A growth mandate is a change mandate
Tensions, technology, and trade are dominating current headlines, but this year started with a unifying proclamation from CEOs across industries: it’s time for growth. From consumer goods to industrials to energy to software, leadership teams started by declaring they want to perform above market with a renewed focus on growth rather than watching the bottom line.
A growth mandate is here, but it feels frustratingly more difficult to achieve. Volatility and the chaotic daily news cycle in the first months of the year don't help. I see the frustration among leadership teams who are determined to drive more this year. I have a frustration of my own: a growth mandate is a change mandate.
Too many teams declare a renewed focus on growth with motivating rallying cries, beautiful charts, detailed market-share analysis, and ambitious targets. But they expect, often implicitly, the existing ways of developing strategy, tracking, reviewing, and executing are going to work. Delivering a breakthrough growth journey means leading a change journey. And change is a hard, non-linear journey that often feels doomed in the middle.
If you want growth, you must be prepared to do the hard work of embracing change in how you develop, execute, and adapt your strategy.
Here are four ways to get started:
1) Methodology of change: Beliefs form strategic choices
Leading growth strategy through uncertainty involves mastering the shift from strategic planning to strategic preparation. Planning continues to serve a critical role in operational efficiency and across areas of your organization where details matter. However, when it comes to strategy, planning is less helpful, as it often assumes linear models, consistency, and optimizing for efficiency.
In preparation mode, we must make decisions based on beliefs rather than waiting for facts to be established. While data remains critical, its key function is to help us test. This is not about forgoing data; data is one input that informs our beliefs. By the time these variables become certain, they are no longer insights as everyone has them.
The foundation of growth strategy is a set of prioritized testable beliefs as these frame your strategic choices that follow. While most teams discuss trends, high-performing teams turn these discussions into a strategic dialogue by articulating their midterm beliefs. Beliefs are not precise predictions, but your stance (or declaration), of how the midterm will play out.
Beliefs are critical, as we need to avoid the trap of jumping from trend to implication. For example, we see possible tariffs (trend) therefore we stockpile inventory (implication). This may be the appropriate choice, but knee-jerk reactions are not strategy. We must also avoid assuming every current trend will form a linear projection. To build your foundation, complete this sentence: We are seeing X [this trend] and we believe Y for the midterm [your team’s belief] which means Z for us [the possible strategic implication].
From here, you have your list of the top, critical, and impactful beliefs. These beliefs force alignment around the opportunity set of the growth opportunities in the market. By prioritizing your top beliefs, you have your critical strategic priorities. More importantly, as you move forward, you will get feedback earlier on if your beliefs are tracking than you will on whether your strategic priorities are tracking. You can view incoming information with this belief filter, “Is this providing more clarity on a belief, challenging it, or is it irrelevant noise?”. Especially when you take a midterm view, much will be the latter.
Setting beliefs gives you the infrastructure to change, as you have a structure to monitor and move faster than others. Communicating your beliefs gives you permission to change, as you now have communicated the signals that will trigger shifts. This communication also means you have recruited testers around the organization who will help assess the situation, respond to changes, and adapt proactively.
**Key shift: Discuss, debate, and align on your strategic beliefs (stances or declarations) on the trends shaping your industry as the starting point of your strategy before articulating choices. Strategic beliefs must be explicit, testable, and linked to choices. Testing them in parallel with execution provides faster feedback than executing a strategy based on shifting market conditions, while also giving us both the infrastructure—and permission—to change.
2) Invite discussion for change: Tracking to plan versus adjusting for changed situations
Our governance, tracking, and review processes often stifle our ability to change. When we gather with our teams to review the strategy, we tend to start with the question, “Are we on track to plan?”.
While I appreciate the sentiment of being on track, starting with this question takes a few assumptions: that there was only one track, that we got it right the first time, and the situation has not changed. These are punchy assumptions to make in any market, but especially right now. Instead, the power question to kick off a review should be, “Has the situation changed?”. This question allows for discussion, invites new insights, and reinforces the criticality of learning in the strategy process.
Starting a meeting with the question, “Are we on track to plan?” also closes off a team’s growth mindset. Team members who may have come armed with new insights and discussion points are now on the back foot and will scramble to justify how they will ‘close the gap’ to plan. They now fear if they attempt to bring new insights; it will look defensive, that they are scrambling to say why the plan is not tracking. Then any new learnings, insights, or adjustments to the strategy will be pushed aside for tactical actions that may provide a short-term boost but rarely have lasting benefits.
Growth means having robust, but efficient, discussions about new learnings and insights that can lead to micro adaptations and adjustments. This conversation necessitates having a clear situational assessment that can be quickly reviewed (that has ideally been tracked with AI-based tools and ask prompts in the background). Having clear beliefs and articulated assumptions, knowing what signals and signposts in the market will validate those beliefs, and tracking these means we have a system to allow for quick, efficient change.
**Key shift: Start strategy review meetings with the question, “Has the situation changed?” versus “Are we on track to plan?” This reinforces a growth mindset across the team, invites new insights and learnings, and reinforces adaptability. But first you need to build a situation assessment to enable this conversation.
3) Empower change in execution: Detailed plans versus intent and boundaries
One of the original growth strategists is a Prussian military general, Helmuth von Moltke (my colleague Stephen Bungay wrote an excellent book on translating his insights into modern practice). Von Moltke challenged conventional military strategy and planning by questioning the traditional approach. He argued that how the generals were rallying the troops was flawed as they were spending days on detailed battle plans, and then even more time communicating these detailed plans to the troops. Which led to his salient insight and oft-paraphrased quote embodying the challenge, when the battle started, “No plan survives beyond first point of contact with the enemy body.”
Surprising things happen in battle, just as customers act independently of our strategic priorities. The real story goes deeper than detailed plans being ineffective in volatile situations. Von Moltke argued that in trying to solve change with more planning, they were getting more detailed, crafting even more caveated plans, which led to his quote, “Detail is the enemy of clarity.” Von Moltke’s point: the more detailed our plans are becoming, the less clarity the troops have as to what matters.
We are doing the same in growth strategies. We craft long and detailed go-to-market plans. Then as we acknowledge things occasionally change, we make these with a hundred caveats and even more footnotes, and then wonder why things are not working. Von Moltke’s knew he could not micromanage battles, just as we cannot micromanage growth strategy. The sage wisdom is that only guidance and clarity are needed for the broader team.
The answer lies in articulating strategy as an intent (finish line) and boundaries (non-negotiables). First, we need absolute clarity of the intent: the main goal we are trying to achieve—what is success. This can be a tight, tangible definition of success, what I call a destination, or more guidance in a direction when facing extreme uncertainty, shifting business models, or disruptive innovations. But the team needs to know what matters most to success, so they can make aligned decisions as they execute towards this finish line.
They also must know the non-negotiables of achieving this. The boundaries are not what you are trying to optimize; the main intent is, but boundaries are critical as they cannot be breached.
This will take your team time to understand. The most important tenets that cannot be breached (cash flow, profit, margin, governance, safety) are the boundaries, not the main intent.
Too often we give our leadership teams strategies that contain contradictions which become obstacles to execution. We give goals to our teams such as “Make $100 million in revenue at 10% profit.” When our direct reports ask what is more important, of course we reply with “Both! Both are important!” Let us say, though, it is the last day of the quarter, and our top salesperson can sign a customer deal that allows us to reach the revenue goal, but doing so will make profitability drop below 10%. When they come into the office on Monday, are they the hero or are they in trouble?
This is an example of strategy not doing its job of enabling people to make good decisions. Instead of providing a framework for decision making, it gives a checklist that not only does not help when it meets the real work; it paralyzes.
Instead, the statement should have been “Make $100 million in revenue within the boundary of 8% profit; the goal is 10%, but the absolute boundary is 8%.” Then, as the salesperson, I know that while I am aiming for 10%, I can go to 8% if I must to reach the main intent. I have just been empowered to make decisions. Without this, I could have made the wrong trade-off, and even more so my colleagues in a different region could have made a different one, with the result that the company would not reach either the profit or revenue goal.
This is the power of boundary conditions: boundaries, when clearly articulated, provide leaders with freedom. If you want to grow through uncertainty, empowering leaders to make good decisions quickly is critical.
**Key shift: Adjust from managing detailed activities and step-by-step plans to articulating clear intent and boundaries and then empower teams to execute towards that intent (finish line) as long as they stay within the boundaries.
4) Recognize and reward change: Performance culture versus growth culture
Many teams seek to build cultures that enable and spur performance with values around discipline, hard work, and GSD (‘get stuff done’).
I get it. I love to just get stuff done, and I love working with entrepreneurial companies who do this as well. But over-focusing on rewarding activity completion takes away from growth, not towards it. In growth strategy, we must commit to the outcomes, not the activities. We work back from impact to outcomes to outputs to activities. This is hard. It is much easier to ask each team member to provide a list of initiatives and goals and let them work towards them. But linear activity planning will, at best, lead to linear growth. For growth strategy, we must focus instead on the impact (change) we are trying to achieve and the outcomes (results) it will take to get there.
Then our job as leaders is to get out of the way and allow our team to execute towards the outcomes while being agnostic about the activities—as long as they stay within their strategic set boundaries.
Who we recognize and reward matters more than any statement or tracking system in reinforcing that we want to be a growth company. Consider how many of your last town halls or employee shout outs were focused on those that worked hard and put in the extra effort. Or did you recognize and reward employees who suggested we stop doing things, who adjusted an activity based on a learning, or who reached a critical outcome in a new way? Who we recognize is the biggest signal of our commitment to growth strategy. It shows you care about outcomes and learning, and that adjusting as you go is great if it gets them to better—faster.
**Key shift: Move the focus on performance at all costs and hitting numbers to delivering growth and learning. Beyond tracking, consider how you will recognize and reward leaders who step up to the growth challenge.
Why this is hard: Time & Trust
Only a few organizations will deliver breakthrough growth as it takes time and trust for growth strategy approaches to be effective.
Executing these four shifts takes time: time to set up the infrastructure, time to build a new capability, and time for leading the necessary change management of executing in a new way. Strategy never feels urgent, which means building strategic capability does not either, so it tends to not get prioritized. And when we need the market results now, we default to known behaviors, even if they are not really working.
Change, especially at this strategic level, is only possible with trust. Trust in your team to adapt to the new structures and execute in new ways. But also trust in the team to deliver the results without constant guidance and micromanagement.
It is hard to trust, especially in a volatile environment. When things are not initially working, we want to lean in with more controls and governance. As leaders, we feel better if we are more in control: we have seen it before, so we feel we know best. But extra controls will not deliver extra growth, partly as they slow us down exactly when we should be speeding up. Growth requires learning and adaptability and trust your team will learn and adapt as needed to grow in new ways.
Not all leaders can deliver a growth strategy, and not all team members have the desire and capability to execute strategy in the way that growth requires. Acknowledge this. Consider if changes need to be made in the team. If trust is not there, growth will not follow, as strategy requires a shift from tracking discipline to trusted empowerment (within boundaries). Trust is the critical ingredient needed for change.
The question is quite simple. If you want to change the what; are you prepared to change the how?
A growth mandate is a change mandate
What will you change to deliver the growth you desire?
