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There comes a point when you will run out of patience. You will be tired of motivating, being positive, and helping others work thru their imperfection. You will escalate and demand accountability.

Before you escalate, the key thing to remember is, escalating with your emotion may or may not help. If your audience feels intimidated, getting angry may help. If they don’t care about your emotions, you are out of luck.

Thus in your engagement contract, you must have an escalation trigger and consequence that is transparent and clear. Penalty clauses are one way. Sometimes the issue is not about money, the threat to let others know about failures is enough.

Another way to find the escalation point is to know what your audience is sensitive about, and use it against him or her. Don’t worry, your audience is already thinking how to do this to you, so you better get ahead of them.

The scariest escalations are when you escalate without threatening. Threatening to escalate but not doing so will cause your audience to ignore you.

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Every organization needs a strategy and planning role. The only question is, who will perform the role?

First, what does this role do? A senior incumbent will shape and influence strategy. All incumbents will analyze strategy, facilitate conversations to define strategy, clean up ambiguities, resolve contradictions, and keep emotions under control. The output will be a list of initiatives and programs, an estimate of scope, complexity, cost, and a high level roadmap. The outputs will be reviewed and signed off by key sponsors and stakeholders.

In large organizations, this role will be performed by the Chief Strategy Officer. In medium to large companies, this role is performed by a PMO. In small to medium companies, this role is performed by consultants or some hapless soul who looks like he or she needs more work.

Some pieces of the role are core, and thus should be kept with or closely supervised by an employee. It is generally a thankless role and very few individuals have the fortitude to make a career out of it. If you do a tour of duty in a strategy and planning role, you will gain a broader perspective not to be had unless they get to a very senior position.

The most important thing to know about the role: it must be like a dial tone. Always on, always aware, reliable, always ready to connect the dots at a moment’s notice.