It’s never too early in your career to start flexing your strategic thinking muscles.
Here are 6 ways to get started.
Understand your organisation’s strategy. Gather as much information as you can on why your organisation has chosen that specific strategy. Read and review all the documents you have, but also ask senior leaders to clarify it for you. Try to uncover the main strategic objectives and how they will be measured. See if you can identify the risks in the strategy and what is being done to mitigate them.
Make time to consider the big picture. If this doesn’t come naturally to you create dedicated space in your calendar, or in your team meetings, to consider a range of perspectives from different stakeholders and over different time frames. Examine how trends could impact your business.
Make decisions with an organisational-first mindset. Keep the strategy, and all key stakeholders, in mind whenever you make a decision. Consider how you will explain and communicate how your decision is aligned with the strategy.
Be clear about what you are, and are not, doing. Strategy is about focus, being clear on where you will spend your time and what you will therefore deprioritise. This can include reducing your time on some things, reducing your role in them, or extending a timeline to enable you to focus on your key priorities.
Align your team. Once you are clear on your priorities share them with your team so they can make their aligned decisions. Check in with your teams’ workload to make sure they are not holding on to legacy, non-strategic projects or activities.
Execute, measure and course-correct where needed. Strategic decisions are always made with incomplete information, they include a hypothesis about the future, so whilst you get on with executing your choices you also need to monitor the assumptions you made to see if they are coming true. Course correction in a strategy is part of the process; strategic leaders balance consistency of execution with agility.
For workshops and coaching to upskill yourself or your teams in strategic thinking contact me at Sarah Robertson Consulting or book a discovery call
