Thursday, March 2, 2023

Strategy Is All about Winning

A good strategy allows you to focus on how to win in the long run while staying positive and on task through the obstacles that you’re bound to face

By André van Heerden, Communications Director

I’m a very competitive person by nature. This can turn me into someone I don’t like when my team, or myself, aren’t doing as well as I’d like. I can feel myself becoming frustrated and angry and ready to make choices that could hurt other’s feelings or cause larger problems.

This is why I love strategy. It saves me from myself and it’s effective.

By having a strategy of long term player development when coaching soccer, I can encourage players to take risks, I can play everyone equally, and I can learn more from failure than success. Even after a tough, last-minute loss. I can find elements of the game to congratulate the players on and areas where we need to improve—and do it all with a genuine smile.

A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin in their book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works note that “winning should be at the heart of every strategy.”

And that’s the great thing about a good strategy: it allows you to focus on how to win in the long run while staying positive and on task through the obstacles that you’re bound to face.

Something that I think many people get lost in are the details of a strategic plan. Often, there’s so much discussion and concern over a particular step or process of a plan that the overall goal gets lost.

It’s important to remember that the step is only there to get to the final objective.

For example, with many projects, the budgeting process is essential to achieving a successful conclusion. If a project can’t be finished because it went over budget, it can’t be successful.

But that’s only one step. If the focus is only on how to save money, then the project will likely suffer because of a lack of quality or safety.

Part of implementing an effective strategy is balancing all of the competing needs and forces so that you still get to where you need to be. Many things may seem important, but it all has to be prioritized based on that initial goal.

Henry Mintzberg, management thinker, author, and strategic planning guru noted that “the real challenge in crafting strategy lies in detecting subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business in the future. And for that there is no technique, no program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation.”

Everyone needs to be keenly aware of what the end goal is. If not, conflicts will arise as different people will have different goals and prioritize different things.

But if you can keep pointing back to what everyone agreed is the strategic goal to begin with, then deciding priorities becomes easier.

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras wrote in their book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, “Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.”

I know for myself that when I become too focused on the score of a soccer game and I am about to start yelling about a call, I find it comforting to remind myself about the bigger goal and greater victory. Once I do that, I can spend my energy on what really matters.

Strategy Is All about Winning

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