The details
Whether you're a company founder or executive looking to grow a business and make it successful, or you're an employee somewhere trying to grow your role, your influence or rise up the ranks-- there's always a tension between high level vision and the details. There's been a lot of ink spilled on this. I alluded to Ron Heifetz's advice to "get on the balcony" just a couple weeks ago in a post about being intentional in pursuing your goals. My balcony time is when I think about the big picture in context of a great many details.
Over the years I've noticed some leaders get pretty uncomfortable going deep. To me- when I'm in charge of something- if the buck stops here with me, then I'm going to own the plan and stand behind my own decision. (Sure- we all consult with people who have more expertise on our teams but there's an obligation to really understand what they are saying.) Mantras of "Go big or go home!" and "Be Bold!" without one's own informed calculations are all hat and no cattle.
Being bold therefore isn't enough. To me, strategy is about the bet. Taking a deliberate approach to something, a calculated bet with tradeoffs. Sometimes it's an emergent strategy. You cannot always fully elaborate the end you may have in mind, but you can have a strong idea (hypothesis) about the right overall direction and the need to take some steps now (urgency).
Sometimes your boss owns the strategy so your role is following and being more a mouthpiece, communicator and manager. In reality, our jobs often mix and match where we play multiple roles in different areas at different times. (Even if it's not your call, it's worth spending time on your own assessment to help optimize things or to influence if you have concerns, or to pre-think possible contingencies.)
The opportunities I've taken that have rewarded me the most have been the ones where nobody else was willing to make the bet- and I was. My boss said "I think you're crazy, but if you think you can pull it off, go present the idea to [a leader a couple levels up from me]." She was a great boss, earlier in my career, to let me have the opportunity to present my own plan (and play out my own risk/reward bet).
A key thing here to understand: I am not a gambler. The foundation of these successful bets was investing the time to deeply grasp technical and business-level detail-- security, partner and product considerations - and the time to form a clear-eyed assessment of the capabilities and ambitions of the people on my team. Things that look like bets to the uninformed or uninitiated may not actually be up to chance or luck.
When leaders aren't in the details, they can't have the context or the knowledge to know if something is truly risky or not. The worst would be to make a one-way-door decision while assuming if things went wrong reversing course would be an easy escape chute. When making changes that will affect things in the future, only your deep understanding of the future parameters will allow an accurate before-the-fact assessment of how things will play out.
I've spoken with quite a bit of generality here, so, I promise to write up a couple concrete examples of two very significant figures (one in government and one in the business world) who owe their success to sweating the details later this week.
Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash
