CHAPTER 18

What to Do When Strategic Goals Conflict

by Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville

Strategy is the practice of translating your organization’s vision and purpose into a set of specific goals, and then developing plans and actions to achieve them. As such, strategy is all about choices—what to do and what not to do; where to invest and where to pull back; how fast or slowly to proceed; how much risk to take.

On paper, this looks like a rational and straightforward process—just lay out the possible goals and plans, analyze the pros and cons, and make your decisions. The reality, however, is far messier. Sometimes the goals that emerge will require resources and skills that don’t exist on your team; at other times the various goals—each of which makes sense on its own—conflict with each other and can’t all be done. So what do you do?

To strike the right balance, you need an execution strategy. You need to assess carefully how you plan to follow through on the goals—whether that means making adjustments, finding necessary resources, or dropping priorities entirely. This chapter aims to show you how to ask the right questions of strategic goals so you can navigate through strategic tensions and find the right path forward.

Restarting Growth in a Competitive Market

Consider this example: A technology firm with a unique product had grown rapidly in its first 10 years from a startup to a $500 million business, but now it was hitting the wall. Competitors had entered its market, selling similar but lower-quality products at lower prices. To maintain its existing customer base, the technology firm had matched its competitors’ prices, but now margins were shrinking and profitability was being squeezed.

In response to this changing financial landscape, the leadership team conducted a strategic analysis to identify ways of restarting its growth and regaining its place in the market. Three goals emerged:

• To dramatically reduce operating costs, lower prices, and win back market share
• To enhance the core product so that it would be more valuable for customers and therefore command a higher price
• To redirect its sales team toward larger enterprise customers who would pay a premium for quality

Unfortunately, these choices seemed mutually exclusive—or at least difficult to do simultaneously. If costs were significantly reduced, the company wouldn’t have the resources or management bandwidth to focus on product enhancements or new go-to-market approaches. The company also didn’t have the right talent to make these shifts, so it would require new investments, which weren’t available unless the operating costs came down.

After much debate, the leadership team realized that looking at each goal individually was the wrong approach. Instead, they needed to look at each goal as part of a bigger picture. In doing so, they were able to create a path forward that allowed them to take on all three goals, but at different degrees of intensity.

First, they decided to go all-in on cost reduction and aimed to reduce operating expenses by 15% as quickly as possible. They knew that this would be painful and that they would lose some good talent—but they also felt that they had to generate profits that could be reinvested in the other two goals.

At the same time, however, they didn’t want to wait six to twelve months for the product and sales shifts. To get those started, the head of R& D immediately canceled a number of longer-term and more speculative projects, and redeployed some of the engineers to a product-enhancement skunk works team. The team’s specific challenge was to find ways of increasing the value of the company’s technology for its customers and to test the most promising opportunities with several existing customers within three months.

Similarly, while reducing other operating costs, the head of sales asked three of his top performers to talk to a few large, high-end enterprises about their needs and how the company’s technology could be helpful. They aimed to gain insights quickly so they could use that information to form the basis of a pilot go-to-market approach for large enterprises that could be tested in a few months.

Taking these steps did indeed help the company restart its growth, and this example illustrates an important point: The goals that emerge from your strategy should not be implemented piecemeal, but instead need to be considered holistically, as part of an overall execution strategy. If the goals are not part of an integrated plan, they might be pursued in the wrong sequence, cancel each other out, or receive less attention and fewer resources than they require.

Creating a Strategy Around Strategy

Though strategy is usually made at the highest level of a company, many executional choices may fall to you as a middle manager or unit team leader. As you develop the “strategy for the strategy,” you must assess and communicate to senior leaders specific implementation issues related to the choices you’re making, especially since they may not be as close to relevant frontline details as you are.

Voice your perspectives objectively and avoid being seen simply as a “naysayer”; if there are key implementation issues that have surfaced or hidden barriers to overcome, discuss them openly but constructively, suggesting ways to address them. Your goal is to help final decision makers detail an overall solution, ensuring the best possible choices and follow-through of what’s being prioritized and sequenced.

Ask yourself the following questions when you are developing a “conflicting goal” execution strategy:

• Sequencing. Can you work on all of the strategic goals at the same time? If not, what needs to be tackled first? Are there resources or knowledge that can be gained from an early opportunity that could help another objective later? In our technology company case, for example, the team realized that they had to become cost competitive in order to remain financially viable, so changing the underlying operating model was a priority. In addition, the savings generated from this goal could then be reinvested in the other shifts later.
• Bandwidth. How much can you and your team do at once? Do you have the resources to focus on more than one major strategic project at a time? What will it take to keep the current business going while you are driving new strategic initiatives? In the example, the team at the technology firm decided that they didn’t have either the resources or the management attention to do everything. But they could proceed on a couple of the goals if they carved them down to a much smaller scale, leading them to create a technology skunk works team and begin focused dialogue with potential higher-end customers.
• Talent. Do you have people in place that have the skills and know-how to move into new strategic territory? Will you need to hire new people or train existing staff? What’s the extent of this investment, and how will it be integrated with the current team? Assess what your team or department brings to the strategy, and fill in any missing pieces. In the technology company, the leadership team realized that the main talent deficit was probably in the sales area, since high-end selling requires more of a consultative approach, which was not in their wheelhouse. But before hiring new people or training current ones (both of which can be costly), they decided to learn more about these customers so that their eventual investment would have a better chance of success.
• Conflict resolution and rebalancing. If the market or our resources change during planning, should our original assumptions about how to compete still prevail? Have our investigations suggested specific learnings that would substantially alter those assumptions? Are there serious disagreements between key stakeholders about the execution strategy? What’s the root cause of the opposition? Are skeptical colleagues raising legitimate concerns that might call for refashioning the way forward? Even with a clear framework for allocating resources to complementary strategic initiatives, market changes, learning, and (let’s be honest) human disagreements may crop up. Work to resolve these conflicts, and be ready to rebalance initiatives if the conditions warrant it.

Considering these points will help you create a clear execution strategy to meet multiple objectives. Of course, no strategic plan remains static. As you move forward on the early initiatives, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t, and what assumptions might need to be changed. You’ll start to see whether early pilots need to be reconfigured, or what it will take to scale them. You’ll better understand what your people are capable of doing, and where they will need help. You’ll assess further investments and when to make them. And as you do all of this, you’ll continue to massage and adjust the overall framework based on everything you learn.

Strategic analysis and thinking almost always lead to a number of different goals, some of which might seem incompatible with others. Putting them together into an integrated implementation framework gives you a way of moving them forward, and learning as you go.

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Ron Ashkenas is an Emeritus Partner with Schaffer Consulting, a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, and the author or coauthor of four books on organizational transformation. He has worked with hundreds of managers over the years to help them translate strategy into action. Brook Manville is Principal of Brook Manville, LLC, a consultancy focused on strategy, organizational development, and executive leadership. A former partner of McKinsey & Company, he is a regular writer on leadership topics and coauthor of two books with Harvard Business Review Press. They are the coauthors of Harvard Business Review Leader’s Handbook (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). This article is based on research for that book.