was to reflect a bit individually and enter the first part of the Strategy area: brainstorm strategic options on their own — ways of going forward towards their purpose and things they feel might be relevant to invest in.
The idea was to “put on paper” anything valuable that came to mind at this moment, so that we can build on it in our next conversation.
Second conversation
Now that we had a good understanding of Environment, Radar, Capabilities, as well as some starting points for creating Strategy, our next conversation focused mainly on refining together the strategic options and discussing based on them.
We started by identifying some patterns of what might be valuable going forward, building on the ideas from the solo-storming.
This helped us refine 3 main strategic options, each one focusing around prioritizing a specific value-add approach in the Head of Strategy role: strategizing, group facilitation and peer networking.
Then, we discussed to uncover the added value, opportunities, risks, costs and readiness linked to each of these main options, taking notes along the way.
After this deep dive, we decided that the next step would be done alone: taking in all of this, deciding which of the options to transform into a personal strategy, and how would this specific strategy would translate into practice.
Individual Reflection
Finally, my client took some time to reflect, decided on a personal strategy that’s most relevant for going forward and also picked some relevant Projects (“What do I need to work on?) and decided on adjustments to their Day to Day (“How would my days look like?).
After receiving these in writing, I had a chance to share my perspective and congratulations for creating their own personal strategy.
Now, while writing this article, I’ve just learned that my client wants to pay it forward and help colleagues gain this type of clarity as well, using the approach described here as a reference. I’m grateful that the practicality of this helps people and it might help more people in the future.
I hope that something in this article resonated with you and also that it inspires you to create a personal strategy of your own. Here’s the visual recap of the whole approach:
Enjoy the journey,
Bülent
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