Most organizations that get serious about strategy do the same thing: they create a Chief Strategy Officer role, hire someone smart and capable, and wait for results.
Most of them are disappointed.
It isn’t a talent problem. It’s a structural one. Look at how the role is typically built, and ask is failure baked in from day one. There may be a disconnect between what is expected from a CSO, and what the CSO is empowered to do. To better understand this issue ask yourself three questions.
Question #1: Is the Role Is Designed to Succeed?
CSO strategy budgets tend to be small, and CSOs often have to persuade the very operating executives they’re supposed to be steering toward NEXT to fund their own initiatives. The person tasked with creating an organization’s future has to lobby the people in charge of its NOW to get resourced. Heinrich & Struggles has done research on the relationship between the CEO, Board and the CSO.
That’s not a leadership failure. That’s a design failure.
A CSO is almost always a line-reporting position, subordinate to a CEO or COO, competing for budget and attention against every operational priority the organization already has in place. When quarterly pressure hits (and it always hits), the strategic function is the first thing that gets de-prioritized, because it has no independent claim on resources and no protected mandate. The organizational chart quietly tells everyone, including the CSO, that the priorities exist in protecting NOW rather than creating NEXT.
Question #2: Is the Priority the Plan or the Strategic Leader?
The focus at Massey Powell is clear: without strategic leadership that has dedicated funding and a substantial degree of autonomy most strategies with get stuck before execution or stall after execution.
Strategy demands empowered leadership to create and execute plans, because plans do not go looking for someone to champion them after they are created, because they are an extension of strategic leadership. Therefore, empowerment isn’t a title and function listed on organizational chart, but a strategic choice made by an organization at the front end before the vision is established and the plan is created. Empowered strategic leadership is not an organization’s “dream-works” where a team thinks about what never was and posits theories to get there, but as a leadership position with a seat at the table with the same importance as finance, marketing and operations.
That’s the piece most organizations get backwards. They treat “strategic leadership” as a role to be filled to manage the strategy that has already been created. Rather than a team that runs on a parallel track creating the organization’s future state. When strategy execution is viewed as management then the strategic leader will be relegated to a chair sitting behind those around the table where decisions are being made. A Deloitte study found that only, “35% of CSOs currently co-lead or own strategic decision-making.”
Question #3: Is Strategy Two Jobs or One?
The executive runs the organization as it exists today. That is a full-time job, and a necessary one as NEXT is being created by the strategic leadership team.
The strategic leader’s job is different: build what’s next, on a parallel track, with the authority and resourcing to make it real rather than aspirational. These jobs require different skills, face different pressures, and work on different time horizons. Asking one person to do both, or creating a structure in which the strategic leader assumes a non-decision making, subordinate role, is setting the stage for your organization to have difficulty achieving NEXT.
This does not mean creating an renegade operation that does its thing without oversight. It means having enough faith in the plan and trust in the team that you are willing to provide a long leash because strategy is rarely executed in a straight line. It also requires an acceptance that there are two distinct roles, of equal importance. to be carried out that in the end will organically merge into the organization new NOW.
Timely and honest reporting to the CEO and Broad is a must. Second guessing and letting fear of failure and reluctance to change guide decisions needs to be avoided. Once the strategy is launched the captain of the ship, CSO, is now in charge. Everyone needs to buy-in to this structure.
The Goal: Creating Strategic Equilibrium
If the CSO model risks failure because of it is internally subordinate, overly scrutinized, and under-resourced by design, the fix isn’t finding a different person to put in that same underpowered seat. It’s building the function differently: with principal-level access, protected mandate, and the autonomy to act as the plan requires and circumstances often dictate. This is strategic balance.
Developing strategic leadership is a decision made at the highest levels of organizations that understand that a plan is not enough to move an organization from NOW to NEXT. They create and maintain the balance that allows them to continue profitable operations until NEXT is created. Strategic Equilibrium is not an accident but rather effective strategy is action.
For associations and mid-market organizations that can’t justify — or afford — a full-time executive strategic leader there are services like mine that fill this gap is strategic capability.
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