What If the Only Strategy You Needed Was the Strategy of Being You?
What If the Only Strategy You Needed Was the Strategy of Being You?
I’ve spent a lot of my working life around strategy. Business strategy, transformation strategy, people strategy and plans for getting from where we are now to somewhere we’ve decided we want to be. I like strategy. There is something very satisfying about understanding where you are, deciding where you want to go and working out how you might get there.
But over the years, particularly through my work with women in business, I’ve become interested in something that tends to happen before any of that. We go looking for the strategy. Not necessarily our strategy, but the strategy: the business model that works, the marketing method that gets results, the right way to sell, grow or show up online. We look at somebody who has created something we want and quite naturally ask, How did she do it?
There’s nothing wrong with learning from other people. I’ve learnt an enormous amount that way. We don’t need to reinvent everything for ourselves, and sometimes somebody else’s experience can save us years of trial and error. The problem begins when we confuse somebody else’s successful strategy with a formula for our own success.
What works for her might not work for you
I’ve seen this repeatedly in business. Someone discovers a way of doing something that works brilliantly for them. They package it, teach it and show other people how to do the same thing. Some people get fabulous results. Others don’t.
Those who don’t can very quickly conclude that they are the problem. Perhaps they didn’t implement it properly. They weren’t disciplined enough. They weren’t consistent enough. They didn't follow the process closely enough. There can be a long list of reasons why we decide we have somehow failed to make the strategy work.
But perhaps there is another possibility. Perhaps it simply wasn’t our way.
A business strategy isn’t being implemented by a blank sheet of paper. There is a human being in the middle of it: a person with her own strengths, preferences, experiences, responsibilities, values, ways of communicating, tolerance for risk and definition of what she actually wants from her life. What works beautifully for one person may require another to spend most of her working life operating in ways that simply don’t suit her.
Take the human being out of business strategy and we miss rather a lot.
We learn how we’re supposed to do business
Of course, this starts long before we create a business. From an early age, we learn how things are done. We learn what makes us successful at school, at work and within the different groups and environments we find ourselves in. We learn what gets rewarded, what gets approval and what is expected of us.
Some of those lessons are enormously useful. Others become rules we never consciously chose. By the time we start a business, we can have quite a collection of them, alongside all the new rules we encounter about what a successful business owner is supposed to do.
A serious business should look like this. You need to be visible. You need to post consistently. You need multiple income streams. You need to build a team. You need to network. You need to scale. You need to be on the right platforms, use the right systems and follow whatever particular method happens to be fashionable in business at the time.
Some of that advice may be excellent. The question is whether it is excellent for you.
That is the question I think we often forget to ask. We can become so busy trying to implement the recommended way of doing something that we don’t stop to notice what it is actually creating in our business or our life.
Knowing yourself changes the questions
Self-awareness has always sat at the heart of The Minerva Manifesto, but I’m not particularly interested in self-awareness as an intellectual exercise. Understanding ourselves can be fascinating, but knowing something about ourselves and then continuing to organise our lives in exactly the same way doesn’t necessarily change very much.
The value comes from what we do with what we know. If I know I do my best thinking in a particular environment, does my working life reflect that? If I know I communicate particularly well in one way and find another exhausting, why would I build my marketing around the second one? If I know I value spaciousness, why would I create a diary that is permanently full?
And if I say that enjoying my life matters to me, does the business I am creating actually leave room for one?
These are not simply questions about personal preference. They are business questions. How we work affects what we can sustain. How we communicate affects how we market and sell. What we value affects the offers we create, the customers we choose, the prices we charge and the way we spend our time. Understanding ourselves starts to become very practical indeed.
The who comes before the how
Business conversations tend to become very interested in how. How will you find customers? How will you make money? How will you deliver this? How will you grow? They are important questions, and any commercially viable business eventually has to answer them.
But I’ve become increasingly interested in putting who before how. Who are you when you’re working at your best? What kind of work brings something alive in you? Where do you think clearly? Who do you enjoy working with? What do you naturally contribute? What do you want your working days to contain? Why does this business matter to you in the first place?
Then we can start asking how.
Because the answers begin to give us clues about the structure of a business that might actually fit the person creating it. They can influence the offers we design, the way we communicate, where we work, who we work with, how much interaction we want and even how we choose to grow.
The who doesn’t replace commercial strategy. It informs it.
A supportive structure shouldn’t require you to become somebody else
None of this means we only do things that feel comfortable. Business will stretch us. We’ll have to learn things we don’t know, make decisions we would rather avoid and occasionally do jobs we don’t particularly enjoy. Sometimes commercial reality requires us to operate differently from the way we might naturally prefer.
That’s business.
But I think there is a difference between stretching ourselves and constructing an entire working life that requires us to continually override ourselves. We can become very successful at performing the role of the person we think a business needs while gradually moving further away from the person we actually are.
I've done enough of the latter to know the difference.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve become much less interested in finding the perfect business formula. I’d rather understand the person first and then look at the business. What are we trying to create? What does it need to earn? How do we want to spend our time? What are we particularly good at? Where do we need support? What structure would allow both the business and the person running it to work well?
Suddenly strategy becomes much more individual.
The strategy of being you
Perhaps this is what I mean by the strategy of being you. It isn’t about refusing advice or deciding that everything should revolve around our preferences. Nor is it an excuse to avoid the things that running a viable business requires. It is about recognising that we are part of the business we’re designing.
Our way of working matters. Our values matter. Our circumstances matter. How we communicate matters. What we want our money to make possible matters. And the life we want to have while we’re creating all of this matters too.
That’s very Minerva for me. Do Business. Make Money. Enjoy Life. Not according to somebody else’s formula for what those things should look like, but with enough awareness of ourselves to make conscious choices about what they mean for us.
There will always be other people willing to tell us how they achieved success. Some of what they share may be incredibly useful. I don’t think the answer is to stop listening. I think it is to become more discerning about what we take with us.
So perhaps the next time you find yourself wondering, How am I supposed to do this?, there is another question worth asking first:
If I stopped trying to do this like everybody else, how would I choose to do it as me?
Explore The Journey
The Journey is an invitation to become more curious about yourself, the choices you’re making and what you actually want from your business, your money and your life.
