| Charity Leaders’ Exchange |
Taking The Time To Be Strategic
I've been thinking quite a lot about charity strategy recently. I'm part of a strategy group for the charity I used to be a Trustee for and we are working on the plan for the next phase of our development.
I'm learning a lot of new things and it has brought home to me, yet again, the importance of senior leaders having time to really think about strategy. There are so many facets to it: how you gather information; how you interpret information; how you stick to the vision of the organisation; how you keep everyone on the journey with you; how you evaluate different decisions against each other.
Of course, different leaders will be stronger or weaker at different aspects of the strategic process. Perhaps you know that you are great at interpreting information but that you find it hard to communicate it to your whole staff team. If that is the case, you might spend more time working with your senior team to tailor the message for different groups and disseminate messages in different ways. Or perhaps you are really good at keeping 98% of your team on the journey with you but have no idea how to deal with the 2% who you know will be very resistant to the decisions you have made. It would be wise here, perhaps, to talk to other chief executives who have faced a similar issue and to see if they have lessons you can learn from.
In my view, the most important thing is simply that you give yourself enough time. The day to day business of running a charity- keeping the services functioning, the beneficiaries happy and enough money rolling in- can seem more than enough to do. Truly though, if you want to really take your organisation forward you need to give yourself the time to think strategy.
- Alex
I'm learning a lot of new things and it has brought home to me, yet again, the importance of senior leaders having time to really think about strategy. There are so many facets to it: how you gather information; how you interpret information; how you stick to the vision of the organisation; how you keep everyone on the journey with you; how you evaluate different decisions against each other.
Of course, different leaders will be stronger or weaker at different aspects of the strategic process. Perhaps you know that you are great at interpreting information but that you find it hard to communicate it to your whole staff team. If that is the case, you might spend more time working with your senior team to tailor the message for different groups and disseminate messages in different ways. Or perhaps you are really good at keeping 98% of your team on the journey with you but have no idea how to deal with the 2% who you know will be very resistant to the decisions you have made. It would be wise here, perhaps, to talk to other chief executives who have faced a similar issue and to see if they have lessons you can learn from.
In my view, the most important thing is simply that you give yourself enough time. The day to day business of running a charity- keeping the services functioning, the beneficiaries happy and enough money rolling in- can seem more than enough to do. Truly though, if you want to really take your organisation forward you need to give yourself the time to think strategy.
- Alex
