When you sell your company one day, you’ll want to present a leadership team comfortable with strategy
Ask yourself this question – each day/week, when you talk with your key leaders, what percentage of these interactions are you telling them what to do (a monologue) versus you having effective strategic and tactical dialog to which they contribute good thinking?
The former builds a tactical muscle within your team, the latter builds a strategic muscle.
How do you go about getting others on your team to think strategically with you? It starts with you asking strategic questions. Employees are prepared to talk with you about what they know you like to talk about. If they know you like to tell them what to do, they will wait to listen. If you talk to them mostly about family, sports and weather, guess what they will be prepared to talk with you about? If they know you like asking good strategic questions and dialoging strategically, guess what many of your managers will start to do?
Here are some good basic questions to start letting your team know that you are encouraging them to also think and talk strategically with you:
- Do we have any internal processes that we should re-evaluate for finding new efficiencies?
- What is one action each Department could take this year to find a new efficiency?
- What action could we take this year to increase our gross profit?
- In our market, are we viewed as a leader by our customers or as a follower of a competitor?
- Every industry has price setters and price followers, which are we?
- Every industry has product/service innovators and followers, which are we?
- What are the top 2 things customers would like us to do better?
- What are the top 2 great things we do for customers that they say sets us apart from the competition?
- Are the actions we have our team working on today helping us build company worth or are they just maintaining things?
These are the types of questions that you should have in your leadership toolbox and many more could be added. These are just a few conversation starters to let your team know you want to improve the strategic dialog being had amongst your team. Building a strategic thinking muscle at your business starts with the owner/CEO. Ask your team more strategic questions and you’ll start to see who on your team can join you in also leading and participating in productive strategic dialog. Start building this muscle today and it will be a wonderful gift to your future self as you strive to achieve your euphoric exit event one day.
