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When the Mayflower left for the New World, Captain Christopher Jones had an objective: Safe passage for his paying passengers. He also had a strategy to support that objective, and tactics for his crew to achieve it. Unfortunately for Jones, it wasn't all smooth sailing. His original destination was Virginia, but bad weather forced his ship off course by some 700 miles. Despite the change in travel plans, Jones did achieve his goal. However, in the face of that bad weather, he likely had to adjust his strategy to ensure the safety of his ship–and his passengers. Like Captain Jones, good leaders know that the journey toward a specific objective is often fraught with changing conditions that threaten to blow an organization off course. And, good leaders also know that achieving organizational objectives demands that they clearly understand the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy and tactics comprise two parts of a greater whole that, when leveraged appropriately, work in concert to achieve success. To clarify the difference, let's say we're a small community hospital–General Memorial–and we've got a clear objective: to reduce turnover among nurse-managers. You gather your senior leaders and brainstorm to learn why the turnover rate is so high. Through your session, you learn about a specific issue: work-life balance is better at the nearest competitor, a large outpatient clinic. Your current nurse-managers are defecting at a high rate for that and other key reasons. But while you have a clear objective, what, exactly, is going to be your strategy? And for that matter, just what is strategy? Simply put, strategy is the long-term, high-level thinking necessary to achieve a given objective. It's the long-term, high-level thinking that sets the direction and scope of an organization to achieve given objectives. Let's get back to General Memorial. Your brainstorming session provided leadership with a much-needed forum to talk about the nurse-manager turnover rate. So now you'll need to take it one step further. Identify the high-level, long-term thinking behind the goal. In this case, your strategy might be to re-position General Memorial as the regional leader in work-life balance. Since General Memorial is already a leader in safety, you can turn away from that positioning and focus on recruitment and retention of nurse-managers. This strategy, when effectively implemented, should achieve a reduction in turnover. Now that the General Memorial team has established its strategy, what's next? It's time to talk tactics. Tactics are actionable, granular-level messages and deliverables that support and drive strategy. In General Memorial's case, the tactics must align with, and deliver into, the work-life repositioning strategy. To determine your tactical objectives, consider the initial brainstorming sessions used to derive strategy–they will likely yield a rich vein of effective, easily-implemented tactical deliverables. In General Memorial's case, perhaps it came to light that the best nurse-managers are dedicated, hard-working employees. (You're lucky to have such committed staff!) But you may also have learned that these valued employees are part of the problem–they aren't taking time off, nor are they using their accrued vacation time. Consequently, they're suffering from high burnout rates, and passing along a counter-productive sense of dedication to new staff members. At this point, you've charged your human resources and marketing teams with executing the tactics. But what happens if the teams can't execute? A brilliant strategy has no value if it cannot be effectively deployed in a real-time situation. If Human Resources insists on a Web component because it seems trendy and the thing to do, for example, yet no online infrastructure exists in the marketing department to support it, this tactic is useless. Far too many leaders believe that a great strategy is all that's really necessary to achieve a given business objective. Setting goals and establishing strategy and tactics, in that order, serve to smooth the turbulent waters that healthcare leaders must navigate to achieve high performance levels at their organizations
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