Most business owners understand the need for strategy when it comes to leading their organizations toward a successful future, especially in today’s business landscape where uncertainty reigns across all industries. The ability to think strategically and navigate change effectively is key to creating a sustainable organization. Yet true strategic thinking and planning skills are a rarity among company leaders today, who are often consumed with the present or focused on near-term goals. In fact, according to Chief Executive Magazine, seven out of ten leaders are not strategic.
Despite the widely accepted importance of strategic leadership, its actual practice is clouded with ambiguity, leaving many business owners wondering what it actually means to be strategic and how they can strategically lead their own companies. The result? A leadership gap of epidemic proportions that has shortened the average lifespan of corporate entities to just 40 years.
The ability to think strategically is not instinctively developed in the business world. On the contrary, it is a skill that must be actively cultivated and purposefully practiced. Above all, this requires a framework for developing strategic leadership skills, which prompted Decision Strategies International to develop The Six Key Elements of Strategic Thinking, a proven guide designed to help leaders of small, medium-sized and large organizations alike hone their strategic leadership abilities. This framework was developed based on more than two decades of experience training strategic leaders and conducting targeted research with more than 20,000 professionals from 6,000 organizations in 176 countries.
The Six Key Elements of Strategic Thinking include the ability to: anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align, and learn. When mastered and used together, these skills enable leaders to help their organizations both adapt and succeed in a world of uncertainty. Each of these six complementary elements encapsulates essential behaviors and practices that allow business owners to steer their companies toward sustainability and growth amid an ever-changing and increasingly competitive marketplace. Let’s look at each one in turn:
- Anticipate: Rather than focusing on what is directly ahead, leaders must anticipate disruption by looking for game-changing information at the periphery, searching beyond current boundaries and building networks to help them scan the horizon.
- Challenge: It is easy for leaders to rely on tried and true solutions, especially when disruption pushes them to the boundaries of their comfort zone. Strategic leaders repeatedly challenge the old way of doing things and encourage different — even contrarian — points of view.
- Interpret: Anticipating change and challenging conventions surfaces valuable facts and figures that must be thoughtfully analyzed to yield actionable results. Strategic leaders compare and contrast these data points in unconventional ways and test multiple hypotheses before arriving at conclusions.
- Decide: Strategic leaders use process and discipline to arrive at a good enough position to make a timely decision and avoid missed opportunities due to analysis paralysis. They tend to frame the decision and approach; balance speed, rigor, quality, and agility; and take courageous stands, even with incomplete information.
- Align: Strategic leaders must know how and when to align divergent agendas to work toward a common goal while welcoming diversity. Actively encouraging open dialogue among stakeholders and addressing misalignment helps build trust and reach consensus.
- Learn: Successful leaders embrace learning in its many forms, whether it is through interactions with various customers, partners, and market segments; through experimentation by way of innovation; or through ongoing check-in points and after-action debriefs to surface early indicators of success and failure. Leaders can improve performance and decision-making when armed with these insights, which are both key to long-term strategy.
Using this framework, we created The Strategic Aptitude Assessment, a tool that enables leaders to identify and improve their strategic approach through actionable feedback for development. By evaluating their strengths and weaknesses in each area, leaders can work toward strengthening their strategic capabilities and can better shepherd their companies to seize profitable opportunities and navigate around complexities and challenges.
In the past, business owners were able to succeed by being great at what they knew best, but today’s leaders must have a more macro, systems-wide approach to leadership across a variety of areas within the organization and beyond. This requires a multi-faceted perspective and a skill set that leaders can achieve by mastering the art and science of strategic thinking.
Take the Strategic Aptitude Assessment today to see how www.decisionstrat.com/insights/strategic-aptitude-assessment/.
