Lead with Clarity: Why Your Strategic Plan Doesn’t Require Certainty
Leadership is a Balancing Act
Leadership requires navigating through a wide range of circumstances. You will navigate days where you experience unexpected wins or open doors, projects that outperform expectations, and appreciation from places you did not expect. On the other hand, you will also have weeks where nothing seems to go right, times when a critical employee unexpectedly resigns, or face external circumstances that could not have been projected in your budget or strategic plans. If you are in a position of directing others for long enough, whether formally or informally, you will eventually be faced with almost all of these circumstances. And, in between all of these situations, you will be expected to cast vision, develop plans to grow the organization, and create forward momentum. Leading an organization is not an easy task, but the reward on the other side is growth, improvement, profitability, and impact. Even marginal shifts are meaningful.
Yet, to do this well, there is a conundrum all leaders experience. It is the balancing act between leading with clarity and leading with certainty. Both require a dose of courage. If all went right all the time, you would not need courage. Diagnosing if you have fallen off balance into one or the other is not easy in the midst of strategic plans and piles of unanticipated tasks. What does each look like in practice – in the context of daily life?
If you lead with a counterfeit version of clarity, your efforts may fail because they were based in untested assumptions and rosy optimism. Yet, if you lead while waiting too long for certainty, you risk never moving forward, or lose the ability to course correct if you do because so much has been invested into planning.
Leading with Clarity
To lead with clarity means you have taken the time to develop a plan. Not just a concept, but a rigorous, well tested plan. Clarity means developing the concept or application before the opportunity fully appears. There are opportunities, both planned and unplanned, that force organizations to get the level of clarity they need. Those look like a pitch to a potential funder, a critical meeting with a stakeholder, an application for a federal contract – the type of moments where the ability to explain your plan becomes critical. Without those moments forcing structure, many objectives remain concept level; potentially a thoughtful concept that connects to broader, longer-term strategic goals. Yet, despite how well-thought through, the data is missing. That data lives in community conversations, market research, internal stakeholder meetings, stress-testing concepts with team members not yet on board with the idea, running the numbers, creating projections, and setting aside real budget. Unless you are a CFO, you might not enjoy this work. Excitement, vision, and concepts can get mistaken for clarity unless you are willing to be honest with yourself. If you cannot yet answer a granular question about a project, you might not yet have clarity. To build clarity, be willing to subject your project to hard and specific questions. It may be slower, but is more thorough and often creates more sustainable results.
More certainty can be created from clear planning – you have taken the time to refine and test your ideas. Solid data allows you to act with an even stronger sense of direction. It creates confidence. However, desiring control can become the hidden motivation behind planning with certainty. And this is when certainty can become a barrier of its own.
Leading with Certainty
Leading with certainty is often the counterbalance to the clarity equation. Certainty means you have all your plans organized and in order. When someone leads with the certainty in mind, they want to see thorough scenario planning, questions answered, funding identified, and clear decision trees to determine the next right move. The need for certainty can keep some leaders from moving forward until circumstances seem aligned. The pitfall is that certainty can sometimes be fear, insecurity, and the need for confidence dressed up as risk management and due diligence.
When a leader does not move forward, their actions are described as ‘analysis paralysis.’ This shows up when something takes way too long to move forward, because it sits for so long in planning and research phases. We know this when we see someone else doing it, but it happens for good reason. Leaders are accountable to a whole faction of stakeholders – from organization boards to payroll demands, and customers or constituents. They need to answer for bad decisions, and jumping in to an initiative without data is a good way to have blame placed on your shoulders when something goes wrong. Even with clarity, projects can stall. That is what happens here. To evaluate whether you are leading with certainty – ask yourself whether you have made promises about a timeline that keep getting pushed back, or whether you have an external party waiting for you to move something forward. If you do, it may be a sign you are sitting on data in fear.
Diagnosing the Causes
Understanding why either scenario happens can be helpful in recognizing the behaviors when they happen. These tendencies are often situational and contextual, although personal temperament can lend itself to a predetermined way of tackling new problems. Organization structure and process requirements can contribute to the circumstances in which a leader will have a preferred project planning style. Leaders in any type of organization can teeter between either pitfall.
Leading without clarity can sometimes be the default in smaller, scrappy organizations without layers of team members to execute planning stages on top of current responsibilities. It might even be described as ‘faith’ or ‘taking action.’
Similarly, leading with certainty can become standard operating procedure in larger organizations (sometimes literally living in an SOP). Large, visible organizations have more complexity and public exposure, and certainty and bureaucracy can overlap. Layers of approval and buy-in have to happen before a project moves in a meaningful way.
If you recognize either of these traps in yourself of your organization, you are not alone. Either mode of decision-making feels like the right thing to do when you are in the moment. The world is complex, and good business requires flexibility and responsiveness. The goal in maintaining this balancing act is to build thoughtful, rigorous plans that move forward, and are designed for sustainability. Sustainability looks different in every organization. With a small team, sustainability may look more like an initiative that does not overwhelm or deprioritize other important areas of focus. In a larger organization, this may look like the long process of breaking silos and building project awareness. In either situation, it looks like a project that has a clear system or pathway to progress that can be adopted by others after proper training.
How Leaders Move Forward
Discernment is wisdom. It is the key to maintaining the right balance between clarity and certainty. First identify whether you have ‘shiny object syndrome.’ Plans collapse simply when organizations try to do too much and lose sight of core business strategies that move work forward. Once you are clear your next initiative is not merely a distraction, take the following three factors into account when you are building your plan toward your next strategic goal.
First, identify realistic timelines for what you intend to accomplish. Contingencies are a good idea, so start mapping your workflow out in reverse before you begin. Take into account everything else going on in the organization, plus the room for the unexpected. Examine both the potential macroenvironmental shifts – the economy and social context – as well as the unplanned internals – the key employee who ends up on medical leave or the product launch that demanded more resources than anticipated. Most solid efforts take longer than expected. As humans, we tend to plan for circumstances as if no one will make new demands on our time and resources. Talk to the people who will be executing. Build a timeline that makes sense. If the project will take longer than planned, and no longer seems appealing by the date of the new finish line, it might be a sign to re-evaluate. If you are good with the new end date, it is time to get to work.
Second, build in processes for steady movement. Bursts of enthusiasm can build early momentum, but most lasting efforts are built through consistency. Realistic timelines may mean your project is not done in a few months, so consider what the necessary actions are that will keep objectives from stalling once the excitement for the work wanes. The process you need to move forward could include the research and strategy work needed to achieve clarity. Your systems can also be simple. A regular meeting on the calendar. A multi-step project with micro-goals built in weekly. A minimum number of outreach touches to stakeholders. Steady and consistent often beats energy.
Finally, pressure test your plan against stakeholder perspective. Companies are frequently cautious about announcing ideas too early. However, early engagement with people impacted by a project provides critical feedback. This can be done selectively, through internal and external conversations. Some of this perspective can be collected generally, through understanding what people think about a concept in the broader sense. The perspective you collect should also be grounded in change management. Some stakeholders will never like a new idea because it involves change, which can feel like disruption. However, stakeholder perspective should never be skipped just because of what it may uncover. Going through this process offers valuable feedback that can be both time and money saving for an organization, and may uncover some new innovative angles that had not been evaluated.
Leadership requires discernment. It is a juggling act between planning and action, evaluating and moving, and getting buy-in and taking a risk, and knowing what the moment calls for. If you are in the leadership seat, chances are you have faced the battle between clarity and certainty. Certainty is not what you are looking for. The call is for action with clarity – the kind that is courageous but thoughtful, and connected to the bigger picture through precision without excuses.
