A Flattering Mirror

I often hear clients talk about the importance of all staff being able to “see themselves in the new strategy.”

It’s an appeal for relevance and inclusion, and I get it. But it’s the role of strategic leaders to help each person see themselves in the strategy—it’s not the role of the strategy itself to reflect everybody’s work.

There are two main reasons for this. I’ll dig into one today and say more about the second next week.

If a strategic plan is a mirror that reflects what you do, it should be the most flattering mirror you’ve ever looked in. Not because it should artificially make you look your best, but because it should inspire you into a desired future that is better than how things look today. It should represent a “glow up” rather than an unfiltered snapshot.

It should also be a wide-angle mirror that shows things from a fairly high altitude. Not so high that you can’t recognize what you’re looking at, but high enough that the destination is clear but the details are blurry. That’s because the detailed path to reaching your desired destination can and should adapt to changing conditions over time. So, if you have staff whose jobs are highly detailed, it may be entirely appropriate that they currently can’t see themselves clearly in that mirror.

You may not need to change the mirror. You need to change how you communicate about what people are looking at.

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