For this episode of our Strategy and Leadership Podcast, we were joined by Ron Carucci, the managing partner at Navalent, a small firm dedicated to assisting organizations and leadership teams through transformation and change. They help these businesses build their pathways strategically, organizationally, and culturally to create and implement the transformations they seek.
Ron has worked with small, medium and large organizations from a variety of sectors and has developed an understanding of the wide array of problems organizations can face as they grow.
During our chat, Ron shared tactics and best practices on crucial pieces of strategy development for organizations, including:
- Why you should know who you are as an organization: If time is spent on understanding what you’re good at and why you’re good at it, then your organization will be better able to respond to changes or threats in the marketplace.
- The importance of committing to the development of a strategy that supports what your organization excels at: Figure out what sets you apart from your competitors and leverage those differentiators. Do what you do well, and don’t try to do everything.
- Understanding the importance of comprehensive strategic planning work: While mission and vision statements are a great start, they are not a strategy. These can help you start the process of understanding who you are as an organization, but more work needs to be done to align your team and develop an actionable strategy with clear steps for what needs to get done so that your organization can grow and scale. Strategy implementation is hard work, but it’s important not to avoid it.
- The need for working ON your organization, not only IN it: While most people like to “get stuff done”, it’s important that leaders are not strictly task oriented, feeling too busy to work on strategy. Running an organization takes strategic thinking, which is an important piece to developing both the people and processes within the architecture of your organization.
- The benefits of crafting your future together, as a team: Strategy development is not a solo activity. An engaged team will be on board early, and have excitement for the future of the organization. While the strategic planning process contains some conceptual conversations, they are followed by ideas that can be further developed into a pathway with clear goals and metrics for achieving success.
- How to develop yourself as a leader: If you’re not sure about how you’re doing as a leader, get feedback from your team. Everyone can improve, and if you ask your team to be honest about your strengths and weaknesses, you’ll have the opportunity to grow yourself alongside your organization and your team.