Strategic Thinking Under Pressure
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
By Jason Quint
As an EOS Implementer and business coach working with middle market companies high stakes decisions don’t come down to judgement or experience, they are often a test of identity. All of the fancy business books talk about mission and vision but the missing piece is often how do those things get used in the every day real world? It is when the stakes are high and the pressure is on that we can look to those ideals to help us stay on the path we laid out, and here’s the important part, during a time of peace (because business is war!)
If your team has put that work in and they’ve spent time figuring out what their core focus is, who their ideal customer is? What are our their long term goals?
What makes them unique in the market? If you and your leadership team have labored over these questions and are in lock step agreement with the answers. It’s easier to stay calm because you have the frame work, you know what the puzzle is supposed to look like. So then with that framework, it’s much easier to figure out if this opportunity into our puzzle.
We only know if it fits because we have a well defined framework and the level of stress has an inverse relationship to the amount confidence we have in that framework. Using the puzzle analogy, if we have a mess of pieces on the board, how can we possibly know if this new thing belongs or not? And that is where the stress enters. That’s where bad decisions can be made and that’s where pressure amplifies the risk.
I’ve often heard it said that you can measure the quality of a leader by their ability to make good decisions with incomplete information and it reasons to stand that then the better the leader the less information is required to still make a good decision.
By spending time figuring out these core tenets of your business you gain an advantage, a head start. While your competition feels the pressure which can lead to a wrong decision, your team remains grounded and confident because you’ve built a solid foundation to make those high stakes decisions.
Clear values and a well defined long term vision act as a filter. They help leaders quickly eliminate options that don’t fit, even if those options look exciting, profitable, or urgent. Without that filter, leadership teams can allow themselves to be distracted from their stated goals and taken on road trips down long dark rabbit holes which ultimate leads to stalled growth and potentially business failure.
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