What is Strategic Thinking?
Claudio Sartorio
Finanças, administração, planejamento estratégico, avaliação empresarial, valuation, orçamento, gestão de projetos.
What is Strategic Thinking?
Strategic thinking focuses on finding and developing opportunities for growth and improvement, allowing a dialogue between people to stimulate creativity and consequently affect the company's management. Although many find it challenging to have strategic thinking, there are some points to be worked on enabling the use of this skill. The strategic thinker is always looking beyond the ordinary. They look for situations that are different and that they can foresee. All this talk seems like we're talking about powers and superheroes, and maybe I can agree with that. You can check the differences between a strategic thinker and another non-strategic on the table:
More about Strategic Thinking
I don't need strategic thinking since I am a great leader.
Having a strategic mindset is essential for those in leadership positions. Mainly because they are in charge of generating profits for the company, attracting more customers, and putting together a great team. You need to have a visionary mind as the market is in constant flux, so the team and the company will be ready to change direction when needed. It is crucial to be aware of new technologies, the economic sector, and the target audience. Strategic thinking includes ideas, planning, and operation since it will effectively define which course of action to take in each situation. In short, strategic thinking increases the chances of success since it encompasses all the case parameters. Check this excellent video about the Strategic Mindset. I hope you like it!
What are the benefits of strategic thinking in leadership?
Strategic thinking will make you grow as a leader. It will help you think and put into action the best means to follow. You can achieve a more open mind about new opportunities. It will make you ask better questions to understand situations and opportunities since the market is constantly evolving, making it more flexible when it comes to news. It will still help you understand problems better to think of all the appropriate means for growth. You need to get out of your comfort zone!
The strategic thinking process is all about ideas.
We can split the strategic thinking process into creativity, strategic planning, and planning operations.
So we can start with creativity, where you create the process. It is also good to brainstorm ideas and their potentials because you have no success data until implementing the concept. After that, you build on the potential, importance, and ease of executing each idea. Then you can conclude and move on to the next step.
At strategic planning, we must take the ideas already prioritized and then start to assemble their steps and strategies. This stage includes external and internal values:
External: economic and political climate, social changes, and external technologies.
Internal: The needs of customers, the company, and employees.
Finally, we get to the planning operation when we set up all the steps and strategies. We start putting these into practice and defining the goals, which are the expected results, and the objectives, which are more variable to achieve the goals.
Here is a great short video about the benefits of strategic planning, which means the process of strategic thoughts and execution:
The trends are not the best way to build strategic thinking since they change every day.
Knowing the context well, the trends, and the current motivators of big business are essential to developing strategic thinking, but these will not be enough. You should also increase some skills so that you can succeed in your knowledge about trends.
- Routine - look for trends and pay attention to the obstacles faced by your co-workers;
- Proactivity - it is essential that you pay attention to the observations of your co-workers;
- Understanding - assimilating all information obtained, defining what is unique, and then defining its impact on strategies.
More about Thinking Skills:
Strategically speaking, I can't be bold.
You should first ask yourself, "How can I broaden my considerations?".
You are increasing the skills of perspective and investigation, collecting different points of view, consequently achieving more possibilities, different approaches, and results.
Difficult questions like:
- What can impact the results negatively?
- What are the first signs of success or failure?
- Do the results support the more prominent company's objectives?
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By asking these questions, you may realize that you can engage better in the company's strategic thoughts and still benefit the project in mind.
Be thoughtful and strategic.
Avoid taking the debates personally. When you can separate the personal from the professional, you can maintain your position in discussions and make bolder questions. At first, being a strategic thinker may seem complicated. Still, you will be grateful for taking the risk with commitment and realizing that you are elevating your skills.
More about Ways to improve Strategic Skills:
Missing some meetings to take a break is never an option.
The feeling of unproductivity may appear when we stop for a while to think. Being in several meetings all the time, without breaks and moments of free-thinking, can end up harming your creativity, preventing you from having strategic thoughts.
Talk to your colleagues about the possibility of missing meetings that you don't need to be in, or arrange a time to think and be faithful to it. Schedule meetings with yourself weekly, and take this time to think and look for answers without pressure.
Here’s a video about how taking breaks helped to improve work, thinking clearer, creating new perspectives, and coming up with ideas:
To communicate my ideas, I need to:
Excellent communication is essential when speaking about strategic thinkers, as disorganized words and phrases lose their senses, and great ideas can fall apart. You must prioritize and structure your thoughts so that when verbalized, people can understand the main message.
Remember always to keep things clear, to avoid misunderstandings. If more specific situations require jargon, you can tell the people you direct to prepare themselves for the discussion. And finally, always try to answer people’s questions first before moving on to your speech.
Here is a video where Simon Sinek briefs Strategic Thinking and talks about the importance of the language we use to communicate:
CEOs and prominent executives constantly seek how to encourage strategic thinking to evolve their companies. It turns out that thought doesn't work that way because it isn't about talking to employees to do it.
Strategic thinking is a mindset that people can work on daily, looking for trends, listening to people’s points of view, taking breaks to think, and not being overwhelmed. These actions will help you to accomplish values with different perspectives and become a habit.
Keep your mind open, getting rid of prejudices allowing you to solve problems creatively. Sometimes we find value where we can least expect it.
Here is a video where Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO, talks about how to be a strategic thinker, it is worth to watch:
I can be a better leader if I develop my strategic thinking.
You have reached the end of this micro-course, and I hope you keep improving yourself and using the tips you have read here.
I hope you liked this journey and it can go on!
Here is a takeaway so you can check once in a while when you need some refreshment: