Managers: Communicating a strategy is part of executing a strategy.

'Tis the season for strategic planning.

Apologies for the delay during November, friends. Illness and a family emergency knocked me off track. I’m working on designing more slack in my writing systems. The good news is that we should be back to our regularly scheduled programming now.

It’s that time of year where you might be waiting for your leader to hand you their 2024 strategy, so you can do produce the same. The whole company is trying to align on goals for the coming year, while simultaneously trying to wrap up 2023. There’s an art to this, and the bigger the organization that you’re apart of, the longer this process probably takes. Let’s try to make it a bit less painful for everyone.

Mission

Your company probably has a mission. Your department or team might have one as well. If you don’t have one, I think it’s worth writing one. A mission is just a couple of sentences (shorter is better) describing some sort of ideal end-state that you’re trying to reach. This isn’t an OKR. Missions should not be SMART goals. They’re meant to inspire, motivate, and clarify.

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It has to stay specific enough to explain why you’re different and what’s going to put you above the rest of your competition if you do it well. “We’re going to be the best company ever to exist.” won’t get you far. Imagine: if only your competitors had also thought of that.

One of my teams previously had a mission to “Be the SRE team for teams that don’t have SRE.” It can be pretty simple, even if the mission itself is complex: Keep the website up. Eradicate malaria. Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. Spread ideas. Those are all missions.

Missions are often short, and the process to produce one is often just as important as the outcome. By talking about what is and isn’t important to your mission or vision, you’ll have necessary conversations along the way on what that exactly means. It’s a great exercise for leaders to see which of their reported values they actually uphold in the moment. Are you trying to just replicate your competitions business, or are you trying to make it your own? How and why are you doing that?