…fixating on the plan. It’s rare that I meet a leader who can’t plan– some are better at it than others, but being able to chart a course from Here to There is sort of a deal-breaker in attaining or maintaining a leadership role. But I often meet leaders whose success is challenged by their inability to let go of their plans. Sticking to a plan makes a leader feel leaderly and displays the “full steam ahead” tenacity that makes for corporate legends and good movies, but it also causes leaders to lose their agility and take their eye off what they planned to achieve, in favor of simply how they planned to achieve it. In the tumultuous world of real leadership this can derail or defeat even the most determined leader.
Planning relies on your ability to anticipate the future and control variables to make the most of it. It’s the due diligence and “advance work” you do to position yourself and your team to deliver the best results or reap the greatest rewards and it’s essential, but it’s also insufficient, because the future has an annoying tendency to stray from the script. When this happens, it’s not your ability to stick to your preconceptions that matters as much as your ability to adapt to what you’re actually experiencing. It’s not your ability to implement the plan “As Is” that promises the greatest gain as much as it is your ability to flex it, revise it, or even discard to serve the opportunities and challenges of the moment.
There is a time for planning and a time for simply Making Things Work. If you’re too focused on the plan when its time to make things work, you’ll miss the promising but unanticipated opportunities that came up while you were busily trying to make everything conform to your plan. Or worse, you’ll get run down or ruined by challenges that weren’t covered in your contingencies. When it’s time to implement, Making Things Work matters. Get your head up and out of the plan so that you can see when it’s ill-suited to your goals. After all, the plan serves you, not the other way around.
In the end, a leader is distinguished more by the results she achieves than by how perfectly she stuck to a plan. (I squirm just imagining this report to the board or stakeholders: “Well, we failed completely, but I’m happy to report that we stuck to the plan to the bitter end!”) Make a plan, and make a good one, but hold it loosely as you step into it. If Shakespeare was right and “all the world is a stage”, then leaders need more than a good script to play upon it well; they need the inclination to improvise when an Oscar-worthy performance depends upon it.
Stuff Leaders Should Stop is sponsored by spray Stoppit
andrewjjohnston 