Strategic vs tactical leadership: are you leading the agency, or doing your managers' work?

Strategic vs tactical leadership: what's the difference in an agency?

Tactical leadership asks "how do we get this done?" Strategic leadership asks "is this the right thing to be doing, and who should own it?"

Neither is better. An agency with a clear plan and no one running the Monday meeting misses the month. An agency that runs a tight Monday meeting with no plan behind it hits activity targets and stays the same size.

Strategic, tactical and operational: three jobs in one agency leader

There is a third layer between the two. Operational leadership is the machinery: how leads are assigned, how servicing requests are tracked, what the weekly meeting covers, who signs off a case before submission. Strategy decides what the agency is for; operations is how work flows through it; tactics is this week's work moving along those lines.

In a small agency one person often holds all three, and in the first years that is normal. The trouble starts later, when the agency has managers who could run the tactical layer and the leader is still running it for them.

When every case question is urgent, the year's plan never gets an hour

Tactical work is loud. An advisor needs an answer before the client meeting at three. A servicing request has gone to a complaint. A recruit wants to talk before signing. Each one is real and each one is today. The plan for next year is never today.

So the leader becomes the centre of everything. Managers learn that forwarding a decision is the quickest way to settle it, and advisors learn to skip their manager and message the leader directly. Every hour is full, which feels like progress. A year later the agency has the same advisors, the same managers, and a leader answering the same questions.

Harvard Business School's Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked how 27 chief executives spent their time, around the clock for 13 weeks, about 60,000 hours in all. One of the tensions they describe is pursuing an agenda while reacting to unfolding events. An agency leader faces a smaller version of the same pull every day.

Signs your week is all tactics: busy every day, same place every quarter

• You answer most case questions yourself.
• Managers forward decisions to you instead of making them and telling you afterwards, because that is what has always worked.
• January's plan hasn't been opened since February.
• Production reaches you as a monthly total, after the month is gone.
• You recruit when someone leaves.
• You could describe every advisor's week in detail, but not what each of your managers is learning.
• Every month is busy, and the agency is the size it was a year ago.

Two or three of these are common. If most describe your week, the agency has plenty of effort. What it lacks is an hour where nobody can reach you.

How to tell whether the agency has a strategy problem or a tactics problem

Look at what is going wrong.

A tactics problem shows up as a gap between a clear plan and what happens this week. Everyone knows the agency is building around young families, yet appointments are not being set, follow-ups slip, booked meetings do not happen. The fix is in the week: the Monday meeting, the numbers each advisor sees, the coaching on the step where each one is stuck.

A strategy problem shows up as effort that does not add up. Advisors are busy and hit their activity numbers, but production per advisor is flat, the recruits you hire are the ones who leave, and every manager is running a different idea of what the agency does. More effort will not fix that.

Richard Rumelt's test is useful here. He writes that a good strategy has three parts: a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and coherent actions that support each other. A target with a list of activities under it has no diagnosis. If you cannot say in one sentence what is holding the agency back, start there. Our strategic planning guide walks through writing that diagnosis on one page.

Turn "talk to me first" into "decide and tell me"

Tactical work does not disappear. It moves to the people closest to it. The step that makes it move is writing down which decisions belong to whom.

Sort the decisions that reached you last week into three groups:

1. Decide and tell me after. Managers own these fully. Examples: which advisor joins which joint appointment, how a routine servicing request is handled, who presents at Monday's meeting.
2. Decide with me. Managers bring a recommendation, you agree or push back. Examples: putting an advisor on a performance plan, changing how leads are shared.
3. Bring it to me. Yours alone. Examples: who joins the agency, which manager is promoted, what the agency stops doing.

Then say it out loud at the next managers' meeting, and hold to it the first time a "decide and tell me" decision lands on your desk anyway. Send it back with a question: "What would you do?" Our guide to roles and responsibilities in an advisory agency has a RACI chart for the work that sits between seats.

If you do not have managers yet, the same sort still helps. The "decide and tell me" pile is what your first manager or a senior advisor takes on.

One hour a week above the agency, and a quarterly half day

Strategy does not need a retreat. It needs a slot that tactical work cannot take. One way to set it up, as an example:

• One hour a week, same time, phone off, outside the office if that helps. Three questions: What did the numbers say this week that a monthly total would hide? Which decision reached me that should not have? What is one thing the agency should stop doing?
• A half day each quarter with your managers. Check the one-page plan against what happened: did the diagnosis hold, did the actions get done, what changes for the next quarter.
• Once a year, rewrite the plan from the diagnosis up.

The weekly hour is the one that slips first. Protect it the way you would a client meeting.

Strategy vs tactics, with agency examples

The plain difference between strategy and tactics is a question of its own, so here it is with agency examples:

A tactic with no strategy behind it is busy work, and a strategy with no tactics under it stays a slide deck.