Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking as a leader. This is what we're going to be talking about today on how to lead the podcast for CEOs, founders, and leaders who want to find the perfect balance of empathy and authority. I'm Kate Waterfall Hill, and I'll be sharing some ideas from over 30 years in working in business and leadership development.

Before we start the show, I wanted to remind you that my new programme, The Leadership Accelerated Premium is now available. It's all the best bits of a course, engaging videos in the shape of my How to Lead Digital Academy, plus the best bits of a networking group, new contacts, a support system, and a sense that you are not doing this journey alone.

Plus, you get weekly coaching calls with me where you get my personal attention on your challenges and interactive workshops on a different topic each week for 24 weeks. Not only that, you get institute of Leadership membership and certification plus disc personality profiling so you can really understand yourself well and be a better leader.

Places are limited, so make sure you book your place or places for your managers and leaders who want to elevate their skills and learn within a safe, friendly community. Find out more at waterfallhill.co uk. So let's kick off with my alter ego, Linda, the bad manager as always, and see how she approaches being strategic.

“Jason, you asked me to give you some guidance on how you're going to get this promotion sorted, and I've come up with a plan. Basically, you just need a strategy. You need to be more strategic. Think like a strategist, have a strategic plan, think more strategically, come forward with a strategy, demonstrate the strategic side of you.

How are you supposed to do that? Well, Jason, I'm afraid you'll have to come up with your own strategy for being more strategic. I can't spoon feed you everything can I?”

Most of us think we understand what it means to be strategic. We talk about long-term goals, we create vision statements, and we might even have the word strategy in our job titles, but true strategic thinking, the kind that drives business growth and career advancement requires much more than just using the right buzzwords.

Let's be honest. Being strategic is challenging work. It requires us to lift our gaze from daily operations, question our assumptions and consider futures that don't yet exist. It means resisting the natural urge to get lost in the comfortable details of execution while avoiding the harder work of defining direction and purpose.

But here's what makes this particularly relevant for leaders. If your team doesn't understand what you mean when you ask them to be more strategic, you are setting them up for frustration and potentially failure. And without clarity, you won't get the innovative thinking, thoughtful planning, or business impact you are looking for.

So how do we move from this vaguely asking for strategic thinking to actually developing and recognizing it. Let's start with the barriers, those moments when strategic thinking sometimes falls apart. Take a moment to think about your own patterns. When do you or your team get stuck in tactical mode?

Perhaps it's during busy periods when everyone's focused on delivery. Maybe it's when immediate problems feel more urgent than future opportunities. For some teams, it might be simply not having a shared understanding of what strategic actually means. In your context, the key to improving isn't just demanding more strategic thinking that only increases anxiety.

Instead, it's about bringing clarity to what you're actually asking for. Perhaps you could define it, model it. And then create practical pathways to develop it. Here are some strategies that you could try. First, clarify what strategic thinking means in your context. So defining what strategic specifically means for your team's work and level.

Provide concrete examples of strategic versus tactical approaches, and create opportunities for your team to observe strategic conversations in action. If they've never seen it, how are they going do it? Secondly, pay attention to how you're communicating about strategy. So your feedback needs to be specific as always, and actionable, you might say, be more strategic when you're giving somebody feedback.

But if you're not explaining what that looks like, people will guess and likely miss the mark. And it's important that we all position strategic thinking as a learnable skill. It's not just an innate ability that some people have and some simply don't. Thirdly, and this is crucial, create space for strategic thinking to happen.

This is particularly challenging for leaders because we often run such packed schedules that no one has time to step back and think. But sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is create deliberate space for big picture consideration.

When you are developing strategic thinking in your team or even in yourself, I encourage you to really set aside dedicated time for strategic discussions and make those separate from operational reviews. Think about the questions that you might ask, either yourself or your team that prompt higher level thinking and teach your team to connect their work to the broader business or organizational goals and priorities.

Here's what makes this approach particularly powerful. When you clearly define what strategic thinking means and create space for it to develop, people feel confident about their ability to meet your expectations. They're more likely to take appropriate risks, suggest innovative approaches, and engage with a worker at simply a higher level.

Yeah, this absolutely does take time. I acknowledge that, but so does any development and improvement. In our fast-paced world, whether you're in a business organization or non-commercial, it might feel inefficient to invest in developing strategic thinking rather than just focusing on getting things done.

But if you think about this, how much time do we waste executing on poorly conceived plans? How many opportunities do we miss because we're too busy managing the urgent and we don't then address the important.

Let's talk about what happens when we get it right though. When leaders successfully developed strategic thinking in their teams or in themselves, several things start to shift. Firstly, your impact increases when team members understand how their work connects to the broader goals, they make better decisions about where to focus their efforts.

They prioritise high value activities over busy work and deliver more meaningful results. Secondly, innovation improves because by encouraging people to consider the bigger picture, you open the door to being more creative, to finding solutions that might never otherwise emerge to a purely tactical approach.

Strategic thinkers are more likely to question assumptions and explore alternative approaches. Thirdly, career development accelerates team members who develop strategic thinking capabilities inevitably become more valuable to the organization and more prepared for advancement.

They're better positioned to tackle complex problems and contribute at higher levels. Let's consider some specific scenarios where strategic thinking makes a crucial difference. in project planning, for instance, if you start by asking how this project connects to the broader business priorities, ask people to consider potential future developments that might impact the approach and ask them to look beyond the immediate deliverable to longer term implications.

What a difference that might make in problem solving discussions. I'd encourage you to push beyond symptoms to understand root causes. Consider multiple solutions and their second order effects. Don't just grab the first thing that comes up and evaluate options against strategic priorities, not just whether it's feasible or not.

And then in team development. If you help team members understand the business context for their work, then we'll likely to feel empowered if you provide exposure to strategic discussions at higher levels and give feedback that connects individual performance to strategic outcomes. Everybody in the team is pushing towards that common goal. So remember, strategic thinking isn't just about planning far into the future. It's about understanding context, seeing connections, and making decisions that align with broader purposes. Notice where your team members are showing curiosity about the bigger picture.

Asking insightful questions or making connections between seemingly unrelated areas. These are all signs of emerging strategic capability. A practical tip I'd like to share, if you find yourself struggling to develop strategic thinking in your team, try the five wise approach when discussing a project or a decision.

Ask, why is this important? Five times in succession. this progressively deeper questioning often reveals the strategic underpinnings of tactical work and helps people connect their everyday activities to the larger purpose. So in summary then I'd urge you to remember these key points. Define what strategic specifically means in your context.

Provide concrete examples that illustrate the difference between strategic and tactical thinking. Create deliberate space for strategic conversations. Connect individual work to broader organizational goals and recognize and reward strategic thinking.

When you see it, if you're trying to develop your own strategic thinking capabilities, I'd urge you to put time aside to create that deliberate space for your own conversations in your own thinking. Try to connect your individual work with the organizational objectives and look for concrete examples of strategic thinking and others that you could emulate. True strategic thinking isn't just about using the right buzzwords. It's about creating clarity, alignment, and thoughtful direction that enables everyone to contribute to meaningful organizational outcomes.

That's all for today's episode of How to Lead. Until next time, keep leading with clarity, care, and curiosity. If you've enjoyed this episode, do follow for more leadership insights and remember. If you'd like my personal support, please do take a look at my website, waterfall hill.co uk, For more information about my one-to-one coaching and the newly accredited Leadership Accelerator premium program, there's never been a better time to take your professional development seriously than right now.

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Until next time, thanks for listening.