“To get to the next level in your career, you need to be more strategic.” Have you heard this feedback before? If so, read on. It’s one of the most common pieces of feedback given to upcoming professionals as well as the least explained.
“Strategy” is one of the most overused words in the business world. Many professionals use it purely to sound smart but actually have no idea what it means. Here are some good definitions of “strategy.”
- Business dictionary: 1. A method or plan chosen to bring about a desired future, such as achievement of a goal or solution to a problem. 2. The art and science of planning and marshaling resources for their most efficient and effective use.
- Wikipedia: A high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.
- Harvard Business Review: A business strategy is a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making.
- My definition (work in progress 🙂: An effective approach in a highly ambiguous situation to achieve a desired outcome. An effective strategy should maximize strengths while mitigating weaknesses and constraints.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic as I have been coaching several of my team members on strategic skills. I realized it’s bit harder than it sounds. Why? Here’s a few reasons:
- Developing strategic skills is a journey that requires practice and real work experiences. You can’t just learn strategic skills from reading a set of books or taking a course. It requires constant practice at work and you need to develop your instincts on handling ambiguity and uncertainty
- Those with great strategic skills may not necessarily be good teachers of this skill. It’s hard to find folks who have strategic skills and can teach it to others at work. Sometimes, they just don’t know how to convey what they know. Other times, they may just not have the time to help.
- Determining whether someone has strategic skills is highly subjective. It’s not always clear after getting this kind of feedback exactly what is expected to be deemed “more strategic.”
Here are my five starting tips on “how to be more strategic at work.” I’ve shared them with my team and I hope they help you as well.
Tip #1 – Carve out dedicated time to think strategically.
Top performers are highly productive. It’s easy to get caught up in the near term work and never have enough time to pull back and do tips 2 through 5 below. The foundation of being strategic starts with being able to prioritize your time differently:
- Exercise 80/20 rule and do less on the detailed work – stop going to meetings where the value of your work is marginal. Stop perfecting Powerpoint and focus more on the “so what” of the slide.
- “I don’t have enough time to be strategic” is an excuse. You make time if it’s important to you and if you really want to develop this skill.
- Being strategic also means you know when and how to say no to others.
Tip #2 – Think big picture!
Many people say this and here’s what it means. Regardless of which industry you’re in, this applies. The big picture in business involves the following 3Cs:
- Customer: how does your work impact your customers?
- Company: how does your work impact the business (eg.., revenue, cost, risks, regulations, reputation, etc..)?
- Competition: how does what you do help your company compete in the marketplace?
I recommend this timeless book from 1983 – The mind of a Strategist by Kenichi Ohmae. Here’s a good summary of this book. Whether you read the whole book or the summary, the key to following this tip is practicing it at work in answering the 3C questions related to your work.
Tip #3 – Define what problem you’re solving and your priorities.
While this sounds obvious, it’s not. 9 out 10 times when I worked with clients in consulting, I realized they were not on the same page on what problem they were trying to solve. Sometimes, they hired consultants just to validate an answer they already had.
It’s important to define and align on what exactly you’re trying to solve with your strategy. Know your desired outcome. For example, are you trying to develop a strategy to increase revenue or cut cost or improve customer experience? And the answer is NOT “all the above.” You need to define your highest vs. lowest priority and gain alignment with key stakeholders.
Tip #4 – How you approach solving the problem is more important than the answer to the problem itself.
Being strategic is not about having the right answers. There’s actually no one right answer. This is what makes strategic skills so subjective and difficult to learn. Instead I recommend that you structure how you solve the problem and make sure key stakeholders agree with the approach.
Many times I would see someone recommend an answer to a problem with a list of rationale. This is a good start but not as strategic. It’s also vulnerable to criticism. If one of your key stakeholders does not agree with your rationale or present a new angle that you didn’t consider, you’re immediately challenged or possibly discredited.
Instead of recommending an answer right away, propose an approach on how you’ll get to the answer and get feedback from key stakeholders. The approach is the evaluation criteria you plan to use in developing a strategic answer. Communicating your approach to key stakeholders will give you a chance to discover blind spots in it and also build buy-in. If all agree that you should look at this problem from five angles, then when you come up with an answer based on facts from these five angles, there’s a strong foundation for buy-in and it builds your reputation of being methodical…thus strategic.
Tip #5 – Speak strategically – less is more.
Even if you can define a good strategy, if you can’t communicate it, you’re unlikely to get the credit. You need to be organized in your communication.
- Set context and define the problem statement.
- Communicate your proposed solution and how that’s related to the “big picture.” Remember tip #2 and your answer to the 3Cs. You should be communicating those here.
- Keep it high level; speak to only 3-5 bullets. Don’t go into too much detail until asked.
- Speak in plain English with examples.
The most common mistake you may make with strategic communication is sharing too much detail about “how” the strategy will be implemented. Executives cares the most about the “why” and the “what” first related to strategy. If they agree with the “why” and the “what”, then they will care about the “how.”
These are my starting tips as I’m still trying to figure out how to best teach strategic skills to others. I was fortunate to be trained early by McKinsey on how to think strategically. With 20 years of practice, strategic thinking has become second nature. It’s been hard to dissect my own thinking process in order to share how I got here. However, I recognize how important it is for me to coach this skill and support my team in their journey to become more strategic. I will keep working on it and share additional tips as I discover them.
Your comments: What actions are you taking to become more strategic at work? I look forward to your stories and questions.
Your comments: Do you have an inner voice that tells you that you are not enough? Do you where it comes from and how to ignore it? I look forward to hearing from you.
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Lei
Best wishes to your career success!
Lei