There are four leadership roles that I have found to be useful energizing a strategic initiative. I organized them into the LIDS acronym to help you remember them: story, learning, integration, and decisions. Each of these roles provides a unique and valuable perspective that facilitates turning vision into results.

Strategic initiatives are a unique subset of all programs characterized by high ambiguity and the intention to transform the organization’s business model.  The program manager of a strategic initiative does more than simply manage a portfolio of projects; he/she must tap into an unconventional set of leadership ideas.  The four LIDS roles provide helpful insights.

Chief Storyteller

Stories are a universally understood and appealing method for organizing thinking and persuading others. You can weave a lot of information into the telling AND you also arouse your listener’s emotions and energy. Peter Guber (former CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group) explains,

“Storytelling can be used to get people’s help in carrying out your goals and ultimately to inspire business success. For the leader, storytelling is action oriented, a force for turning dreams into goals and then into results.”

Chief Learning Officer

This role is concerned with identifying unknowns and taking action to fill knowledge gaps, and transferring learning across the team (One definition of teams is that they are groups of people who learn together). The job of the leader is to create a constructive environment for learning. The mantra is this: the faster that the team can identify unknowns, the faster the program will progress.

As I have discussed in other posts, strategic thinking is largely about the mastery of ambiguity.  People avoid ambiguity, and substitute assumptions for asking questions. I have been successful with getting teams unstuck with this question,

What don’t we know, and how can we find it out?

Chief Integration Officer

Leaders fit the strategic initiative and its outcomes within the larger organizational, political, and social context. The leader needs have the capability to see the components as well as the unified whole. In this role, you are continually looking for connections and relationships between elements. You need to relentlessly focus on the fit and function of all elements of the program. Here is a tip,

Pay attention to interfaces because most failure occurs at the interface.  Interfaces are not readily apparent and out of most people’s comfort zone.

Chief Decision Architect

This role is concerned with the quality of decision making in the execution of the strategic initiative. The leader’s guiding principle as Chief Decision Architect is this simple guiding principle: Fast and effective decisions lead to fast and quality results.

How can we speed up decisions? One suggestion is to place “decisions to be made” at the top of your meeting agenda.

Application of the Four LIDS Roles to Interpreting Strategy Documents

I have written a series of articles on how to interpret strategy documents.  You could also use each of the four LIDS perspectives to enhance the understanding. For example,

• You could see the new strategy and vision as part of a longer narrative arc for the organization.  Some values and capabilities with remain, but others will propel the story forward.
• The document contains much information that needs to be learned.  However, it is not complete and there are many more unknowns that you need to systematically discover.
• Strategies are composed of different levels of functional, business, and enterprise strategies. There are often several portfolios.  All will benefit from an integrated view.
• Strategy formulation represents decisions and commitments, but there are considerably more decisions that have to be made in execution.

Here is another application of the L.I.D.S. leadership roles. Suppose a program manager is floundering. How could each role provide useful perspectives?

Related articles

• Strategic Thinking (Part 2): Framing Decisions with the Four Types of Ambiguity to (leadingstrategicinitiatives.wordpress.com)
• Vice President, Director, Manager of Strategic Initiatives: Position Description Best Practices (leadingstrategicinitiatives.wordpress.com)
• Path Finding and Way Finding (leadingstrategicinitiatives.wordpress.com)

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