The Missing Piece of Strategy
There’s a truth about strategy that often gets overlooked:
Most leaders design strategies for their organisations and their markets. Very few design one for themselves.
And yet, the personal growth strategy is often the piece that makes or breaks momentum.
We all know the traditional frames. A market strategy defines where you’ll compete and how you’ll create value in the world. An organisational strategy focuses on aligning people, culture, and systems around shared goals. These are the familiar domains of boardrooms and leadership retreats.
But what’s rarely spoken of is the third strategy the one that sits underneath both: your personal growth strategy.
This is the set of deliberate shifts you choose to make as a leader in mindset, in behaviour, in presence to unlock what’s possible at the organisational and market levels.
Without it, strategies stall. Because even the sharpest market plan can’t execute itself, and even the most aligned organisation can’t outrun a leader who hasn’t evolved to meet the moment.
I learned this lesson viscerally when I became CEO of Teach Starter.
On paper, I was more than qualified. I’d already scaled and exited a bigger company, navigated complexity, managed teams, delivered results. But what I didn’t realise was how much my prior success had been shaped by the corporate environment I was in an environment rich with resources, structure, and buffers.
Teach Starter was different. It was a bootstrapped startup. Resource-constrained. Fast-moving. Hungry.
The market strategy was clear: create deeper engagement with teachers.
The organisational strategy was also clear: reorganise functions for alignment, cultivate ownership, sharpen execution.
But the personal growth strategy?
That part was uncomfortable to face.
I had to admit that the leader I had been the corporate executive, the resource-rich operator wasn’t enough for what this environment required. I had to humble myself, strip back layers of certainty, and tap into a more entrepreneurial spirit. I had to be scrappier, more creative, more comfortable doing more with less.
That shift didn’t come from a business plan. It came from looking inward and asking: What must change in me for what’s next to become possible?
The breakthrough only came after I answered that question honestly. It was then that I was able to gather the team in a three-day workshop, invite them into the strategy, and open the door for real ownership. But if I hadn’t made the personal shift first, none of it would have landed.
This is what alignment looks like at the strategy level. Personal, organisational, and market strategies are not separate domains. They are concentric, interconnected, mutually reinforcing.
Momentum comes when all three are designed together, when a leader’s personal growth creates the capacity to implement organisational change, which in turn enables the market strategy to succeed.
Ignore the personal growth strategy, and you’ll forever be trying to bridge the gap between what you want your organisation to become and what you’re currently able to lead.
So here’s my invitation to you:
Before you finalise the next quarter’s objectives, before you set new KPIs or push the next market initiative, pause.
Ask yourself:
What must shift in me to make possible what I’m asking of my organisation and market?
That question might just be the missing piece of your strategy.
