The High Cost of Tactics
The mandate of the Chief of Staff (CoS) could not be more important to the success of the business: participating in the executive strategic decision making process, providing insights and data for better and faster decisions, and lending strong leadership skills to empower teams towards successful execution.
It can be very difficult to enjoy the best part of being a CoS because of so many tactical tasks that need to be taken care of, such as:
- Managing the meetings that are designed to craft and advance strategic initiatives;
- Ensuring timely and thorough follow up;
- Creating reports that provide the executive team with relevant and accurate information;
- Enabling continuous collaboration among executives, before, after, and in-between meetings.
If these tasks won’t get done, at the end of the day, the organization’s strategic initiatives will likely be compromised, and the ultimate mandate of bringing vision and mission to life – may not get met.
Why It Can Be So Hard To Get Stuff Done
Yet, even though these tasks are tactical, they can pose a great challenge to the Chief of Staff. They are time consuming and tend to be a logistical nightmare, entailing multiple complexities in having to:
- Get access to all the internal and external data that is relevant to the initiative;
- Collaborate with relevant executives immediately to discuss opportunities and changes without having to wait for the bi-weekly or monthly meeting;
- Change the execution path in real time whenever the data warrants such action;
- Align the executive team around KPIs, action items and decisions in real time;
- Track the impact of decisions for making changes if needed.
All of this is nearly impossible to achieve, because so many different (and limited) tools are required to make it happen, for example: spreadsheets, emails, slide decks, texting, and various other tools .Just coordinating among these tools can be an even bigger time-waster, making them a far cry from the advantageous time-savers they are designed to be.
The Key to Not Getting Bogged Down
The key to getting more strategic, and being less bogged down by the demands of logistics, is to have one solution that centralizes every aspect of what it takes to successfully execute strategic initiatives and:
- Ensuring that everyone on the executive team is communicating and collaborating effectively
- Turning meeting notes into dynamic action items and decisions;
- Enabling everyone with visibility into the internal and external data they need in order to make the right decisions at the right time;
- Driving the agility required to execute initiatives effectively in the face of any change that might arise in the organization or market.
About Planview AdaptiveWork Eagle
Planview AdaptiveWork Eagle is an initiative management platform that optimizes executive collaboration, delivers visibility, and enables the agility required to successfully execute strategic initiatives.
To learn more go to: https://www.clarizen.com/product/clarizen-eagle/.
