Get to what matters
When you’re trying to bring order to your business and devise a strategy for how to get things done, it’s crucial that you do things in the right sequence.
“The execution of your plan is entirely different than the development of your plan,” Stroup says. “Those two things really need to be done separately and they need to be done sequentially. Otherwise, you’re going to have great execution but on the wrong things, or you’re going to pick the right things, but you’re not going to execute any of them very well.”
Your first step should be to pull in your critical thinkers and get down on paper the most important things that matter to your business. Make an agreement that this list will not include personal pet projects that don’t serve the greater good of the business.
“It’s not about, ‘Here’s the thing I want to do,’” Stroup says. “It’s really got to be a very thought-based process with as much data as you can possibly get to be able to accurately identify those things that are truly strategic.”
Be purposely divergent in the beginning to allow for the consideration of all ideas that fit this mold.
“Then I ask each one of those people to dive into more detail in their specific areas, which allows them to involve others in the process,” Stroup says. “We have eight to nine different things we’re really looking at in detail and within each of those eight to nine teams, we probably have no more than eight to nine people. So in our company, we probably have nearly 100 people that are involved in the process. But we have nine to 10 people who have oversight in the final decisions of the working of the plan itself.”
As you’re selecting people, be thoughtful about how the experience will help the individuals chosen.
“The company may benefit from an individual being on a particular subject, but that individual might actually benefit more from being on another subject because that’s an area where they really need to develop,” Stroup says. “So we really try to take both into consideration when we develop the teams.”
At some point, you need to change from being divergent to convergent and get your list boiled down to the essentials.
“The process you use to converge can be as simple as voting around the room or as authoritarian as the CEO saying, ‘Look, these are the three things we are going to work on,’” Stroup says. “It sort of depends on the style of the leader and the style of the company.”