How to Identify Strategic Priorities Designed to Win

Identify Strategic Priorities
Drafting a corporate strategy during a leadership retreat is one thing — executing it consistently across the organization is another. The more ambitious your goals, the greater the need for strategic clarity, focused effort, and disciplined follow-through.

While strategic priorities evolve over time, top leaders make it a point to define priorities that drive real results. Leadership simulation assessments highlight three essential criteria for effective strategic priorities:

• Logic-driven decisions: Priorities should flow directly from data, insights, and a clear understanding of the business environment.
• Value creation: Each priority must deliver meaningful impact and reinforce competitive advantage.
• Focused alignment: Limit priorities to a manageable set that truly matters, ensuring teams can concentrate efforts without dilution.

Prioritization is the linchpin of strategy execution. By focusing on fewer, carefully chosen initiatives, leaders accelerate decision-making, optimize resource allocation, and make smarter trade-offs. Paradoxically, doing less — but doing the right things — generates more value. Clear priorities enable teams to act decisively, manage scarce resources effectively, and translate strategy into concrete action plans that move the organization forward.

3 Research-Backed Steps to Identify Strategic Priorities Designed to Win

1. Use Strategic Drivers to Set the Strategic Context
   Too many leaders assume the strategic context is clear enough to begin setting priorities. Yet our organizational alignment research reveals a striking gap — employees perceive these drivers as 50% less clear than executives do. This absence of clarity leaves teams unsure how to prioritize actions, allocate resources, or make decisions aligned with the organization’s strategic intent — especially when circumstances shift.

   Before identifying strategic priorities for the next 12–36 months, leaders need to understand market realities and define foundational strategic context through five critical drivers:

   • Vision
     Your strategic vision defines what the organization hopes to become — the business you will be in tomorrow. The most effective vision statements are inspiring, motivating, challenging, memorable, and unique.
   • Mission
     Your mission statement articulates why the company’s work matters. Clarity around purpose and business focus helps stakeholders — employees, owners, and customers — rally behind your strategy.
   • Values
     Corporate values establish the organization’s fundamental beliefs that guide behavior, decision-making, hiring, firing, promotions, and rewards.
   • Ideal Target Clients
     The right clients don’t just buy your products or services — they engage passionately and repeatedly with what you offer.
   • Unique Value Proposition
     High-growth companies are three times more likely to have a differentiated value proposition. Knowing what sets you apart in the eyes of your target clients completes the strategic context required to prioritize effectively.
2. Define High-Performance Success Metrics to Set the Bar
   Once strategic drivers are in place, define what high performance looks like over the next 12–36 months. Focus on two or three leading or lagging metrics that carry 50% or more of the weight regarding what matters most.

   For example, a client entering a new market focused on (1) new client acquisition and (2) new client satisfaction. While many initiatives were underway, these two metrics provided clarity on what truly mattered. Another client striving to scale prioritized (1) profitable growth rate and (2) client renewals. Even while realigning teams and divesting products, they understood that profitable growth in their current client base was the key to higher performance.

The Bottom Line
Getting these strategic drivers right is harder than it may seem. Our research shows that only 30% of companies have sufficient strategic clarity to effectively identify strategic priorities. Once the executive team is aligned on strategic drivers, leaders can engage broader teams to identify and act on priorities in a way that fits the organization’s unique situation.

To see if you have the strategic clarity required to better set priorities, download 7 Proven Ways to Stress Test Your Strategic Priorities Now