Strategic thinking is a skill that anyone can use in any role. Applied strategic thinking is practical, ongoing, and informal. Strategic thinking is helpful when it is linked and aligned with grand corporate strategy.
Posts Tagged ‘Strategic Thinking’
Applied Strategic Thinking
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008Critical Elements of Strategic Leadership: Beyond Corporate Strategy
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008Being a strategic leader requires that you first understand corporate priorities and future agendas as well as have a clear direction on how you can contribute to it in a value-added way. Being an active supporter of the organization’s strategy is only one element of strategic leadership. There are two other very important elements.
The second aspect is a personal process to help you think strategically about the role you and your team can play relative to the organization’s strategy– things that are independent and unique to you and your responsibilities. In our book, Ahead of the Curve, we present an easy process for thinking strategically. It is about how you, as an individual, can influence your future in positive ways and contribute to the execution of corporate strategy. This comprehensive process can be used in any type of situation and by anyone wanting to make a difference in the future.
The third and probably most overlooked responsibility of strategic leadership is leading, guiding, and influencing your team members to be strategic thinkers about their own responsibilities. Typically, we think of team members as task executors and tactical players. But, imagine the strategic value your team could generate if each member not only fulfilled their daily operational responsibilities, but also thought about their roles, objectives, and changes needed to satisfy the future requirements of internal and external customers. Innovation would occur, productivity would increase, and team member motivation and self actualization would be unleashed.
The mistake organizations have been making is believing that strategic thinking is something only upper management and executives do. In fact, if everyone in the organization were thinking and acting on their own strategic contributions, the results in alignment with the execution of strategic initiatives would be striking.
A leader’s role is critical in creating a strategic mindset and culture at the working level. To do this a leader needs the skills and tools in place to ensure formulation, execution, and accountability of the strategic performance of each team members’ plans and initiatives.
In the case of my own team, each member is expected to have at least two strategic targets that they focus on in addition to their regular, operational responsibilities. They utilize a strategic thinking planning guide to help identify their strategic target areas, conduct a SWOT, explore scenarios, and build an action plan. In my one-on-one interactions with them, I provide some guidance regarding the selection of a strategic target. Then on a monthly basis, we have a team meeting (actually it is a breakfast meeting) where we review the collective strategies we are working on together. Each team member makes a five minute report on progress with their individual strategic progress. After each person presents, the team checks for alignment and discusses questions, feedback, or ideas with the team members. I, too, present my own leader based strategic targets. This meeting is very focused, efficient, and strategically oriented. We work very hard to keep operations discussions out of the meeting. For me, this meeting is very important because it brings the process full circle. The team is linked and there is some accountability for the strategic thought process. I have found that these more strategic team activities help the team focus their energies on activities that will have a positive impact on the future. The present becomes linked with the future; there isn’t an unknown gap between where we are now and where we are going in the future. While this may not be the perfect approach for you, it has become an important tool for me as a leader to promote strategic behaviors in my team. In addition to having tools and processes in place that I just discussed, a leader can do a lot to create a strategic culture in the team without taking away from operational efficiency and focus. Consider a few of these ideas for unlocking the strategic leadership potential in your team:
• Talk about strategic topics and ask the team to challenge the status quo.
• Frequently discuss what will prevent the team from maximizing its future potential.
• Share your own strategic targets with the team so they can see you aligning your personal strategy.
• Ensure follow-through on strategic assignments and mechanisms.
• When the team or team members identify a strategic opportunity, recognize it and respond rapidly.
• Kick off the new year with strategic “open letter” to all team members.
• Focus decisions and actions (even operational ones) on what is most important for the team to be successful long-term.
• Help team members see how strategic thought processes will benefit them.
• Reward team members for strategic behaviors.
• Give them reading material such as a quarterly newsletter. We offer one titled “Ahead of the Curve™.”
Explore and experiment with these ideas and some of your own to figure out how you can fulfill all three elements of strategic leadership. Operational pressures can certainly divert our attention, but just take it one step at a time as you move towards greater strategic leadership. Your investment in taking care of the future will begin to make a difference for you and your team today. The organization too will find notable benefits when strategic thinking is driven through the organization.
Controlling the Activity Trap: The Key to Personal Strategy
Monday, June 9th, 2008
Go back a few years and think about the things you did on a daily basis to get results and achieve goals. Would you say your daily tactics, assignments, projects are the same today as they were five years ago? In most cases people I talk to said no. In my own work, while some of the tactical aspects of my job have remained, almost every other aspect of my job is different. Now, think about what duties your job will require in the future. One year, three years, or five years from now, will you be doing the same things you are doing today? Probably not.
Managers who operate strictly in tactical mode are not focused on their people, their future success, long term goals and strategies, and have difficulty being a well rounded effective leader. Strategic Thinking is an important tool for success in any organization. I believe that everyone can be more entrepreneurial and can drive more value in contributing to long term personal and business success by improving strategic thinking. If your people focus too much on the day to day operations and just getting through their task lists, what will happen to your future? The first skill to being strategic is what we call “Taming the Beast.” The beasts are those things that keep us from spending some time on strategic objectives, keep us from preparing for the future, and blind us from what is on the horizon.
Successful strategic thinkers understand and develop ways to combat their beasts. They find ways around the roadblocks and are in tune with organization needs and objectives, future opportunities, creative and innovative ideas, as well as worst probable scenarios that might hinder future success.
So what are your beasts? How can you tame them? Beasts are different for each one of us. One of my beasts is email. I don’t know about you but I am quick to stop whatever I am doing just to answer an email that could easily be done later. When that icon pops up on the computer, I tend to stop whatever I am doing to look and see who has sent me a note. Email is a huge distraction in my work day, therefore to tame my beast I keep my computer off for the first 15 minutes of the day. I spend that 15 minutes planning for key strategic objectives that are longer term and need some attention and detail today. When my computer is on, I have established three different levels of distinction for email. Now, End of the Day, and Later files were set up in my email system. Any email that arrives which deserves immediate attention goes in to the Now file and get answered every two hours. Email that is less important goes into either the End of the Day or Later file. At the end of my day I will spend whatever time I need to in answering the email. This system works for me and it is not to difficult to come up with a systematic approach to taming the beast. Here are two suggestions to tame your beasts.
- Take some time and identify the beast that is distracting you most from strategic thinking time. Once you have identified the beast create a plan to tackle it.
- Try to curb your appetite for activity and regularly schedule some time during the week to focus on long term issues. By doing so, you will be more in tune and prepared for future obstacles and opportunities.
With a little focused effort, you will be surprised at how easy it is.
The Training Must Go On: Facilitating A Program From The Airport
Monday, June 2nd, 2008Recently, one of our clients scheduled a 1-day workshop in Milwaukee, WI, USA. And as usual, our facilitator was traveling to the client’s site a day prior to the planned workshop date. While the weather was clear in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, where our facilitator was departing from, the weather in Milwaukee was about to turn ugly. At approximately 3:00 pm, my client called to tell me a big storm was in route that would potentially bring 4 inches of snow to Milwaukee. At this point my client and I began to put into practice some everyday strategic thinking. We laid out a few different scenarios we could do in order to carry out the training.
Scenario 1 – Perhaps the storm wouldn’t be too bad and our facilitator would still arrive into Milwaukee without any glitches.
Scenario 2 – If the facilitator was delayed and unable to get into Milwaukee that night, we decided that we would start the workshop a few hours later since the participants were in town for an additional day and would be able to work later into the day and evening.
After discussing the two scenarios, we also made a plan to check in with each other 2 hours later to report the status of the facilitator’s flight. The first report, the airline loaded his flight and took off for Milwaukee. We hoped we had dodged the storm. A couple of hours later our facilitator called me to report that his flight had been diverted from Milwaukee to Grand Rapids, MI. He would not make it into Milwaukee that night. The plan was for him to get back on his flight and return to Atlanta for the night, and take the early morning flight and get into Milwaukee at around 8:30 am. If all went well he could still arrive in town and only have a delayed start.
Well, the next morning, I received a call from our facilitator; his flight had been delayed enough that he wouldn’t be able to get to Milwaukee in time to teach the workshop. This is when we began implementing scenario three. Our facilitator would teach the workshop from the Atlanta airport via telephone. This was possible because our client contact had seen the workshop on occasion and while he couldn’t teach the content, he could help keep structure and organization to the “tele-training.”
This created some additional everyday strategic thinking to take place. Since Atlanta is a busy airport, our facilitator was faced with a challenge to find a quiet location, that also had an outlet for power where he could keep his phone plugged in as well as his computer. With a little searching he was finally able to find a location, create a mini-mobile-workstation, and subsequently deliver a training session over the phone. The great part about this whole story is that it was a success. The company’s representative was amazed at the efforts that our team went through, from discussing the options to the final way we were forced to teach the workshop. While we couldn’t control the weather, we could control our focus and attention for how to cope with its inconvenience and put together a collaborative and strategic effort to make sure that the show went on, and pull it off successfully.
Gather Intelligence
Monday, May 5th, 2008A few years back, a friend of mine was laid off from his high paying corporate job. Prior to this, he was living the good life, as they say. A very expensive home, a new luxury car, vacations to the best places, and it seemed as if my friend had money growing on trees. I was very happy for him.
Because he was a go-getter, he had climbed the corporate ladder quickly, he never settled for anything less than being the best. He enjoyed playing corporate politics and found allegiances in the organization that assisted him in his progression. But, as my friend was heading for a very prestigious position in the organization, reports of company problems began to surface in the news papers and news channels. Stock prices began to decline. I assumed my friend was going to be okay considering his lifestyle and his aggressiveness.
A few months after I had heard the reports of the company financial problems, my friend called and asked me if I knew of any jobs out there for him. I was surprised to hear that he had been laid off with two weeks severance pay. Unfortunately, he was more surprised than I was. He said “it was a complete shock to him” and that he “never saw it coming.” This really surprised me. I wasn’t an employee of this organization and yet I read the paper and watched the news and heard months prior to his layoff that the company was struggling. Two questions went through my mind. Could the signs of impending layoffs have been out there for my friend to pay attention to? If the signs were there, what could my friend have done about it? The bottom line was, my friend was out of a job and according to his admission, he never saw it coming.
In CMOE’s workshop on Applied Strategic Thinking, we discuss the importance of being able to manage the stumbling blocks that may appear in the future. The ability to navigate through future impediments is critical to any successful strategy. The most important aspects of the navigation is gathering intelligence and then the expertise to scan the environment and analyze what could help or hinder future success. Additionally, having the ability to sort through clutter and use information that can lead to proper action is vital. I believe that if my friend had spent a short amount of time looking at the intelligence available months before, he may have been able to ask questions that could have prepared him for the job loss. More importantly, he would have been able to plan and prepare in the event that his job was eliminated.
There is no question that when you ask yourself better questions you are going to get better answers. The same exists with intelligence. The better you are at intelligence gathering, the more informed you are. Establishing regular intelligence gathering better prepares you for the future and helps you anticipate trends and patterns that exist, or will exist.
Acknowledging the Pain: Change in an Organization
Monday, April 28th, 2008
Change for many people is stressful, but for others it can be tremendously traumatic. Dr. Thomas Holmes and researchers at the University Of Washington School Of Medicine, who developed the Life Change Index Scale rated the factors that caused stress from the low (11) a minor traffic ticket to a high (100) the death of a spouse. Different types of business change fell midway on the scale between 20 and 46. Because this study is based on averages, a change stress rating of 47 may not impact one person as much as it may another. As business leaders, we understand that change is inevitable. So we must be aware of how change affects our co-workers and steps we can take to make the transition more comfortable for them and in turn for the success of the initiative.
Resistance
Many times people will resist change by denying or ignoring that it is occurring. Sometime ago, a coworker’s wife was expecting another child. This co-worker was so resistant to the change in his family; he refused to even acknowledge that he had any part in the pregnancy. I remember that for weeks the whole team tried to get him out of his denial, anger, and refusal to accept the new baby. Then when the couple found out they were going to have twins, he became so agitated that we were worried he might leave his wife and the children. Of course, by the time the children were born, he had not only accepted the situation, he amazed the office with his compassion for the infants, especially one. The umbilical cord of one of the babies had been blocked; so the child (a little boy) had not developed at the same rate as the other child. This baby was not allowed to leave the hospital for weeks, and our co-worker visited that child every day and lovingly talked to the baby while gently rubbing the child’s back, a complete attitude change to the situation.
Acceptance
While this story may not seem to apply to the change going on in your organization, it does address the extreme to which some people resist change. This man could not see any benefit of this change in his life, nor was he ready to respond to the change. No amount of discussion, encouragement, or teasing would sway his thinking. He understood that he had only two choices, accept the babies or leave.
Acceptance of his feelings was the one thing that helped him most and it is the beginning act that can make a big difference for change in your employees. My friend’s wife never showed any anger or hurt when he expressed frustration at the upcoming lifestyle change. His supervisor set time aside each week for him to talk out his feelings about the situation. Little by little, he began to make comments about the upcoming event and the adjustments he was willing to make.
Because others acknowledged his right to have his feelings, he was able to sort out the real reason for his resistance. As he stated later, most of his apprehension was based on fear, fear of failing as a father, not being able to provide adequately for a larger family, and that the change would alter his wife’s feelings for him.
Application
Employees who are resistant to change may also be basing their opposition on fear. He/she may fear the change will change his/her position, affect job security, or lead to more and even greater changes. You can help your employees through the emotion of change by:
• Demonstrating commitment; clarifying your reasons for the change.
• Inviting questions and responding promptly
• Using active listening skills; show that you hear and understand the concerns of others, but don’t take on or “own” their burdens
• Increasing communication and information sharing
• Reinforcing the value of your team members
• Providing regular updates on the progress and benefits of the change (e-mails, bulletin boards, memo’s, briefings, etc.)
• Working through the “harsh realities” of change
• Being accessible to team members
• Setting aside time for individual coaching
Change is constant and if we learn to manage change, we will learn to embrace the value it brings.
Strategy: The End Result
Monday, April 7th, 2008
We are often asked the question what is the end result of applying strategy on a day to day basis. Through extensive research and development, we have discovered that great strategic thinkers in any job or at any level learn how to nurture these skills. They avoid being seduced and succumbing to the activity addiction. Good strategic thinkers develop their skills by practicing and hunting “small game” such as projects, assignments, and team issues. Later, many assume key corporate positions or become political leaders or military strategists on a much larger scale.
While most people won’t become world leaders or famous generals, many people will fulfill valuable roles in organizations. Your value will increase if you master the principles and skills of personal strategic thinking. These are skills that can be learned or acquired with just a little commitment and desire. Yes, there will be some formidable forces to overcome. You will have to be less enslaved by your own comfortable thought patterns and your traditional views and solutions to problems. You will have to develop patience and move away from the “task magnet” to give your mind a chance to breathe, think, reflect, and contemplate. You will have to resist constant pressure for instant results, quick fixes, and fast solutions to every challenge or dilemma. In short, you will have to be courageous and bold as you try to bring more balance and a strategic perspective into your life.
The journey to improve strategic thinking isn’t necessarily simple or easy. It takes an investment in training and practice. But the journey will be worth it. You can be more successful if you think ahead, determine what it will take to make a difference, and make a greater contribution. You can avoid a lot of heartache when you anticipate forces that can lift you up or take you down. By adopting a proactive mindset, you will be more prepared for those tough decisions, realities, and opportunities that come your way. You can prepare your team to weather the storms and to move out when the sun appears.
Experiment with these ideas, and add liberally to these fundamental skills and ideas as you steer your ship into the future. We are convinced the strategic process will change your life in positive ways with a little thought, with some heart, discipline, and with a lot of determined action.
“The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created, created first in mind, then in will and next in activity. The future is not someplace we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found but made and the activity of making them changes the maker and the destination.” John Scharr
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