Are you responsible for all the important decisions in your company?
You know, the big ones, important for the company and critical to its ongoing success.
This burden can be very heavy to carry, and sometimes it feels like being stretched out in all directions. Clients complain about services that didn’t work perfectly, our best employee is quitting their job, tax payments are coming up, and we lost a large contract.
A lot of entrepreneurs face the situation where they are responsible for all decisions of their company. But do they always have the backgrounds or experience needed to make the best decisions?
In most cases, the business owner drives the company’s success and possesses detailed knowledge of the core topics relevant to their business. That doesn’t mean that they know everything.
We see this often in coaching and mentoring sessions. Business owners are empowered, want the best for their companies, and care about delivering results and growing their business.
What we also see is that the same person struggles when they have to make decisions that are outside of the core topics of their business. That’s where Leadership Strategy Consulting comes in.
We will talk about the 7 principles in a second, but you need to understand your starting point first:
- Where do you stand now?
- What is your goal?
- What does your time frame and budget look like?
Being aware of this will shape the options that you have to reach your goals.
1. Understand Where You Stand
I mentioned it before, “you need to understand where you stand”!
What does that mean?
You have to understand the challenges that you are facing, but also your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. So, we are talking about SWOT. This approach is a pretty good starting point since it gives you an overview of different aspects of your current situation. If you don’t understand where you stand, how can you progress, and how do you measure the progress that you have made?
Considering the GRIFFOX Layered Cake Model, we find this stage at the very bottom of the model, “Foundation & Experience”.
We have seen a lot of companies ignoring this stage or rushing through it since it looks like work is time-consuming, and we want so badly to achieve our goals.
So, many companies and business owners think it’s better to be goal-oriented and just move forward, no matter what. But do they understand the why? Are they able to make real progress, or are they just looking at the big numbers?
We respect that, but we don’t recommend it. What we recommend is a clear and purposeful approach to effective leadership strategy consulting.
Understanding your starting point is important since it connects you to the real issues and problems, gives you direction, and lets you move forward in a purposeful way.
Let’s look at the next principle.
2. Define Clear Goals and Metrics
Goals and metrics are very important, since goals show the direction that we need to take, and measures show us when we have reached our goals.
Just to clarify that, both goal-orientation and problem-orientation are important in Leadership Strategy Consulting. Goal-orientation guides the process and gives direction; problem-orientation gives clarity and confidence. Albert Einstein said, “If you can define your problem, you have already solved half of it.”
We can use different approaches to write down our goals. An easy-to-use approach is SMART. You’ll find different definitions for each letter. The one that I look most is Specific, Measurable, Attractive, Realistic, and Time-bound.
What I really like in this selection is the “Attractive” part. To be honest, if a goal is not attractive to you, why would you ever be in the mood to reach it?
Furthermore, we always use the SMART+ approach. The “+” stands for reachable by yourself.
A lot of SMART descriptions are missing the plus and then you wonder why you are never reaching your goals.
Always make sure that goals are reachable by yourself. If not, you are relying on a third person/third party and if they don’t do what they promised, you’ll never reach your goals.
An alternative approach to SMART+ are KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which track specific numbers that support the process of reaching your goals (e.g., number of phone calls per day) or the OKR model (Objectives and Key Results), which is a larger set of specified objectives and key results that all drag you into your specific and desired direction.
Let’s stop here for now since I want to stick to our main topic, which is effective leadership strategy consulting.
Maybe I will write another blog post on Goals and Measures for Business Success in the future.
3. Select the Right Tools and Methods
SMART+, KPIs, and OKRs show a little bit of the complexity that we face when we are talking about strategic planning approaches. There are just too many tools and methods.
Still, we are convinced that a good mix of tools and methods is the best way to get you to your goals and helps you to keep track. But that means also that you need to understand the tools and methods that you want to use, and you need to have an overview of the tools and methods.
However, a practical and easy-to-use approach that you can use in a lot of situations is the GRIFFOX Layered Cake Model. It has a clear structure, can be used for organizational change, strategic planning, leadership, and personal growth, and is highly flexible within the layers. Furthermore, it can easily be scaled by using a multi-layered cake approach.
In short, Foundation and Experience, which sit at the bottom of the model, focus on understanding where you stand at the moment. The Framework layer focuses on analyzing data and selecting specific supporting tools like KPIs. The Implementation Layer focuses on project management and translating your plan into daily operations or next steps. It also contains a project-related reflection cycle to adjust to needed changes and be aware of improvements, challenges, and problems. The Reflection layer focuses on a larger Reflection between the initial starting point and the goal. It looks at topics like “Were we able to achieve everything that we aimed for?” and “What is still missing?”. This helps us to decide if we can move forward or need to go back to the Implementation layer. The Goal layer that is sitting at the top guides the whole process and is visible from start to end. So, it helps to communicate our message and guide us to our goals.
I don’t want to stress this too much, but having the right tools is important for your project success.
4. Engage the Right People, Efficiently
Project success is related to the right people, but it also needs to be efficient.
But who are the right people?
This question is never easy to answer. On the one side, you want to include knowledgeable people who support the company and who have a lot of influence since important decisions often affect different departments or teams.
On the other side, you want to keep the audience as small as possible since too many voices lead to a lot of discussions, lead to losing time, momentum, and money, and lead to inefficient project meetings.
The size and kind of your organization also influences how many people are part of project meetings. With this in mind, engage the right people, but also think about efficiency.
It’s always about the right mix.
5. Make Sustainable, Vision-Driven Decisions
Short-term wins are important for driving projects since you have a story that you can tell, and your employees or stakeholders can see that you are actively working on that project.
Important company-wide decisions always mean that the main focus is on your corporate vision. What do you want to achieve within the next 3, 5, or even 10 years?
How is this specific project supporting your vision, and which aspects need the strongest focus?
Clarity on these aspects helps you to guide your direction and to support you in communicating your message. Most projects deliver some kind of change to the employees. And if you have worked with prominent change approaches in the past, then people will always ask, “What’s in it for me”?
The reason for that is that these approaches tell us that we need to work on the desire for change and, therefore, communicate how awesome the project is and what our employees can expect in the future.
To be honest, I think most projects should focus more on ownership and acceptance. The reason for that is that a business owner or a department head is typically not discussing their decisions with their employees. So, if we focus too much on the desire for change or the “What’s in it for me?” then we are overfocusing on one perspective of the project instead of taking a look from different aspects, and especially focusing on our vision.
Every company needs to find its perfect approach for effective leadership strategy consulting, which is also highly connected to communication and your corporate culture.
6. Communicate with Clarity and Honesty
Communication can be a game-changer or it can lead to a lot of conflicts. Either way, communication is complex.
What do I mean by saying “communication is complex”. A message can be delivered and perceived in many different ways. The way how we use the words that deliver the message, the way we pronounce them, our level of confidence, the clarity and detail level of the message, and our mood can highly influence how a message is perceived by a specific audience.
Next, the audience is interpreting the message since that is what our brain does. Some people will trust in you, other will ask questions (if that is an option), and the rest will be quiet and think about the message and come up with their own analysis and interpretation.
The easiest would be if everyone would just be in the mood to ask questions. This would be time-consuming but at least we have a meaningful conversation.
Past experiences and your corporate culture is influencing this process too and we can see that communication is complex just by bringing up some important points.
Even if our intention is to inform our employees in a detailed way, we often face the hard reality that communication is never working in a perfect way.
7. Track Progress and Stay Agile
In short, measure what matters, celebrate milestones, and refine your approach as needed to stay on course.
We talked about that earlier. Measuring progress is important since we want to know when we have reached our goals. If our goals are unclear, it is hard to say when we have reached them and can end the project.
Defining clear milestones helps you to reach your goals since it is always helpful to break a larger goal into smaller pieces. Just think about building a house. If we write this down in a project management plan then we easily can fill many pages since it is very complex and a lot of different people with different capabilities are working on that project. But it is easy to check boxes like the foundation or the frame of the house is finished. I can check that and regarding the house, this milestone is visible.
Therefore, visibility is very important in project management and in measuring success. That is the reason why we visually designed the layered cake model. It is easy to talk about where you stand, and it is easy to talk about the next step. Visibility helps to reduce abstraction, which is a very important aspect of leadership strategy consulting. That makes it easy for you to deliver a message and for the audience to follow you.
If explanations get too abstract, the audience gets lost in your message, and the next steps are unclear.
Still, we have to stay agile for at least two reasons. From our experience, number 1 is issues and obstacles that show up every single day. Daily stand-up meetings, for example, help you to stay in touch with your teams; they are efficient, easy to organize, and give you a quick overview of what needs to be done next.
Number 2 is to focus on your company, your goals, your needs, and adjusting everything on the go if needed. Think about any sports game. If a specific game strategy is not working since your opponent is stronger than expected or a player on your team gets injured, you are adjusting your strategy and tactics to still be in the position to win the game.
The same is happening in all projects. We need to have reflection cycles like an iterative approach, where we check ongoingly if the project is moving in the desired direction. If we see that our project needs adjustment, we can act and shift toward a different strategy.
I hope you like this article about the 7 core principles of effective leadership strategy consulting.
If your organization is ready to move from goals to measurable impact, contact GRIFFOX Consulting to explore how we can support your leadership and strategy journey.
Thanks for reading!
About GRIFFOX Consulting
GRIFFOX Consulting helps organizations align people, processes, and performance. With 50+ years of combined leadership experience, we guide public-sector and mission-driven clients through change and growth using proven frameworks like the GRIFFOX Layered Cake Model™.
If you’re seeking executive leadership consulting that actually moves the needle — contact us today. We’re ready to help you drive impact at the top.
Prefer to learn visually? Watch our short strategy insights on our YouTube channel.