Tactics Vs. Strategy: What’s The Difference?

The terms tactics and strategy are used a lot in business environments (along with their adjective forms, tactical and strategic), but often without any real context. Due to the nature of the words, they’re not always used correctly, either, further confusing the issue.

Both words originally come from military terminology. They’re two different important parts of how to win battles and wars. However, it’s important to understand that despite the fact that they’re different, they’re interlinked.

It’s not possible to realize a large-scale project – be it launching a new product, building a housing development, or winning a war – without both strategy and tactics.

Both relate to the planning stage of a project. The easiest way to think about it is that strategy is the larger picture – the end goal – while tactics are the steps you take to achieve that goal.

Basically, upper management is involved in the strategic planning, such as what direction the company wants to take, while lower management does the tactics, i.e., what needs to be done on the ground to move towards the end goal.

Key Takeaways:

What are Tactics?

Tactics is a peculiar word in that it’s plural in construction but singular in usage. Tactic has a different meaning than tactics does – though they’re related. A tactic is a “device for accomplishing an end,” according to Merriam-Webster, while tactics relate to the art of “employing available means to accomplish an end.”

Tactics, when used in the military or business sense, are the small bore planning and action stage. If a project is being run properly, then most of the strategic planning will already be done — they’ll know what the general goal is and the large steps needed to get there.

What constitutes a tactical plan? Tactics are much more direct than strategies. The strategy may be to reach near gender parity in a tech company, but it’s the tactics that get the work done. In this instance, the tactics would include:

• Biasing hiring practices towards women who apply.

• Doing outreach in areas where there will be a large number of women who are interested in a tech job, such as at a technically inclined university.

• Offering incentives for women who accept a position at your company.

As you can see, most of these are short-term and directly problem-focused. If this tech company wants to hire more women, they need more women to apply and accept their offer.

What Is a Strategy?

A strategy is much more overarching. It has much more to do with the planning stage, while tactics are more focused on the doing. While strategy is more removed from tactics, that doesn’t mean that it’s devoid of planning or implementation.

The first part of strategic planning is to identify a goal. For instance, a technology company wishes to have at least 40% of its workforce female – and in the technical side of the business, rather than just marketing and human resources.

Now that a goal has been set, they need to start breaking it down into sections. Those sections, the larger parts of the plan, are your strategy. These may include:

• Investing in charities that encourage women and girls to pursue STEM.

• Fostering mentorship programs so that more experienced employees will take young women under their wing.

• Educating their current employees on the benefits of having a more diverse workforce.

All of these strategies are much more long-term oriented and not as specific. If you wanted to break them down into tactics, you would be selecting which charity and how much to donate, as well as possibly incentivizing mentorship to encourage your employees to jump on it.

Tips for Utilizing Strategy and Tactics

Not every decision needs to be blocked out into strategy and tactics – in some ways; the terms can confuse the matter. That being said, making use of both of them is the way that your goals get accomplished.

If you’re all strategy and no tactics, you’re unlikely to move forward towards your goal – or you will only go haphazardly.

Alternatively, if you’re all tactics and no strategy, you’ll get things done, but they won’t be in the direction of any overarching goal.

The best way to make use of both strategy and tactics is to begin with a goal. Say you want to increase your sales by 15% over the course of the next six months. You have a goal now, and from that, you need a strategy.

Your strategy may be to increase advertising – see if outreach will bring more people in. In order to do that, you need to decide what sort of campaign you want to run. If you want to do it properly, you should find out exactly what your target audience should be.

People that are interested in your product, but not necessarily the customers you already have – don’t need an advertising campaign in order to buy your product.

So your tactical plan may be to survey the customers you already have to find out why they bought your product and what would make them recommend it to others. Once you know the type of people who buy it, you can then formulate a campaign and put it into action.

That means that your goal transforms into a strategy that transforms into tactics. In a larger company, this process would go down the line as well, with upper management setting the goal, then the next group down drawing up the strategy before being sent to the project managers to draw up and implement the tactics.

Tactics vs. Strategy FAQ

1. When should I use a strategy rather than tactics?

   To put it in broad strokes, strategy should be used when you want to do long-term or overarching planning, and tactics should be utilized when you’re doing short-term or granular planning.

   Strategy looks at the situation over a long period of time and puts forth a series of steps to do over time. Tactics are how you achieve those steps, and it looks at short-term planning.

2. How are strategy and tactics linked?

   Strategy and tactics are inextricably linked – they’re both required in order to achieve goals. Without a strategy, you wouldn’t be able to set longer-term or overarching plans. Without tactics, you wouldn’t be able to work out the steps and requirements in order to achieve your goals and implement your strategy.

3. Why is strategy important?

   Strategy is important because it helps you achieve long-term goals. You can strategize ways in order to work towards your ultimate goal, laying out in broad strokes what you need to achieve. Without a strategy, you may accomplish numerous things, but they won’t necessarily get you any closer to your ultimate goal.

   Strategy can also tie several parts of a project together, allowing you to see the whole picture and how the different pieces of it need to be done and when in order for it to work.

4. Why are tactics important?

   Tactics are important because that’s how things are accomplished on a small scale. Tactics are all about who does what, where they need to be to do it, and when they can start. Without tactical planning and implementation, people aren’t going to work together or know what they need to work on.

Author

Di Doherty

Di has been a writer for more than half her life. Most of her writing so far has been fiction, and she’s gotten short stories published in online magazines Kzine and Silver Blade, as well as a flash fiction piece in the Bookends review. Di graduated from Mary Baldwin College (now University) with a degree in Psychology and Sociology.