Strategic planning doesn’t begin with a three-day retreat or a glossy 60-page deck. It begins when you, as a leader, decide to pause, ask better questions, and invite your people into the conversation. When strategy is grounded in what you already know, tested against real data and real voices, and captured in a living document, it becomes one of your most powerful leadership practices instead of another task on the calendar.

It is hard for leaders to trust the theories about how to do things differently. After all, what we learn throughout our lives in schools, universities, churches, and workplaces, is that winning means that we dominate the field. We are so accustomed to the idea that leadership means having all the answers and that our job is to tell people what to do and how to do it, and to discipline with consequences like termination when they do not. But that is an exhausting way to work.