4 Ways to Become a More Strategic Leader

Have you ever worked for an organization where the company strategy felt murky or undefined? Or perhaps your company vision was articulate and well understood across the organization, but you didn’t understand how your role fit into the big picture. Maybe it wasn’t clear what your business unit was doing to help the company achieve its vision.

Not having clear answers to these questions results in unmotivated teams, a lack of confidence in leadership, and employees who are focused on busywork that doesn’t have the highest impact.

Being a skilled strategist is imperative the higher up you go in your career and is a quintessential quality of great leadership. Every inspiring leader I’ve ever worked for was an excellent strategist who guided our team to execute on the big picture vision with efficiency, excitement, and grit. Why efficiency, excitement, and grit?

• Efficiency: Your goal as a leader should be to achieve the company’s vision in the shortest time possible (given the resources), without burning out your employees or yourself. This also includes setting clear expectations about what you are not going to do. To do this, you must prioritize making organizational processes smarter so that everyone spends their time more effectively. I recently heard a leader use this brilliant analogy, “I’m here to build a faster elevator, not run up and down the stairs faster.”
• Excitement: Everyone wants to come to work feeling inspired to show up as their true authentic selves and work towards a goal they believe in. Life is too short to spend 40 hours a week working on mundane tasks that don’t leave you feeling inspired. A good leader can clearly articulate the why and get everyone excited about and on board with the long-term vision.
• Grit: It’s not always smooth sailing, especially if you are in an industry like tech that constantly changes. Macro trends like economic instability and a worldwide pandemic can drastically change the strategy. Therefore, you want to encourage your employees to have the passion, perseverance, and resilience to focus and execute even in changing environments. And if they fail, you want them to feel safe enough to learn from their failures and come back to work the next day and try it again. It’s how innovation is born and sustained.

So how can you become more strategic? Perhaps you’re already a leader but have been in fire fighting mode at your company for the last several years and lost sight of the big picture. Or maybe you’re an individual contributor looking to move up to a management role. Regardless, strategic thinking is important for everyone in an organization, but it becomes a requirement for success as you move up in your career.

Here are 4 ways you can become a more strategic leader:

1. Develop a clear understanding of what strategy means
2. Adopt a strategic thinking mindset
3. Consistently communicate the vision and strategy
4. Operationalize your strategy with accountability

1. Develop a clear understanding of what strategy means

Strategy is one of those terms like, “sales play” or “operating model” that seems to have multiple meanings depending on your experience at different companies.

The Oxford Dictionary defines strategy as, “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim”. To me, a strategy is how you will achieve your vision. It’s the series of choices you make to define the path your company or department must take to meet short-term goals to achieve the vision. Strategy can be constrained by resources, capabilities, culture, and organizational structure and operating models. As Dorie Clark, a professor for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business says, “Strategy is being clear and proactive in what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do.”

Your long-term, ultimate goal is your vision. There are many ways to achieve that vision, some are quicker, more enjoyable, and have a higher likelihood of success than others. Your strategy is the choices you make of how you will get there. Your strategy consists of short-term milestones, also known as your goals. Tactics are the smaller measurement of things you need to do to achieve each goal.

For you visual learners like myself, I mocked up the image below to explain it.

2. Adopt a strategic thinking mindset

Everyone can benefit from adopting a strategic mindset. Push yourself to think bigger and to play bigger. That means moving beyond living in the weeds of your tactical to-do list and connecting the dots outside of your workload. Understanding the bigger picture helps you ensure that you’re spending time on what matters most and contributing most efficiently. There are four ways to shift to a more strategic mindset.

Turn it into a routine

A strategy is not a one-time plan you create, then put on your shelf. The most successful strategists develop a routine way of thinking. To build a more strategic mindset, make it a habit to constantly observe new sources of information, identify the trends, and adapt accordingly. This means getting in the routine habit of thinking, listening, and reflecting on what you’ve learned so that you can see how it fits into the big picture and what actions you should take.

Making time for strategic thinking

Another key step to adopting a more strategic mindset is to start carving time out on your calendar to focus on the big picture. It’s easy to get stuck in a sea of back-to-back half-hour meetings the whole day, but you are the only one who can proactively make time for strategic thinking. This means blocking off time on your calendar when you’re most energized and able to focus. For me, that’s three hours once a week in the morning while I’m drinking my coffee.

Questioning the status quo

Another important mindset shift is to question the status quo but do it safely and respectfully. I know this is what we’ve always done, but why? Is it still serving us? Is there a more efficient way to do this? For some of us, this comes naturally, but for most this isn’t taught in traditional schools. Kids aren’t taught to constantly question the teacher and still receive a good grade. 

Think of your style when communicating this as well. People who are gifted at dialogue keep a constant focus on safety. The book Crucial Conversations has great advice on this topic:

“Dialogue calls for the free flow of meaning – period. And nothing kills the flow of meaning like fear. When you fear that people aren’t buying into your ideas, you start pushing too hard. When you fear that you may be harmed in some way, you start withdrawing and hiding. Both of these reactions – to fight and to take flight – are motivated by the same emotion: fear. On the other hand, if you make it safe enough, you can talk about almost anything and people will listen. If you don’t fear that you’re being attacked or humiliated, you yourself can hear almost anything and not become defensive.”

Connect the past to the future

I once worked for a leader who frequently reminded everyone that “the past is the best predictor of the future.” For many, this comment was cringeworthy, especially when made to a team that was hired for their future-focused, innovative capabilities. Because of this leader’s mantra, many times the future was ignored, and past decisions were often repeated in hopes that they would work in modern-day times. It was no surprise that the results were subpar.

It’s not that we should forget about the past. There is value in understanding why things failed or were successful. The trick is applying those past learnings and connecting them to the future.

It’s hard to accurately predict the future, but there are a few sure-fire ways to build your knowledge and intuition to spot the patterns and be ahead of the competition when change happens. Don’t limit yourself to thinking in small, incremental steps or seeking knowledge only from within the proverbial walls of your own company. Look for the macro trends in your industry. How are budgets shifting? How are buyer patterns changing? What new problems are your customers facing? What are your competitors doing? What innovation are you seeing in other industries that you could apply to your own? Take the time to read the analyst reports, talk to your customers, and follow the blogs written by innovative thought leaders in your industry.

3. Consistently communicate the vision and strategy

To ensure your department or team is crystal clear on how they fit into your company’s vision, you must consistently articulate the strategy for getting there with simplicity and clarity. Just as important, you must be able to communicate "the why" in an authentic way to inspire your employees to feel connected to the strategy and vision.

You may start to question if you’re being too repetitive on this topic. You aren’t. Most people need to hear it three times before they remember it, plus you have new team members joining regularly who are just joining the conversation. Ideally, you have at least one all hands on a monthly (for smaller teams) or quarterly (for larger teams) basis. This should be an agenda topic at every all hands with a visual (usually a slide) that your team members instantly recognize and included in all of your department communications like newsletters.

4. Operationalize your strategy with accountability

Now that your team understands the company vision and how their role supports the strategy to get there, it’s time to make it real for them. It’s not enough to just communicate the vision, strategy, and goals. You must operationalize your strategy. How do you do this? Develop an accountability framework and reporting structure across your organization so that everyone clearly understands their quarterly goals and knows they will be measured against them.  

Accountability eliminates busywork that isn’t going to make an impact on the company’s long term vision. It also helps to ensure clear roles and responsibilities so that teams aren’t overlapping and stepping on each other’s toes. 

Accountability is also used as a forcing function to align teams on short-term goals. I’ve been in several meetings where executives were “aligned” on the high-level vision and strategy, but once we got into the details of the short-term goals and reviewed the work that was produced, it was clear that there was misalignment.

When people feel accountable for the work they produce, they put in more effort and feel valued because they know their work matters to the bigger picture vision. Whether that’s using OKRs, MBOs, or placing parameters around the distribution of budget and resources, you want to hold your teams accountable for achieving their goals aligned with your strategic roadmap. This means evaluating progress on a routine basis in quarterly business reviews, bi-annual planning sessions, 1x1s, and end of year strategic planning.

Conclusion

As busy leaders, it’s easy to get bogged down in the day to day minutia and constant fire drills expected of us. Make sure you’re prioritizing the time to think strategically, communicate the vision and strategy to your team, and develop a framework to hold them accountable for achieving their goals. Your success depends on it.

And if you aren’t in a leadership role, remember that strategic thinking isn’t just valuable for executives. It can be a gamechanger for individual contributors to be considered for management roles and will only help you as you grow in your career.