Lou Adler wrote an insightful post for Linkedin recently around the consequences of taking short-term actions without thinking about how those tactics impact one’s longer-term career decisions and positioning.
Of course, making strategic vs. tactical tradeoffs isn’t new, but most people tend to overvalue the short-term benefits, rationalizing, ignoring or minimizing the long-term impact.
Most CFOs and Finance Executives only think about their careers when forced to … they’ve lost a job; they are going to lose a job; or they are desperately unhappy and want to make a move, quickly. The mindset in each of those situations is almost always around executing a short-term strategy to relieve the pain, without thought of the longer-term consequence.
“Your short-term tactics are determining your long-term strategy. You have it backwards. Your strategy needs to drive your tactics.”
Urgent, short-term focused actions are rarely grounded in strategy; rather, they are driven by overwhelm and desperation. Making strategic decisions with tactical information can derail your future career goals – and – leave you dissatisfied while forcing you to jump right back into another short-term tactic known as job search chaos.
The only way to ensure your strategy drives your tactics is to act before you need to act, and then execute those actions consistently and constantly.