Get Beyond the Tactical

The weekly tactical meeting where teams resolve many small problems in about an hour is the most common type of meeting. Rarely have we worked with teams that are not having this meeting, or at least an attempt at it, in a regular cadence.

When you feel your team’s meeting rhythm is awry, start here. The tactical needs to be great first because it’s the basis of a healthy meeting ecosystem. Solving a lot of little problems gives the team forward momentum, surfaces strategic topics, and cascades up otherwise obfuscated trends from frontline teams.

But the tactical meeting is just the beginning. The next stage is to graduate to running great ad-hoc strategic meetings, where transformative topics are debated and decided so you can do great, consequential things with your team.

Don’t have strategic meetings. Your poor performers will be happy, and your competitors will love you.

Most leaders intuitively understand this, yet few are actually having these meetings.

Why do they get stuck at the tactical?

The most pressing issue for teams is the tyranny of urgency, where great strategic topics are pushed aside in favor of just getting through the next week.

“We can wait until next week to get to that.”

“Let’s just get through this crisis, then we can solve the real issue.”

“I really can’t fit another meeting on my schedule, so we won’t be able to solve that.”

If you hear yourself saying any of this when strategic topics surface, you are living under the tyranny of urgency.

The second mindset freezing teams at the tactical level is making efficiency an idol. You must be willing to deliberately “waste time” on debates that will not sow results for months or maybe even years. Immature leaders value efficiency, mature leaders value effectiveness.

“It feels like that discussion wouldn’t lead anywhere, so we just shouldn’t have it.”

“Debating that issue could cause a lot of drama on the team that I would have to waste time mediating.”

“There’s no way we could create a KPI for such an ambitious goal, so we shouldn’t set that expectation. I wouldn't even know where to start."

If you hear yourself responding to strategic issues with these phrases, you have idolized efficiency to the detriment of your organization.

Once you identify the mindset holding back your team, how do you graduate to actually running great strategic meetings?

First, you as a leader in your tactical meetings must have the discipline to monitor the altitude, unearth conflict when team members are holding back, and interrupt discussions that venture into the strategic realm. It is your responsibility during these meetings to probe into disagreements on potential strategic issues then table the resulting discussions for an ad-hoc once the heart of the conflict is out in the open.

This becomes much easier when there is a proven, productive process for running these strategic meetings, as we teach in our much-in-demand class on the subject. When the leader and the team know there is a clear and trustworthy system for strategic issues to be debated and decided, they are far more likely to take that next step.

Your team, if constituted of the right people, finds its joy in strategic conversations. Bring your team back to its joy. Help them stop turning the wrenches everyday and give them the opportunity to build and steer the compelling and controversial issues they joined up to address. When we ask teams to list their most important strategic issues, invariably their eyes light up and they clamor for more time to dive into the “real issues.” As a leader, elevate them back to their most joyful area.

Finally, ensure the team has a clear, shared strategy that defines what the organization’s strategic issues actually are. It is confusing and distracting when every issue that is at least compelling or interesting is given time in the sacred strategic space. A collective “big, hairy, audacious goal” helps the team remember the difference between something energizing to talk about and something that will advance the strategic goals of the organization.