First-Time Leader: Foundational Tools for Inspiring and Enabling Your New Team

CHAPTER 6

ATTITUDE: MAKE CRUCIAL CHOICES AROUND YOUR TEAM’S STRATEGY, POSTURE, AND CULTURE

This chapter gets at the critical choices driving how first-time leaders and their teams will win—strategy, posture, and culture. Like your mission, vision, and values, these need to form a coherent direction.

STRATEGY

At its core, strategy is about generating and selecting options to close gaps between objectives and current realities. It is about the creation and allocation of resources to the right place, in the right way, at the right time, over time that bring to fruition your mission, vision, objectives, and goals while maintaining values.

Your task as the leader is to lead the team in creating and selecting the most effective set of strategic options that will get you from your current reality to your desired destination. In addition to the gap between where you are and where you want to be there will most likely be some barriers keeping that gap in place. Your strategy should guide the actions that your team takes to bridge that gap and eliminate those barriers.

Michael Porter suggests that almost any industry’s value chain includes design, produce, sell, deliver, and support. A big part of strategy is identifying and playing to the organization’s unique strengths relative to its competitors at one point on the value chain.

Innovation Follow-Through—Richard Branson

Richard Branson has achieved remarkable success taking the Virgin brand into industries “out of frustration” with existing ...