How to Instill Patience: The Key to Sustainable Success

"How do we stick to long-term strategies when stakeholders are looking for short-term results?"

As a leader, maybe you've experienced this within your organization...

You design a great long-term strategy only for people to get impatient and start looking for immediate results. So that long-term strategy gets abandoned far too soon and you and your organization don’t reach your potential because of it.

Here's the thing: From my time serving as CEO at Baker Tilly, I've experienced you don't have to choose between one or the other.

It's possible to achieve sustained success built off long-term strategy execution WITHOUT sacrificing short-term results.

There's a formula to instill patience in your stakeholders so you can execute well-designed strategies that create sustainable success.

Ok, let's back up for a second...

I'm a firm believer in strategy because when defined and executed well, it's the thing that can help your organization BREAK THE MOLD™.

An intentional strategy should define a future state for your organization that exists a number of years out. It provides a framework and a roadmap for where you're headed and informs the decisions you need to make to get there.

(I wrote more about what an effective strategy is ​here​)

Often, the #1 thing that derails organizations from executing great long-term strategies is impatience.

Today, I'll share some proven tactics I've used to instill patience within various stakeholder groups and share how to manage conversations when impatience arises so you can stick to your strategy and reap the benefits.

Let's dive in.

Getting buy-in.

Look, this might sound a little backward, but sometimes the greatest way to instill patience in your stakeholder groups is to be patient yourself.

I recall a time when I wanted to implement an entirely new organizational strategy at Baker Tilly. How long do you think it took me to get buy-in across our leadership team?

A few weeks? A couple of months? 6 months?

Two years.

In other words, don’t expect everyone to take the leap with you just because you present a new strategy.

It takes time for people to understand the nuance of your vision and move past some of their internal roadblocks that are going to get in the way of embracing it.

You're trying to change people's mindsets. That takes time.

I like to call this marinating time.

Just like a good piece of meat tastes better when it's had time to marinate, bringing your strategy to life will have a greater chance of success if you give it time to marinate within your organization.

Explain the thinking behind the strategy, hear people's concerns, and express why you believe this strategy will lead to a desired outcome you can all get behind.

Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up—so let it marinate.

Setting proper expectations.

Nothing destroys a well-designed strategy like misalignment about expectations.

Are all stakeholders clear on:

• What are we trying to accomplish?

• Why is it important we accomplish it?

• What will success look like along the way?

That's the baseline.

Seems simple, right? Well, it is.

And sometimes I find it's so simple that leadership teams skip the simple things in pursuit of more complicated things.

Something else to consider... if you have designed an effective strategy that describes where you are headed three to five years from now, you have to have some conversation about timing.

It's not a one-year strategy for a reason—the desired results aren't going to happen immediately. It’s a strategy, not a plan.

When implementing our new strategy at Baker Tilly, I often had conversations where I reminded people that we were running a marathon, not a sprint. And during a long race like that, there were going to be ups and downs.

People are willing to be more patient when they are aligned on where we're headed and have proper expectations of what it will take to get there.

Creating milestones.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting you should try to convince people they have to wait three to five years to see ANY results.

That's unrealistic and you'll never make it there.

That's where milestones (or plateaus) come in.

These are the short(er)-term indicators that we're making progress toward our long-term goals.

What can we use as evidence that we're headed in the right direction?

Sometimes these are quantitative measures. Often, they are qualitative measures that indicate we're on the right path.

So ask yourself and your leadership team:

What can we agree will be evidence we are making meaningful progress toward our long-term strategy?

Remember: You read a book first page to last page. You run a company last page to first page.

So when determining these milestones, start with the end in mind and define the steps to achieve the end goal.

Without these milestones, you're asking people to follow you down a multi-year journey based on blind faith alone and I can tell you, that's not going to work.

Identify wins along the way so your stakeholders can see evidence of the strategy working.

Managing impatience.

From my experience, you can do everything I've mentioned to this point right and people will still get impatient. It's the hard truth.

When impatience and concerns about the strategy come up (and they will), one of the most helpful exercises is to look at whether it's the strategy or the execution that is lacking.

If we aren't getting short-term results or reaching our milestones, is it the strategy itself that is flawed? Or is the execution of the tactics within the strategy that we're missing the mark on?

Here's something I've found that makes this analysis easier:

You will know your strategy is wrong when your customers, clients, or the marketplace tell you it's wrong. Not when you internally decide it's wrong.

This can come in the form of direct feedback from your customers and clients that your new strategy isn't adding value to them or helping them achieve their desired outcomes.

It can also come from data. Data can be a good indicator because data is objective, people’s opinions and impatience are not.

So, when looking at data and/or feedback from your clients, what is being communicated?

And based on that, what conclusions can you draw about the execution of your strategy and any possible improvements you can make?

Start there.

Summary

1. Get buy-in from your stakeholders by allowing time to marinate.

2. Set proper expectations for what you're trying to accomplish, why it's important, and what it will take to get there.

3. Create interim milestones that will be indicators you're on the right track.

4. Evaluate the execution of the tactics before you assume the strategy isn't working.

What you can do next:

Whether you're a CEO, senior leader, or middle-level manager, think about how these four principles can apply to the future state you are trying to achieve within your organization.

Set aside time this week to do some intentional thinking about where you might be hitting a roadblock or where you might need to adjust your approach.

• Are you trying to rush something into place that is asking people to change a long-standing mindset?

• Is there a conversation you need to have with someone (or a few people) about expectations?

• Are you getting pressure about short-term results because you haven't identified milestones along the way?

• If the pressure is coming internally, do you need to take a look at the execution of the tactics to see where you might be missing the mark or do you have data to support the progress you are making?

Being able to set a vision and execute an intentional strategy is the difference maker between companies that exist in the status quo and those that achieve outsized results.

Learn to navigate the impatience that often accompanies these long-term strategies and you're well on your way to achieving differentiated results.​

With intention,
Alan D Whitman