A few years ago, I was hired to advise a supply chain company on the heels of a major transition. One of the people I worked closely with was the newly appointed chief operating officer. The company had recently acquired a competitor, and she had been promoted to oversee its successful integration—and this sets the stage for our examples of strategic thinking.
Having risen through the supply chain ranks, she had spent most of her time reacting to operational missteps and customer complaints, and her razor-sharp problem-solving skills had trained the organization to look to her for quick decisions to resolve issues.
My goal was to help her clarify her high-level responsibilities at the newly enlarged company and how they aligned with its mission. So I asked her, “What’s the most important thing your CEO and board want you to accomplish in your new role?”
She answered readily: “To cut duplicate costs from redundant work and get the organization on one technology platform to manage our supply chain.” Her clarity surprised me—and her. That was the good news. The not-so-good news was that she realized how little her daily tasks were actually serving said mission.
That’s where I came in. After several rounds of investigation and candid discussion, we agreed on a productive path forward. This included breaking her mandate into four focus areas, reconstituting her team to include leaders from both organizations, and ensuring all meetings and decisions she was involved in connected directly to her mandate.
This story had a happy ending. But it was also the exception. The sad reality is that far too many senior executives are simply unable to connect their role to the strategic contributions they should be making to fulfill the role. Put differently, they don’t know how to think or act strategically.
If this sounds like you, you’re certainly not alone. But following these four tips for developing your strategic thinking skills can help bring you ever closer to clarity.
Strategic Thinking Example #1: Scrutinize the strategic requirements of your job
“It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement,” wrote Harvard Business School professors David Collis and Michael Rukstad in an influential article for the Harvard Business Review. “If they can’t, neither can anyone else.”
Research consistently confirms this painful truth. Most managers don’t know what parts of their jobs serve their mission and actually add value, and what parts are simply getting things done. It’s no wonder, then, that many of them spend far too much time dealing with issues as they come up or firefighting.
With no sense of what their actual priorities should be, they take up whatever issue walks into their inbox.
To help get a better handle on what you should be doing, it can be helpful to ask yourself a few simple but pointed exploratory questions:
- In one sentence, describe what your company does. In another sentence, describe what you do. What’s the relationship between these two answers—and are you satisfied with it?
- Are there any activities that if you weren’t already doing them, you wouldn’t start doing them? How can you phase out those unnecessary activities to free up capacity for more important work?
- What does this “more important work” look like? Why is it more important? To what extent does it align with your organizational mission?
- What would you need from your boss in order to begin shifting your focus in a way that allowed you to spend more time on higher-value activities?
Let the answers to these questions guide you as you work on your strategic thinking long-term.
Strategic Thinking Example #2: Focus resources wisely
Once you can draw a clear(er) line of sight to your strategic contributions, the next step is to ensure company resources are available to help accomplish them.
For many new executives, the large pile of money they now get to direct is exciting—but potentially dangerous. Aligning budgets and bodies around a unified direction is much harder when there are many more options and reactive decision making has become the norm.
Too often, immediate crises cause executives to whiplash people and money. Without a sound fact and insight base on which to prioritize resources, squeaky wheels get all the grease. Which brings us to the next point.
Quote
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.
– Henry Ford
Strategic Thinking Example #3: Search for insights in all the right places
The term “insight” typically conjures up notions of breakthrough ideas or “aha moments,” but that’s not what’s useful to you. When it comes to thinking strategically, it’s far more insightful studying basic patterns from available data that can help you pinpoint what truly sets your company apart.
Strategic thinkers know how to use data to generate new insights about how they and their organizations make money. Examining patterns of performance over time (financial, operational, customer, and competitive data) will reveal critical information about future opportunities and risks.
In the case of the supply chain executive mentioned earlier, rather than institute a blanket cost reduction, she decided to spend some time poking around the data she had on hand.
After doing this she uncovered patterns that identified—and crucially, protected—the most competitive work in her organization: getting products to customers on time and accurately. She isolated those activities from work that added little value or was redundant, and then focused her cost-cutting efforts on those.
In the end she was able to dramatically reduce costs while improving customer experience. This all happened because of critical insight.
Strategic Thinking Example #4: Welcome dissent
Strategic thinking is as much a social capability as it is an intellectual one. As impressive as an executive may appear, their strategic brilliance will never be acted upon alone. Leaders need the people they lead to translate strategic insights into choices that drive results. For people to truly commit to carrying out an executive’s strategy, though, they have to understand and believe in it.
That’s a tall order. As the Collis and Rukstad quote from earlier makes clear, many executives themselves don’t fully understand what they’re doing or what their strategy is. And even if they do, too often their approach to communicating their strategic vision leaves much to be desired.
Extra-intense PowerPoint presentation sessions are not what increases understanding and ownership of strategy.
To the contrary, people’s depth of commitment increases when they, not their leader, are talking. One executive I work with habitually takes his strategic insights to his team and intentionally asks for dueling fact bases to both support and refute his thinking.
As the debate unfolds, flawed assumptions surface and are replaced with shared understanding, ideas are refined, and ownership for success spreads. A strategic mindset not only embraces but encourages different points of view.
That’s his strategy, and he’s sticking to it. As he should.
Call-out/Tip
It’s helpful to think of strategic thinking as a kind of process, not a defined set of activities. It’s a means for getting to desired outcome, and, as a result, may lead you to take different actions depending on your unique circumstances. Anyone who tells you that all you have to do is X, Y, and Z is not offering a good example of strategic thinking.
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