Managing Yourself

How
Strategicto Become a
Thinker Better
by Rich Horwath
November 08, 2023

Vahit Ozalp/Getty Images

Summary. A common piece of developmental feedback is the need to move from

tactical to strategic thinking. But what does that look like? The author, who has
coached thousands of leaders to help develop their strategic thinking capabilities,
has identified three core behaviors to work on: acumen (thinking), allocation
(planning), and action (doing). close
Having worked with more than a quarter million managers over
the past 20 years to sharpen their strategic thinking capabilities,
I’ve realized that many leaders with wonderful potential are
unfairly branded with the “tactical, not strategic” label, causing
their careers to stall out. For far too long, determining whether
someone was tactical or strategic has been a subjective guess
based on job titles, instinctual hunches, and cherry-picked
observations.

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CEOs and talent management leaders have told me they need a

specific behavioral roadmap to help high-potential employees
transition from tactical to strategic. To design this roadmap, I
surveyed 2,586 managers from North America, Europe, Africa,
and Asia to understand the real-world challenges they faced in
developing, communicating, and executing their strategies. I
identified three core behaviors that anyone who’s been given the
“tactical, not strategic” feedback can work to develop.

Acumen
Acumen is about how you think: your ability to understand a
situation, generate new ideas to move from the current to desired
future state, and solve challenges to create new value. Acumen is
comprised of three core components:
 Context awareness informs your vision of the big picture.
Understanding both your internal situation (culture, purpose,
processes, etc.) and external situation (market trends, customer
behavior, competitive landscape, etc.) helps you allocate
resources to reach your goals.
Insight refers to your ability to generate learnings from your
context awareness. This requires curiosity and an exploratory
mindset. A key trait of strategic thinkers is their discipline to
continuously record, categorize, share, and reflect on insights.
Innovation is when you channel your context awareness and
insights to create new value. It typically springs from the thinking
involved in overcoming a challenge or solving a problem.
To evaluate your acumen, ask yourself the following:

Do I regularly assess my business’s current situation, both from

both the internal and external perspectives?
Do I share valuable insights with my team?
When problem-solving, do I stick to the tried-and-true, or do I
look for new approaches?
Allocation
Allocation is about how you plan. Strategic thinkers set goals,
distribute resources, recognize the risk and tradeoffs when
making decisions, and create advantage by offering superior
value. Where you invest your resources — time, talent, and capital
— is a primary driver of your effectiveness and it requires the
following components:
 Ability to focus resources: Resources are generally finite and
without discipline, can be spread too thinly to have an impact on
achieving your goals and objectives. A strategic approach entails
the ability to focus resources, the courage to make trade-offs, and
the willingness to ensure that your use of resources aligns with
your strategic intent.
Decision making: Instead of simply accepting the base-level
option, strategic thinkers generate a range of viable alternatives.
Since trade-offs are being made with each decision, they analyze
the pros and cons of each alternative, as well as the level of
acceptable risk.
Competitive advantage: The central aim of strategy is to create a
benefit, gain, or profit. A competitive advantage is formed when
the configuration of one’s resources and activities result in the
creation of superior value for customers relative to competitors.
Once advantage is attained, strategic thinkers continue to
diligently evolve it in order to stay ahead of the competition.
To determine whether you’re an effective allocator, ask yourself:

Do I proactively move resources from underperforming areas

towards ones with greater potential?
Am I spending my time on activities that align with my goals?
How am I measuring myself against my competition?
Action
Action is about what you do. Preparing a business strategy is only
one step; how you implement your strategy determines your
success. This requires the ability to collaborate with others,
execute strategies to achieve goals, and optimize your personal
performance.

Collaboration is your ability to work with others to exchange

knowledge, data, and insights that help further your progress
toward a defined goal. Communication skills — verbal, visual, and
written — are fundamental to successful collaboration, as is the
ability to listen without judgment, because it allows you to
approach the interaction with an open mind that is receptive to
new and different paths forward.
Execution involves the disciplined application of resources to
achieve your goals. It requires focus and discipline to combat the
continuous stream of interruptions, noise, and shiny objects that
can lead you to veer off course. While execution is often thought
of as tactical, there is an inherent strategic component, because
insights that aren’t actualized will languish in unproductive
obscurity, lessening the value you can provide.
Personal performance is the stewardship of your own time,
energy, and mindset in pursuit of your desired outcomes. Being
strategic requires the flexibility to adapt to changing
circumstances and the mental agility to overcome challenges and
forge new paths in the attainment of goals.
To assess your action skills, ask yourself:

When it comes time to implement a strategy, how prepared am I

to take action?
Do I ask others what their goals are at the beginning of the
conversation?
 Do I easily get side-tracked by other obstacles along the way?
...
When we define strategic as possessing insight that leads to
advantage, we can then begin to assess our own strategic fitness
level. Acumen, allocation, and action — the ability to think, plan,
and do — are what separate strategic thinkers from the rest, and
they are behaviors that can be learned and applied to create
superior value. While beauty may be in the eye of the beholder,
strategic is in the behavior.

Rich Horwath is the founder and CEO of the

Strategic Thinking Institute where he serves
leadership teams as a strategy workshop
facilitator, executive coach, and strategic
advisor. He is a New York Times and Wall Street
Journal bestselling author of seven strategic
thinking books, including Strategic: The Skill to
Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve
Executive Excellence.