You Don't Have to Win Every Event: A Lesson in Strategic Priorities
Updated: Aug 18
You Don't Have To Win Every Event: A Lesson In Strategic Priorities
What Kate O’Connor’s European heptathlon gold teaches Business Leaders about strategic priorities, resource allocation and overall performance.
Ireland’s athletes gave us another memorable week at the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham, returning with four medals and performances that once again demonstrated our ability to compete well beyond what the size of the country might suggest.
For business leaders, the heptathlon offers a particularly interesting comparison.
Seven events. Different disciplines. Different physical and technical demands. Every result contributes to the final score, but success does not depend on winning every event. It depends on producing the strongest overall performance.
The same is true in business.
Leadership teams are effectively competing in several events at once: growth, profitability, cash flow, customer experience, employee engagement, technology, risk and long-term value creation. Every one of them matters. But no organisation can give each of them maximum capital, resources and leadership attention at the same time.
The real discipline of strategy is knowing where winning matters most.
If Everything Is Important, Nothing Is Important
One of the most common mistakes I see in leadership teams is treating every worthwhile initiative as a strategic priority.
The problem is rarely a shortage of good ideas. More often, it is an excess of them.
A new market may offer growth. A technology project may improve the customer experience. An acquisition could add scale. A recruitment programme might strengthen capability. Each proposal may be credible and supported by a persuasive business case.
But capital is finite. Leadership bandwidth is finite. Organisational capacity is finite.
When everything appears important, the issue often comes back to a lack of clarity about the overall vision.
Without a shared destination, it becomes difficult to assess whether an initiative represents genuine strategic progress or simply another attractive opportunity. Different functions pursue different definitions of success, resources are spread too thinly and the organisation becomes extremely busy without necessarily moving forward.
As the saying goes: if everything is important, nothing is important.
The CEO, board and management team must therefore agree on some fundamental questions:
Why do we exist?
Who do we serve?
What sets us apart from our competitors?
Where are the greatest opportunities?
What is our agreed destination?
Once those answers are clear, strategic choices become easier. The board, management team and employees begin working towards the same goal. Culture, values and commercial ambition reinforce one another. Decisions about investment, recruitment, reward and retention can all be assessed against a common purpose.
Clarity creates alignment and alignment creates momentum.
How Should Business Leaders Prioritise Strategic Investments
Business leaders should prioritise strategic investments according to their alignment with the overall goal, stakeholder value, resource requirements, expected return and relative attractiveness compared with alternative opportunities.
In my experience of leading multiple strategies across Group businesses, the most difficult decisions were rarely between a good proposal and a bad one.
They were usually choices between several credible opportunities competing for the same capital, people and leadership attention.
To bring discipline to those decisions, I used five questions:
Are we doing the right thing? Ethically, and regardless of profit, does this positively serve our customers, employees, and other stakeholders?
Does this initiative bring us closer to our overall strategic goal?
What capital and resources will it require and are they available?
What return can we reasonably expect, and does it meet our minimum investment requirements?
Are the proposed timelines acceptable, and does the opportunity compare favourably with the alternatives available to us?
The first question was non-negotiable. If we could not ethically stand over the decision, regardless of its potential profitability, we did not proceed.
A “no” to one of the remaining questions did not necessarily mean the initiative was permanently rejected. It might need to be redesigned, reduced in scope, delayed or sequenced differently before being reconsidered.
Only when we could answer yes to all five questions would we recommend proceeding, seek board approval and allocate the capital and resources required to execute the plan.
This is an important distinction. Strategy is not simply a process for deciding whether an idea has merit. It is about determining whether the initiative is right, aligned with the overall goal and the best use of the organisation’s resources at that particular time.
Like the heptathlete, leaders must consider the overall score.
Fair Allocation Is Not Always Effective Allocation
There can be a natural tendency to distribute resources evenly across businesses, functions or strategic initiatives. It feels balanced and avoids difficult conversations.
But equal allocation is not necessarily strategic allocation.
Different businesses may operate in different markets, possess different competitive strengths or be at different stages of maturity. Some initiatives may offer significant growth potential. Others may be essential to protecting the existing business. Some capabilities must lead the market, while others simply need to meet an appropriate standard.
This means leaders must distinguish between:
Areas where the business must win.
Areas where it must remain strongly competitive.
Areas that should be maintained, monitored or improved over time.
Every part of the business remains important. But not every part offers the same opportunity to create value from the next euro invested or the next hour of leadership attention.
The responsibility of the leadership team is to optimise the performance of the whole enterprise, not to maximise every individual part independently.
When Should A Business Adapt Its Strategy?
A business should adapt its strategy when the evidence shows that its underlying assumptions, market conditions or competitive environment have materially changed. The destination may remain the same, but leaders must be willing to change the route, pace or allocation of resources required to reach it.
My understanding of strategy changed during my time as a CEO.
I once thought of strategy primarily as a roadmap: establish the destination, define the route and execute the plan. Over time, I came to see that strategy must be more dynamic.
A five-year plan remains important. It creates direction, aligns investment and gives stakeholders confidence about where the business is going. But no five-year plan can accurately predict changes in competition, customer behaviour, technology, innovation, regulation or geopolitics.
The destination may remain valid while the route changes significantly.
In 2018, we developed mySherryFitz with a clear customer objective: to give buyers and vendors greater transparency, increase the speed of property transactions and create a more seamless experience through technology.
Then COVID arrived.
The original strategic objective had not anticipated a global pandemic or the closure of more than 100 retail offices. However, the capability we had created allowed employees to work remotely, conduct virtual property viewings, accept offers online and continue completing transactions during lockdown.
More than 1,000 properties were sold during the first three-month lockdown period.
The strategy had not predicted the crisis. It had created the capability to respond to it.
That experience reinforced an important lesson for me:
A strong strategy should provide clarity about the destination without creating rigidity about how you get there.
The organisations that adapt best are not necessarily those that abandon their plans fastest. They are those that understand which parts of the strategy are fundamental and which parts must change when the evidence changes.
Conviction or Stubbornness?
Adaptability does not mean changing direction every time performance disappoints.
Poor periods occur in every business. The leadership challenge is determining whether an underperformance is temporary, an execution problem or evidence of a more permanent market or competitive shift.
I have always believed in an ethos of “no surprises”.
Regular performance reviews and honest conversations with senior management help identify problems before they become larger issues. The first priority is to understand what is happening rather than rush towards a solution.
Are the assumptions behind the strategy still valid?
Has customer behaviour changed?
Is the market moving temporarily or structurally?
Is the problem the strategy itself or our execution of it?
What action is now required?
Conviction means remaining committed while the underlying strategic assumptions remain sound. Stubbornness is remaining committed after the evidence has materially changed.
Leaders need the discipline to know the difference.
Why Leadership Bandwidth Limits Business Growth
Leadership bandwidth can constrain growth just as much as capital because strategic initiatives create additional demands without removing the responsibilities of running the existing business. A growth plan is not fully resourced unless the leadership team has the capacity, support and incentives required to execute it successfully.
Capital is an obvious constraint, particularly in transactional or seasonal businesses. Strategic investments must remain affordable, even where the potential return is attractive. Leadership bandwidth can be equally scarce and is often less carefully measured.
The day-to-day demands on a senior management team do not disappear when the organisation begins an acquisition, transformation or major growth programme. Due diligence requests arrive. Deadlines tighten. Operational and strategic priorities begin competing for the same people.
Business leaders need to anticipate that pressure.
This may require additional support, clearer decision rights, revised responsibilities or reward structures designed to motivate and retain key employees during demanding periods of strategic growth.
A plan that is financially funded but organisationally under-resourced is not fully funded.
The Overall Result Matters
A heptathlete cannot prepare for seven events as though each were the only event. Every discipline matters, but strengths, improvement opportunities, recovery and the overall points objective influence how preparation is managed.
Business leaders face the same underlying choice.
You do not have to win every event. But you must understand which events matter most, where your organisation possesses a genuine advantage and where scarce resources will produce the greatest overall return.
That requires clarity about the destination, momentum through aligned execution and the ability to adapt when circumstances change.
The individual initiatives produce the scores. The combined performance determines the result.
At Stratavera, we help business owners and leadership teams establish clear strategic priorities, align resources behind them and create the momentum required to deliver sustainable results.
The question for every leadership team is simple:
If everything in your business is still described as a priority, have you really made a strategic choice?
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