A very real challenge in any career, from the very first job you have to the latest, is how to balance the often competing demands of operational and strategic goals.
This is because questions in the operational zone are often different from those you’ll find in the strategic zone.
The more your career progresses, the larger these challenges become.
The Operational Zone
The operational zone is where the urgency of the day-to-day is managed.
This zone is incredibly important. It is what keeps customers happy, a business running and ultimately makes or breaks the success of a team.
In the operational zone are:
- calls/emails from customers
- new orders from customers
- errors/problems
- workarounds and bandaids for known issues
- general budget management
- some meetings
- check-ins with direct reports
- team and workflow management
- communications (all types, from emails to project updates)
- the need to reinforce and reference priorities
- setting an example through day-to-day habits
The operational zone is where stuff gets done, today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. It is the here and now.
The Strategic Zone
The strategic zone is where the future happens.
It is where you get above the clouds and see the entire shape of things beneath you (I refer to this as the ‘context of the whole’).
This is where you map the journey ahead.
The strategic zone is where you foresee a way to make everything better beyond today – improvements to products that will make customers happier, investments in new capabilities to help your business, everything associated with being a more successful person and business.
In a survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% of them said that being strategic was the most important leadership behaviour important to the organization’s success.
In the strategic zone you will find:
- next year’s plan
- next year’s budget cycle
- the roadmap for your team
- new product development
- market development
- future targets
- deeper analysis of performance patterns
- analysis of competition and competitive strategy
- trends, opportunities, emerging issues
- wild cards and “black swans” (unlikely, but high impact events)
- people and talent development
- culture development
- large investments and business cases
- hard questions and wicked problems that require more time than is available in the operational zone
Like the operational zone, the strategic zone is also incredibly important.
Without thought to the strategic zone, businesses fail to plan for what’s just round the corner.
How Operational and Strategic Zones Change As Your Career Progresses
Now that we’ve looked at these two areas, let’s look at how the demands placed on you to spend time in each will change as your career progresses.
First, you’ll be expected to spend more time in the strategic zone. This is because more senior roles in companies often have larger ‘spans of time’ in terms of responsibility. Forbes notes this as a shift in focus from the short to long term.
For example, a Product Manager may operate on priorities with a 1 to 3 year timeframe. In contrast, a CEO is expected to think about the health of the organisation not just this year, but over the next 10 years.
Second, you will still have to manage the demands of the operational zone. I know many Product Managers who start their day looking at the daily measures and key statistics for their product.
These dual demands increase the higher you go.
This is the conundrum.
Many people I know feel that, as they spend more time on strategic issues, they spend less on operational ones. But it doesn’t always happen that way.
Your peers, your bosses, the board of directors….they still expect operational issues to be dealt with…and dealt with well.
And when we don’t keep an eye on those issues, we risk dropping the ball.
As a result, the operational zone can often feel more important than the strategic zone.
Say you face this dilemma.
You block out the entire afternoon in your calendar to spend time with your team, so you can analyze the design for next year’s product launch. In the morning you get a call from a major customer who is threatening to pull their business if you don’t resolve their issue today.
What do you do?
This dilemma is common for us all; it’s a face-off between an issue in the operational zone that requires time that otherwise would be spent in a strategic zone workshop.
In this dilemma the scales are often skewed because the operational issue feels more important than the strategic one.
It is hard to not see an upset and important customer as the more important issue, ins’t it?
Beware The Bias of The Present
In most situations, the operational zone issue will feel 10 times more real and threatening then the strategic zone issue.
Because the strategic zone issue is in the future, it will seem distant and less tangible.
The future is unconsciously more abstract to us than, say, an upset customer today.
Yet, both decisions carry consequences.
In the example above, the decision we could make about the future design of a new product could easily make the company more successful than responding to a single customer.
The greatest single challenge we face in leadership is to recognise that both operational and strategic zone issues are equally important.
This requires a mindset shift.
We have to manage how we perceive strategic issues, so that we view them with the same urgency as those in the operational zone.
How The Majority of People Deal With This Situation
Let’s think back to our example of the angry customer. How do most people deal with this situation?
8 times out of 10 the person in this scenario will postpone the planning session with their team and deal with the customer.
1 time in 10 they will put off the customer and go ahead with the planning session (this is not ideal, nor the best answer, because in no circumstance do we want to lose business).
It feels like its ‘lose – lose’ no matter which option is taken.
However, there is one other option.
It is hardly ever taken, yet can provide the best path. In this option, you manage both operational and strategic zone issues without compromise.
What 1 in 10 Leaders Do To Balance Operational And Strategic Demands
Great leaders do three things that allow them to respond to this issue unlike 90% of managers.
- First, they ask what is most important;
- Second, they have learnt to manage their capacity, not their time;
- Third, they manage the potential for operational issues as a strategic zone question (the most important action of all three of these points!).
1. Ask what’s most important
The first thing to ask is what truly needs our time and what does not.
At first, it’s natural for us to think we are needed to solve everything. Aren’t we important?
It was empowering to learn I wasn’t as important as I thought. I realised I had so many incredible and talented people around me who could help with all sorts of challenges.
If you’re struggling with this, try an exercise.
Think of the CEOs you’ve most admired. What were the activities you saw them do that you felt were most important?
Maybe it was a time when they addressed the entire company or gave an overview of priorities for the year. Maybe you saw them give an investor announcement. Perhaps you heard the CEO taking with people, taking time to greet them and listen, so the CEO understood their people at all levels.
You likely did not see the CEO doing every day things, every day. In fact, according to FastCompany, most CEO’s only spend 11% of their time on routine activities, like attending meetings.
CEOs constantly challenge themselves by asking ‘what are the most important things to spend time on?’.
Now imagine you’re the CEO of your team. From your team’s perspective:
- where do you think they need you most?
- what would be the ways you could be most impactful to them?
- what will make a difference to how they see you, the job your team is there to do, and the company?
When we do this exercise, it can tell us some ‘home truths’. It helps us quickly see where we can spend our time for greatest impact.
2. Manage Capacity, Not Time
Sometimes it feels like the only way to solve issues is to throw more of our time at the problem.
But the answer isn’t more time. The answer is more capacity.
Time and capacity are different responses to the same issue. And they produce very different outcomes.
Time is a limited resource for us. You only have so many hours available to you in a day. Capacity is not limited in the same way.
We can expand our capacity by increasing our personal resourcefulness and the resources that we have access to.
Here are just some the methods to increase your capacity:
- Do what you do well, the most.
A task becomes easy when you’re doing something you’re naturally skilled at. Often this happens when you’re in flow. You can likely do more of these tasks, more quickly than other people you know. By doing things that you do well, more often, you will increase the volume of work you’re able to get done. - Do what you do less well, less.
Activities you’re not naturally skilled at or have low interest in are often time consuming. By refocusing where we spend our time, and doing less of these tasks, we increase our capacity. - Delegate
For those activities that are not important for you to do , consider which of these can be delegated to others. The act of ‘delegating’ is a skill in itself. - Oversee, don’t manage
I know many managers who are involved in the detail of activities other people are leading. This takes loads of their time. By trusting others to do great work, and being involved at the right time, overseeing but not managing work, we dramatically increase our capacity. - Train your people to problem solve.
Sure, we could jump in and likely solve many problems for others. But every time we do this, we rob our people of an opportunity to learn. By training our teams to solve problems, we develop others and, in doing so, make teams more effective and give a chance for problems to be solved before they reach us. - Encourage people to come to you with escalations, not the problem.
Problem solving takes patience and often multiple attempts. When we encourage our teams to stick with a problem, raising issues with us when they cannot be solved or when they’re becoming increasingly severe, we help people strengthen their problem solving skills. - Ask for help.
We often think asking for help is a sign of weakness. In fact, it’s a sign of humility, openness and strength. I ask for help often, especially on complex activities. I view it as a way of accessing expertise I do not have. It’s also one of the best ways I know to build trusted working relationships. - Manage to a buffer, not to your limit.
Most people I know manage their time to 100% of their capacity. Then, when a new priority emerges, they find themselves stretched to fit it in. I recommend to keep a little in reserve (5-10% available time) so that if something urgent arises, you have the resourcefulness to give it attention without burning out. - Seek more resources
If you are stretched and doing important work, it is always an option to ask for more resources. From my experience, if there is a strong justification for the work (whether that is in the form of business benefits or reduced risk), companies act reasonably to these requests.
These are some simple but effective strategies to increase the capacity available to you to manage operational issues, so you can spend more time in the strategic zone.
3. Manage the potential for operational issues as a strategic zone question
This final action is perhaps the most powerful of all three actions that leaders take, but is also the least used.
Great leaders treat the potential for future operational issues as strategic zone questions. They devote time to planning ahead to solve issues before they arise.
Let’s look at an example. In the case of the upset customer, strategic zone questions could be:
- how can we setup our business so that if a customer is upset, we have a process to resolve their issue quickly; or
- how can we improve the design of product X so that the issue we’ve heard from three customers does not happen again; or
- how can we test a prototype of a product before it’s released to customers, to spot and solve issues, before they ever reach a single customer
Each of these questions asks us to solve a challenge before it becomes a problem in the future, by asking a strategic question today.
Strong leaders are constantly scanning their business for signals that indicate future operational issues. Then, they proactively work with their teams to setup preventative measures and systems that will solve for those issues in the strategic zone, before they become crises.
I hope these suggestions are useful to you, whether you are just starting with your first role or already have an established career. Please consider sharing your feedback by leaving a comment below.
