3 Methods To Improve Strategic Thinking Skills For Managers
Bosses love ideas and solutions. Demonstrating strategic thinking skills, as a manager, opens doors and elevates you in your boss’s eyes. You can help them solve some of their biggest problems.
For those serious about progressing in management, serious about increasing influence and impact in the business, improving strategic thinking skills is one of those must dos to stand out and get ahead.
Anyone can improve their strategic thinking skills. Strategic thinking, like all skills, needs to be practiced in a sensible way to improve. Everyone starts at the bottom without much idea of what to do. Some of the best strategic thinkers have absolutely been where you are now at some point.
3 Methods To Improve Strategic Thinking Skills For Managers
- What is strategy and what is strategic thinking
- Why a plan is not a strategy
- To improve your strategic thinking, start with the patterns around you
- Adopt this mindset to improve your strategic thinking skills
- Create structured thinking and problem solving to develop influential strategic thinking skills
Better big picture thinking will help you whatever your current management role is right now. Big picture thinking and understanding helps you prioritise your work more effectively. It helps you contribute to solving your boss’s problems. It will help you move further up the career ladder faster.
How to improve strategic thinking skills starts with understanding exactly what is strategy, followed by 3 very useful and practical methods to build strategic thinking skills.
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What is strategy
Strategy should provide a picture of the organisation as it wants to look in the future. Strategy is vision directed at what the organisation should be and NOT how the organisation will get there. Strategy is a theory, a future state of being often expressed as a set of goals.
Strategy is the thread or common ground that binds every part of the business together into a single direction. Strategy is long term – with timeframes in years rather than months.
Two useful definitions of strategy
1 – An integrative set of choices that position you on the playing field of your choice in a way that you win
2 – The framework which guides those choices that determine the nature and direction of the business. Those choices relate to the scope of products and services, markets, key capabilities, growth, profit and allocation of resources.
Strategy should be communicated as clearly and simply as possible. Use straightforward language to define it, not corporate speak. Make it as relatable to your employees as possible. Make your strategy clear and understandable.
Why a plan is not a strategy
Planning is prioritising and organising the resources you have. Planning is about what you can control to create specific outcomes. Planning is deciding when and how to undertake tasks, activities and projects to create outcomes. Planning is about HOW to get to a goal.
Strategy is the goal. Strategy is the destination. There are a lot of unknowns within strategy. You don’t know how customers and markets will react for sure. You hope they will do what you expect. You can’t guarantee you will win by deploying a specific strategy. You expect but don’t know a specific strategy will create advantage for you. As you receive feedback from customers and markets, tweak and adapt your strategy.
Strategic thinking is not same as planning. Planning is what you do to implement your strategy and reach your goals.
Next, I will cover how to improve strategic thinking skills
The first method to improve strategic thinking skills, start with the patterns around you
Some great actions to create good foundations for how to think strategically are to:
- Investigate and analyse the market in which your company operates
- Find out if there are technology, legislation, or other trends that are impacting your sector and markets
- Work to understand your customers, what their needs and wants are and how well your products and services solve their problems.
- Find out what your competitor’s strengths are, what products and services they offer and how these compare to your company’s
- Dig into your company’s strategy and compare to what you have learned about the market, competitors etc. Form your own opinions about the pros and cons of the company’s strategy
- Using the company strategy is a backdrop, think about how well does your team’s goals and focus of work currently align to company strategy?
- Finally, how is your company financially performing and how strong is its balance sheet?
Improving strategic thinking is improving how well you find and understand the patterns, the opportunities and the risks involved in doing business.
Strategic thinking is understanding all the trade-offs involved, the different needs of the various parties and the timelines that might impact those trade-offs.
Understand the patterns around you and form a view, an opinion about the pros and cons of your company’s strategy. Then you can start thinking about what changes would enable your company to win more effectively.
Useful tools for this stage include SWOT, PESTLE, Porters Five Forces and the Business Model Canvas.
Do your homework and understand what is happening around you to improve your strategic thinking.
The second method to improve strategic thinking skills – Adopt a curious mindset
Strategy is a future state. Strategy is a theory. There are a lot of factors that you can’t control and you can’t be sure of delivering. Thinking about strategy can leave you feeling uncomfortable. You can’t promise that the company will reach the future state described in strategic goals.
For these reasons being okay with feeling uncomfortable and not being able to control outcomes is important. There will be ambiguity and this should not put you off. To enable good strategic thinking, be okay with potentially being wrong.
People with a curious mindset, who are open to different views and experiences, who respect others different points of view are likely to be better at strategic thinking. They use all these different viewpoints to create a strategy more likely to win.
Another very useful skill to develop is the ability to rapidly and fluidly transition from high level big picture thinking to diving right down into the detail. The detail is often where the best insights come from, that others haven’t found yet, that change your view of the big picture. Being able to shift from the big picture to the detail and back again is really helpful to expose more insights than others.
Finally, it takes time to build strategic thinking skills. Keep working at improving your skills. Over time you will get there. Don’t be too hard on yourself while you are on the journey.
Stay curious, open and interested in the different viewpoints and outlooks others have.
Third – Create structured thinking and problem solving to develop influential strategic thinking skills
Influencing strategy and creating new company level strategies are a very big deal. Get strategy right, or mostly right and your company is likely to be successful in a competitive marketplace. Get strategy wrong and your company will struggle to survive.
Of course, strategy is not the only factor in success. Strategy is the starting point on which everything else should be built.
To influence or create a new strategy, you have to bring a lot of people along with you. The bigger the impact of decisions, the more people are typically involved. You have to educate and persuade them that your strategy or ideas have merit and will make a difference to the success of the business.
Demonstrating that your thinking and problem solving is structured and considered is pretty essential to building support for your thinking and solutions. Get enough support and your solution wins.
Think very carefully about the actual problems you are solving. Structure the framing of the problem so you demonstrate you are solving the right problems. Apply an equal amount of structure and logic to your solutions, including the testing you have done. List out all the assumptions you are making and what has to happen for your solution or strategy to create winning advantage.
Then you can start discussing with colleagues and bosses. Ask them for input and challenge. The more others are involved, the more it becomes their strategy and solution too. We support what we agree with.
At the end of the process, everyone signing off on the strategy needs to be agreed and aligned. Agreement is what you are aiming to achieve by using structure, logic, testing and clear assumptions.
In summary
We have gone through different methods to improve strategic thinking as a manager. Strategic thinking is one of those core skills along with solution building, communication skills, and people management that determine how high you rise in your management career.
Work at improving your strategic thinking skills. Spend time each week thinking about the big picture. Look at what is happening in your sector and what your competitors are doing. Keep looking at and thinking about your company’s strategy. Strategy needs to keep evolving.
Work on adopting an open and curious mindset and seek the views and opinions of others, even when they are very different from you own.
If you have any questions on “3 Methods To Improve Strategic Thinking Skills For Managers”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Any manager will benefit from improving their strategic thinking and their ability to go from the big picture into the detail and back out again. Good strategic thinking improves so many areas – decision making, setting direction, prioritising, communicating with your team, asking probing questions, getting others thinking, …
The strength of your strategic thinking is a door opener (when good) or a door closer (when not). The more senior your position, the more strategic thinking you need to do your job well. If you don’t work at improving your strategic thinking, you limit your career.
To improve your strategic thinking, decision making and direction setting, consider a coaching programme with me. Click here to find out more.
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