Being an executive, technical or otherwise, is about balance. How do you balance your focus on the Tactics vs. Strategy? Being good at tactical execution is likely how you got the job where you handle both tactics and strategy. Tactical tasks will feel comfortable and straightforward. They are also brutally important. Tactics is how you achieve strategy. However, growth and success rely on solid strategy, therefore neglecting strategy in favor of tactics is missing the forest for the trees. One approach to help draw yourself up into strategy is to make it a part of your process. You should block time in your calendar specifically for working on strategic problems. Ask yourself questions about the future and seek to answer them. For example, if our company makes another 25% in revenue per year in two years, what processes do I need to implement now to support that.
Another important related form of balance is short-term objectives vs long-term goals. Incentives skew towards the former, but a healthy company must invest in the latter. We might want to eschew software tests in order to ship a feature, however too much of this and suddenly our application has low-to-no test coverage. Our public company may do unnatural things to meet quarterly reporting requirements. Enough of these unnatural actions and our company has rotted from the inside out. Itâs important to consider that you and your team will often be incentivized to ignore the long term. This is the path of least resistance and is only sustainable if your horizons are short. Ignoring the long term is the executive equivalent of failing to pay your credit card bills.
One of the important factors in this process is that the balance for anyone factor will shift and change with the circumstance. So additionally the manager has to re-adapt and revisit their prior balance making choices.