If Strategy Is So Important, Why Don’t We Make Time for It?

Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.

This week I want to talk about, let's know the question. If strategy is so important, why don't we make time for it? This came from an article from Harvard Business Review. It was actually a 2018 article by Dorie Clark, and they surveyed 10,000 senior leaders in companies. And this is one of those other things that just blew my mind. I can't believe when
they do these surveys that people are so disconnected in their responses.

But listen to this,10,000 senior leaders, 97% said being strategic is their number one most important behavior. And then these very same people turned around in the exact same survey, 96% said they lack time for being strategic. Is that not a disconnect? I don't know. I don't know how people give so disjointed inside their own brains when they're taking surveys. It's amazing. 97%, this is my number one behavior. I don't have time for it. I just don't get it. So how does the author Dorie Clark rationalize such a misalignment in people's thinking?

Well, number one, she says that there's a difference between busyness, B-U-S-Y, busyness, and business. Long hours and busyness are a proxy in most organizations for productivity and commitment. So, if I work 70 hours a week, the perception might be that I'm more committed to the company's success and more productive than the person who
works only 50 hours a week. That is a common perception in construction companies. It really is. Now, what I think most contractors care about is results. If somebody can achieve results in 40 hours, that it takes another person 70 hours to achieve, I don't see any difference in commitment there. I see a difference in productivity, and maybe we should be learning from the 40-hour person versus extolling the 70-hour person.

The second thing is busyness, long hours at work conveys a certain social status. It's perceived that senior leaders work harder and longer than other employees. I remember going to a peer group meeting. This was the very inaugural meeting of a peer group. Iron had not sharpened iron in that peer group yet. And two brothers in particular bragged
about their 90-hour work weeks. They really did. I mean, they wore it as a badge of honor and had later on, it didn't take long in that peer group to begin iron sharpens iron. Five years later, nobody was talking about 90-hourwork weeks. They were talking about vacations and travel, and they made a difference for each other. That's for sure. Even if nobody quantified work weeks anymore, you could tell that they were much more relaxed. They had better people in place, they had more self-managing companies, if you will, than they did at the outset.

Okay. Number two, people don't know how to go about strategy. You guys build stuff, you move dirt, you pave stuff, you bend conduit, you do all these things that you have to do to construct a project but none of that really is long-term business planning or strategic planning. Those are tactical things. The things you do every day at work are tactical. The
long-term things are strategic, so they don't have a framework. And sometimes leaders are worried that they're going to look foolish in front of their subordinates because I don't know how to do strategic planning. We're going to wing it, we might get it wrong. That's okay. Doing something is infinitely preferable to doing nothing. So, making the time first, even if you don't have... It's like picking up golf. The first day you hit a golf ball, or in my case, a tennis ball, you're going to be much, much worse than after you've practiced it 10,000 times. After you practice planning a little bit, you guess what? You get pretty darn good at it and you're already good at project management. You just need a plan to execute.

Okay. The third thing, the perception of waste. When people think about strategy, they think about getting that big three-ring binder and yeah, we hired a consulting firm, and they came in and we spent big money and lots of time and we got a three-ring binder, and it sat on the shelf, and it gathered dust. So, they feel like waste. Strategy led to waste, and it didn't move the needle for them. Why not? Because they didn't translate that giant three-ring binder into
actions. I talked to a contractor this week and they took their strategic plan, and they reduced it to a poster that every employee could see. They had it all over the place. Job sites in the office, everywhere, but the goals and the objectives, and it was all graphically done. You probably have people on your team that are wonderful graphic artists, and this
poster was the North Star. It was the guide stone for everybody in the organization. So, they took this three-ring binder they created, but they reduced it to something that people could touch and feel and understand. And that's how you translate strategy into everyday action.

The fourth thing is they don't have time for strategy, but they don't know where their time goes. All they know is it gets away from it pretty darn quickly. So, Clark talked about using a time tracking tool to really understand where your days and minutes go in the course of the workweek. And we've done that exercise a few times here. It is quite revealing. Strategy is a way of thinking big. That 30,000-foot view, and it's a process. The most valuable piece of
strategic planning and thinking is getting the best brains in your organization and generating team thinking, getting the best ideas bubble up through the organization. And the second thing about it is alignment.

So those the two most valuable pieces, the team thinking and the alignment that strategic thinking produces. If you're not making time for it, I respectfully ask that you start. You'll be happy that you did. What do you think? Those of you that have done it, let's hear from you. Did it move your needle? Did it help or was it just a big old colossal waste of time? Share with us in the comments.

This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.