In the beginning, there was just you and your partners. You did every job. You coded, you met with investors, you emptied the trash and phoned in the midnight pizza. Now you have others to do all that and it's time for you to "be strategic."
Whatever that means.
If you find yourself resisting "being strategic," because it sounds like a fast track to irrelevance, or vaguely like an excuse to slack off, you're not alone. Every leader's temptation is to deal with what's directly in front, because it always seems more urgent and concrete. Unfortunately, if you do that, you put your company at risk. While you concentrate on steering around potholes, you'll miss windfall opportunities, not to mention any signals that the road you're on is leading off a cliff.
This is a tough job, make no mistake. "We need strategic leaders! is a pretty constant refrain at every company, large and small. One reason the job is so tough: no one really understands what it entails. It's hard to be a strategic leader if you don't know what strategic leaders are supposed to do.
After two decades of advising organizations large and small, my colleagues and I have formed a clear idea of what's required of you in this role. Adaptive strategic leaders the kind who thrive in todays uncertain environment do six things well:
Anticipate
Most of the focus at most companies is on whats directly ahead. The leaders lack peripheral vision. This can leave your company vulnerable to rivals who detect and act on ambiguous signals. To anticipate well, you must:
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Look for game-changing information at the periphery of your industry
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Search beyond the current boundaries of your business
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Build wide external networks to help you scan the horizon better
Think Critically
Conventional wisdom opens you to fewer raised eyebrows and second guessing. But if you swallow every management fad, herdlike belief, and safe opinion at face value, your company loses all competitive advantage. Critical thinkers question everything. To master this skill you must force yourself to:
Challenge current beliefs and mindsets, including your own
Uncover hypocrisy, manipulation, and bias in organizational decisions
Interpret
Ambiguity is unsettling. Faced with it, the temptation is to reach for a fast (and potentially wrongheaded) solution. A good strategic leader holds steady, synthesizing information from many sources before developing a viewpoint. To get good at this, you have to:
Encourage others to do the same
Question prevailing assumptions and test multiple hypotheses simultaneously
Decide
Many leaders fall prey to analysis paralysis. You have to develop processes and enforce them, so that you arrive at a good enough position. To do that well, you have to:
Balance speed, rigor, quality and agility. Leave perfection to higher powers
Take a stand even with incomplete information and amid diverse views
Align
Total consensus is rare. A strategic leader must foster open dialogue, build trust and engage key stakeholders, especially when views diverge. To pull that off, you need to:
Bring tough issues to the surface, even when it's uncomfortable
Assess risk tolerance and follow through to build the necessary support
Learn
As your company grows, honest feedback is harder and harder to come by. You have to do what you can to keep it coming. This is crucial because success and failure--especially failure--are valuable sources of organizational learning. Here's what you need to do:
Shift course quickly if you realize you're off track
Celebrate both success and (well-intentioned) failures that provide insight
Do you have what it takes?
Obviously, this is a daunting list of tasks, and frankly, no one is born a black belt in all these different skills. But they can be taught and whatever gaps exist in your skill set can be filled in. I'll cover each of the aspects of strategic leadership in more detail in future columns. But for now, test your own strategic aptitude (or your company's) with the survey at
www.decisionstrat.com. In the comments below, let me know what you learned from it.
Paul J. H. Schoemaker: Founder and Chairman,
Decision Strategies Intl. Speaker, professor, and entrepreneur. Research Director, Mack Ctr for Technological Innovation at Wharton, where he teaches strategic decision-making. Latest book: Brilliant Mistakes
http://www.inc.com/paul-schoemaker/6-Habits-of-Strategic-Thinkers.html
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