Are Your Leaders Tactically Deliberate?
Most organizations have a strategy (but not all). Senior leaders have spent time building a vision, setting growth targets and identifying priorities for the next few years. Where things tend to break down is in the day-to-day decisions that are supposed to carry that strategy forward.
At DCI, we refer to the leaders who close this gap as being tactically deliberate. A tactically deliberate leader can draw a clear line from the decisions they make each week to the organization’s strategic goals. They know which actions move the strategy forward. They also know which ones work against it.
In the most effective organizations, strategic alignment shows up at every level. Senior leaders articulate a clear vision and define the leadership behaviors needed to reach it. Managers translate that vision into specific objectives for their departments and identify the staff behaviors that support them. Team members understand how their work connects to the bigger picture. When these levels line up, decisions are made faster and more consistently because people know what matters.
When they don’t line up, the signs are usually easy to spot. Teams work on competing priorities. Decisions that could be made at the front line are pushed up the chain. Growth goals are announced each year but progress stalls because effort is spread across too many directions.
It helps to think of decision-making as a behavior generalizable to any leader and any industry. Like any behavior, the decisions people make are influenced by antecedents, that come before behavior and prompt it to occur, and consequences that occur during or after behavior and determine whether the behavior will continue. The organizational strategy itself is an antecedent. It tells people what the organization wants. The consequences that follow their decisions tell them what the organization actually values.
For example, if a plant manager is told that growth is the top priority but is consistently praised for holding costs flat, cost control will win out over growth nearly every time. The manager isn’t ignoring the strategy. They are responding to what gets reinforced.
This is why alignment can’t be solved with another all-hands meeting or a better slide deck. Leaders have to look at what happens after decisions are made. Then they need to ask whether those consequences support the direction the organization is trying to go.
With the Deliberate Coaching® approach, we help leaders become tactically deliberate by starting with pinpointing. Leaders identify the specific decisions and behaviors at their level that connect to each strategic goal. A goal such as “grow our market share” becomes something a leader can act on. One example is reviewing pipeline data with each account manager every Monday morning.
From there, coaching happens in short, frequent conversations tied to real work. Questions like “How does this decision support our growth target?” or “What would you do differently if growth were the only goal?” help leaders build the habit of checking their choices against the strategy before they act.
Finally, leaders make sure the decisions that support the strategy are the ones that get recognized and discussed. Celebrating small wins early helps those decisions become routine.
Strategy matters. However, it is the hundreds of small decisions made each week that determine whether an organization actually grows.
Are your leaders tactically deliberate? Contact DCI at info@deliberatecoaching.org to learn how Deliberate Coaching helps leaders align their daily decisions with your strategy.
Posted by Nic Weatherly, Ph.D.
Dr. Weatherly is the CEO and Managing Consultant at Deliberate Coaching International with a proven track record of maximizing operating revenues and organizational and staff performance by building holistic systems and targeted training programs, linking performance-improvement initiatives to key business metrics, and strategically aligning short- and long-range goals to the organization’s mission, vision, and values.