Getting the Best Results Through A Winning Strategy

I'm going to get to the point and skip the fluff, this article is not about avoiding wrong decisions, but it is about how to approach strategy with winning methods that start with planning and end with true execution; real results, like really real results. Winning Strategy is not just planning for the year and it’s not a fancy new method. It’s a culmination of integrating the Foundational Four (view our Eight to Great Model), planning the future, and developing the discipline of action to get results. It is the process of planning internally, just as much as externally. It’s the weighted balance of people and process; and ensuring your product is dialed in to the best of your ability. People being your employees and customers, and process being everything from business development to project close-out. Winning Strategy is a holistic approach that takes disciplined people, hard work, intelligence, market timing, and a little luck… researchers are still trying to figure out how luck works, we’ll leave that to them. The good news is that many companies have grown and broken past barriers with the Winning Strategy, so even if luck or timing isn’t on your side, your discipline, hard work, and intelligence might just be what propels you past your barriers. This chapter will not be walking through all the strategic methods or aspects. Instead, we will share key elements of strategy. We’ll also stay away from financials, since the focus of this chapter is a results driven approach with people at the forefront. 

Strategy is an interesting word and often is used in business to sound smart or important… it’s like saying “according to research”. If all else fails, just say “Our strategy is…” and people will most likely think you have a decent plan. We’ve observed a lot of businesses call something strategy, when really it was a “to-do” list. Just so we don’t overuse the word, we will sometimes refer to it as strat, hopefully you didn’t skip this line as you keep reading. Defining strategy can be tricky as it isn’t a one size fits all, considering services and products often have a different approach depending on your niche. But to help give a broad and somewhat holistic approach, here’s how we define it:

Strategy is the art of planning and executing with the “right” information and people toward your Compelling Vision and long-term goals. 

To better understand strat, let’s break it down into 4 broad stages/questions. Just note, these four stages are essential, but there’s something that is often overlooked… The Foundational Four. Healthy Leadership, Compelling Vision, Purpose Driven, and Values Centric are key to ensure we integrate into strategy. Remember, it’s foundational to incorporate these into every part of your thriving business.

1. CURRENT, where are we now?
   • This first stage is normally a period of time like a strat retreat or annual planning, but we suggest this becomes a part of your culture and system. 
   • Healthy Leadership: Start with your leaders, get them in a room and talk about their current health. How equipped do they feel to lead? What’s keeping them up at night? Are they focusing on people development and the G.I.G.? Starting here is essential, if you don’t have Healthy Leaders, you don’t have a thriving business.
   • Gathering: This is where you diagnose to understand your current state. Far too often, leaders go straight to the white board without having holistic information from the key areas of their business. Later we’ll discuss some of the steps of key information. In general, we are gathering information for internal and external reflection. 
   • Forming: This is where you take all the gathered data and form it into digestible information. This is often best achieved with images, charts, etc.; we all like visuals! They communicate to us what we sometimes can’t piece together for ourselves. 
   • Reporting: This is the dissemination of information to teams to help with true input. Don't let your leaders go without pertinent information. 
2. FUTURE, where are we going?
   • This is where Compelling Vision leads the way. Taking your vision and letting it guide your team to a desired future. Compelling Vision is a part of your everyday/week drive, but it’s also the driver of the Winning Strategy. 
   • This is the discipline of looking forward, sometimes really really far (Always Vision) and other times, just a few years (Horizon Vision). It’s like fast-forwarding your movie and trying to see where you want to go. 
   • During this stage, it’s also important to break it down. We recommend having your leadership team reflect on it. Then have other key members give feedback on concerns and excitement that is attached to the vision. If it’s not compelling, then it’s not a good vision. 
3. PATH, how do we get there?
   • Every goal needs a path. This path is a big piece of the Winning Strategy. This is the hard part, because as we know discipline is not our natural human tendency. People and discipline is what it takes to execute a plan. Talk is cheap.
   • The first part of the path is getting broad focus areas identified. The focus areas will help eventually lead to your vision and company goals. We recommend that you only have 3 to 5 focus areas for the entire company. If you have multiple business units, territories, and sub businesses that operate on their own,  you might want to create separate focus areas for them. We’ll talk more about the process portion later in this chapter. 
4. CONVEY, what’s the communication?
   • This is often forgotten, but communication to all your key members is essential. If people don’t know, they can’t help. Even if they aren’t going to help much in the process, when they know, they can become champions of the vision and goals. 
   • A part of communication is ensuring that your Healthy Leaders are more focused on Collective Purpose and People Focused (+), and not the Dismal Daily and Me Focused (-). When we get stuck on ourselves and the daily grind, we distort the best version of ourselves and our business. 

Don’t Forget Purpose Driven and Values Centric

Both of these are not explicitly named in a stage like Healthy Leadership and Compelling Vision, but instead, they are integrated into everything you do in the process. 

1. Purpose Driven is using your businesses Collective Purpose to align with a contribution bigger than one person. But don’t forget, we should be looking at key member’s Personal Purpose and ensuring that our strategy aligns with what we are asking. For instance, you won’t ask an employee to lead an initiative that requires them to travel more if one of their personal purposes is to “win at home first”. Let Purpose Driven be the conduit that helps in all decisions. 
2. Values Centric is keeping your organization’s values intact with the strategy. Every decision should be filtered through your values. Let’s use a prior example of a polished concrete, terrazzo, and epoxy floor company. They value being Neat, Clean, and Organized (NCO). An example is asking, if we add this new team to our department, do we believe we can still maintain our value of NCO? Adding a team means trying to maintain NCO while integrating the complexities of new. Now, if you say no, it doesn’t mean you just trash the idea. You should strategize on how you will maintain that value. Values should always be a filter for all the decisions made. 

Strategy is simple, but yet a complex system of planning and executing toward your Compelling Vision. Don't go another year without truly understanding and implementing a system that works for you to see real results!

Harrison Tash

Founder of Living Water