‘It needs to be something you live and breathe’: How to set a strategic direction for your team

Daily check-ins and close contact with the work are not always possible for engineering managers – especially those working with large or remote teams. It is nonetheless vital for them to set a strategic direction.

An upcoming IMechE training course, Senior Engineering Manager, is designed to develop strategic leadership capabilities and help you work more effectively and efficiently. Running in London from 3-4 September, the programme is for existing line managers who want to take their skills to the next level.

Penny Taylor is one of the course trainers. Here, she gives four tips to help you set a strategic direction.

Set your vision

The first thing to bear in mind when setting your strategic direction is that long-term thinking is key. It’s very easy for managers to get sucked into weekly or even daily ‘To Do’ lists, but what they need to be doing is thinking six months or 12 months ahead: “How are things going to be different? What are the longer term actions that we need to be taking, rather than just being stuck in the weeds of short termism?”

One of the key failures I see is that managers don’t stick with the long-term thinking.

Invite input

You need to communicate what that vision looks like, but there should also be opportunities for others to have some kind of input. You might say to the team, “This is the outline of where I think we need to be. Help me put some detail behind it.” That way, they feel some ownership rather than it being imposed from above.

Make the strategy visible

Once we’ve refined it and got a strategy that we’re happy with, and the team is going to work towards it, the next thing is making sure that its visible and reiterated at every opportunity. If you can boil it down to a pithy phrase, that’s what I want on the wall. It's not just something we talk about as a meeting on a Monday morning and then we put it away in our desk drawer and forget about it.

At the factory that I used to run, for example, we had it up on the wall in reception, we had it as a screensaver and it was on the agenda for meetings, so that when people made decisions it was there in front of them, to help them make a decision that aligned with the bigger direction.

If a member of the team has a decision to make about what project to focus on, the strategy should help them prioritise. It needs to be something that we live and breathe, not something that we file and forget.

Review regularly

The final bit, which sometimes people forget to do, is to review and update it regularly. Set time aside, maybe every three months or every six months, to ask “Are we still on course, do we need to start looking a bit longer term? Are there other things we need to be changing?” The strategy then dictates where we put our budget, and our effort.

Let's say you were hugely ambitious in your strategy: “In six months’ time, we're going to have taken over the world.” Three months down the line, you might realise “We’re not even halfway there – perhaps it was too ambitious.” Rather than being hugely ambitious, which risks becoming demotivating because it is unachievable, we need to review it and make it more manageable.

IMechE's Senior Engineering Manager course runs in London from 3-4 September. Find out more and book on the IMechE training page.