If you are a strategic perfectionist you are planning and strategizing until you have everything set in stone.
Focus, instead, on launching your strategic plans into multi-directional and multi-factorial motion.
If you are a strategic perfectionist you are so busily focused on internally researching and creating that you ignore the obvious smoke signals from the external marketplace. You expect everyone to put themselves on hold for you.
If you are a strategic perfectionist your goal is to create the perfect mousetrap. Except the mouse has moved on in search of other options.
If you are a strategic perfectionist you are enamored with the power of your creative and innovative thinking. You are inwardly focused instead of aligned with the plethora of external links which are critical for business growth, expansion and sustainability.
When you are focused on strategic perfectionism, you won’t stop until everything has been thought of. Everything is in place. Then, in your mind, you will pull the trigger and tell everyone “Go!”
They are already gone, my friend.
You have been so pre-occupied getting all the bits and pieces into place before you call for help, bring in the consultants, purchase capital equipment, you-name-it, that you may have lost opportunities instead of created them.
You are a strategic perfectionist operating in a vacuum.
When you wear the blinders of strategic perfectionism, you aren’t being strategic and visionary. You are creating yet another system of players, roles and pieces that will be moved about the chessboard.
And managed. Not led.
When you are a perfectionist, you are far too focused on process and predictability versus risk and uncertainty.
Strategy is messy work.
If you are a perfectionist you aren’t going to be happy about the untidy aspect of your task. You will constantly be focused on fighting fires and cleaning up all the curve balls that are thrown at your clean and perfect strategy.
Execution of strategy requires a broader bandwidth to your mindset and organizational culture than currently exists. Have you planned a strategy to expand that mindset, starting with your own?
Take a step back from your strategic perfectionist pursuits. Make sure you aren’t simply creating more processes with tasks to be managed.
Strategy requires vision and pro-activity. Strategy means you are creating for anticipated uncertainty (now that’s a thought) of what is far down the road, not in front of your face today.
Strategy requires that you stop, reflect, revise, refocus and potentially alter your plans based on real time information. Strategy is not immutable. It is in a constant state of flux.
Time to take a reality check on your current activities? Have you been focused on strategic perfectionism while your clients have moved their mindset and business elsewhere?
After all, strategy is focused on customers, markets and economies. These objects of your strategic desire aren’t going to wait around for you to get everything “perfect.”
Your strategic perfectionism is based on theory. How about basing it on practical reality?
Babette N. Ten Haken is a management strategist and team-building leadership coach. She helps teams, startups and businesses who wrestle with unpredictable revenue streams. Her Workshops and Playbooks create more productive and profitable teams in healthier organizations. Her Playbook on leadership and business strategies, including tools, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
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