Shifting Strategic Priorities: Top 6 Steps to Take

When Strategic Priorities Won’t Sit Still: How Smart Leaders Protect Focus and Performance
Does this sound familiar?  Your market has shifted.  There has been a change in leadership. New competitive threats have emerged. Suddenly, the “top three” priorities from last quarter are replaced with five new imperatives. While changing market realities can certainly impact what matters most, constantly shifting strategic priorities is a leadership warning sign because it causes:

• Teams to scramble.
• Focus to fracture.
• Execution to slow.
• Trust in leadership to erode.

What the Research Says about Shifting Strategic Priorities
Data from organizational culture assessments show that shifting strategic priorities promote unmanaged organizational change.  Research underscores the cost.

• Our organizational alignment research found that strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performance in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.
• A longitudinal study by McKinsey found that organizations with clear, stable priorities significantly outperform peers in both financial returns and employee engagement.
• Research published in the Academy of Management Journal by Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer demonstrated that perceived progress toward meaningful goals is a primary driver of motivation. Constantly resetting goals undermines that progress principle.

The Top 6 Steps to Better Manage Shifting Strategic Priorities

If your strategic direction keeps moving in a way that is causing issues:

1. Separate Strategy from Tactics
   Some changes are simply tactical adjustments required to run the business and keep pace and do not signal a whole new strategic direction. Strategy answers enduring questions — where to play and how to win. Tactics answer how to respond this quarter.  When leaders conflate the two, teams can feel like they are always reacting and chasing the latest shiny object or flavor of the month.

   What to Do:  Use a strategy retreat to anchor your strategy with clear, compelling, and enduring strategic drivers (e.g., mission, vision, and values) along with the critical few strategic big bets that matter most for the next 12 months. Then allow tactics to flex within that framework. If a big bet changes, do not just add it to the list — stop, reassess, reallocate, and recommunicate.

2. Create a Strategic “Filter”
   Without strategic decision making criteria, every opportunity can feel important and urgent. But not all strategies are of equal importance.  Leaders and their teams must know how to make strategic trade-offs based upon explicit decision criteria tied to strategic priorities..

   What to Do:  Before adding or altering a priority, require leaders to answer three questions:

   — Does this directly accelerate our core strategy?
   — What will we stop doing to make room for this?
   — What measurable outcome will improve as a result?

   If the answer to the second question is silence, you are not reprioritizing — you are piling on.

3. Limit the Number of Active Priorities
   Strategic focus dilutes with each additional objective. A laundry list of strategies is not a strategy. Any more than three to five true enterprise-level strategic priorities are usually to challenging to successfully implement. Beyond the critical few, trade-offs blur, resources get stretched thin, and accountability weakens.

   What to Do:  Limit yourself to 2 main strategic big bets that carry 50% or more of the strategic weight required to get you want to go.  If required, add a third but do not go beyond three.

4. Stabilize the Operating Rhythm
   If strategic priorities must shift, overemphasize keeping everything else stable. Change management training research shows that a steady operating rhythm helps to increase psychological team safety during times of change. Teams can absorb directional shifts more effectively when the processes around them are more stable.

   What to Do:  Maintain consistent strategic planning cycles, review cadences, strategy success metrics, and strategy communications.

5. Protect Meaning and Strategic Momentum
   Frequent strategic shifts often signal deeper clarity, leadership, or political issues. High performing teams treat every strategic adjustment as a deliberate, inclusive, and transparent decision.  If a strategic pivot makes sense, explicitly define new goals, reset milestones, and celebrate early wins to reinforce change momentum.

   What to Do:  Explain the rationale for change, constructively debate and quantify the trade-offs, and reinforce what remains unchanged.

6. Diagnose the Root Cause
   Finally, if priorities keep shifting, ask why. Is the strategy unclear? Are senior leaders misaligned? Are external signals being overinterpreted? Is there insufficient data informing decisions?  Frequent strategic turbulence is usually a symptom of unresolved leadership alignment issues.

   What to Do:  Purposely measure and address leadership team alignment.  Then close any alignment gaps to reduce organizational volatility.

The Bottom Line
While some shifting strategic priorities are inevitable in dynamic markets, chronic instability is not healthy or sustainable. Make sure that you purposefully anchor around strategic drivers while transparently balancing trade-offs, limiting active priorities, and clarifying what is changing and what is not. The key is not to avoid making changes, but to purposefully design changes with clarity, conviction, and strategic buy-in

To learn more about how to better manage constantly shifting strategic priorities, download 7 Proven Ways to Stress Test Your Strategy

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.