Are you caught in the trap of developing a strategic plan and then becoming too attached to it? If so, the following advice may help you regain perspective…
Plan A, your preferred strategy, is like the first child in your family. Whether it is pampered or scolded, the emotional connection is always very high. Plan B is like the middle child, relatively speaking unwanted, unloved and uncared for…stuck on the shelf. And Plan C, if there is one, is the baby of the family, potentially a winner, but never quite given the opportunity to mature, stuck in the shadows of it’s older siblings.
Did you know that emotional connections are what energizes a strategy? Without energy, a strategy will fizzle out, no matter how good it looks like on paper. And this applies to Plans A, B and C. If you decide to switch plans, then you need to be able to locate and harness the energy for such a change. Unfortunately, very few organizations are good at this.
So how do you locate and harness this energy? Research has shown that about 50% of people in today’s organizations care deeply about results, about 50% care deeply about the processes that produce these results, about 45% care about developing a sense of community, and even much less, about 30% care deeply about teamwork and harmony. (The total is greater than 100% because some people care about multiple things.)
So the key to harnessing that energy is to identify where your organization sits in comparison to these numbers. How many people are focused on results, how many on activities, how many on building community, and how many on teamwork and harmony?
And here’s another conundrum…emotional intelligence stresses community, teamwork and harmony, and yet these are less prized in organizations than their left brained cousins of logic and reasoning, aka results and activities.