Tag: business strategy

Sharpen Your Strategic Thinking Here

Strategic thinking integrates analytical skills, problem-solving skills, creative skills, communication skills, along with management skills.

 

Strategic Thinking is the hard stuff of business.

If you are looking for a few ideas to strengthen your strategic thinking, sharpen your ability to see new solutions, think more critically, and be more analytical to help impact your business’s growth and competitiveness, then keep reading.

Strategic thinking is critical for all organizations since it charts the path between the present and the future and helps leaders shift their focus from short-term execution to the longer-term needs of the organization. For this reason, strategic thinking skills are highly desirable and worthy of improvement through learning, study, and practice. 

“Knowing the name of something doesn’t mean you understand it.”

Richard Feynman

The Skills of Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking integrates analytical skills, problem-solving skills, creative skills, communication skills, along with management skills. These skills can tremendously impact a business’s trajectory, growth, and competitiveness in the marketplace. These skills are essential, allowing a business to achieve its objectives, overcome obstacles, and address challenges it faces in the markets.

  • Analytical skills: A strategy starts by understanding objective data from your business, markets, and stakeholders. These inputs include financial statements, KPIs, industry trends, market conditions, and vendor and stakeholder perspectives. This step helps define the current reality facing your business.
  • Problem-solving skills: Strategic planning is often used to solve problems or address challenges, such as missed financial targets, inefficient workflows, or an emerging competitor. Implementing a strategy addressing your central challenge requires understanding the problem and its potential solutions. From there, you can craft a strategy that solves it.

“A real strategy is a coherent mix of policy and action designed to overcome a significant challenge” 

Richard P. Rumelt

  • Creative Skills: An excellent strategist can integrate data analysis with problems and challenges to generate new approaches and ideas. Developing your competitive advantage requires understanding your firm’s unique resources and capabilities and leveraging them in new ways not previously available in the market. These new approaches require one to see “between, around, and through” the obvious to find a new path forward.
  • Communication skills: Implementing a strategy for your company requires exceptional communication skills. Strategy can appear complex making it essential that all stakeholders understand and are aligned, so everyone works toward the same goals and objectives. Building teamwork, consensus, and collaboration make communication critical to strategic success.
  • Management skills: Strategy isn’t just about thinking of solutions; it requires action to achieve results. Once data has been analyzed, the problem is understood, and a solution has been created and communicated, you need strong management skills to bring everything together.

With the core Strategic Skills outlined, let’s work on improving them. The good news, like any skill, your strategic thinking skills can improve with focus and practice.

TO IMPROVE YOUR STRATEGIC THINKING SKILLS…try the following.

  • Ask the hard questions. To improve your strategic thinking skills, ask more challenging questions. These questions can relate to products, markets, management, or any question that points to adding value for the customer. Doing so allows you to become adept at spotting opportunities, and exploiting opportunities is what strategy does.
  • Observe and analyze. Use Reality Testing to see things as they are rather than how you would like them to be. One of the most effective ways of accomplishing this is to observe and reflect on your current situation, ensuring any strategy you conceive is objective and grounded by facts.  

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Richard Feynman

  • Play the Devil’s Advocate. Before implementation, your strategy requires thorough analysis, evaluation, and testing to ensure other possibilities are noticed. Play the Devil’s Advocate with your ideas, assertions, and analysis will make any weaknesses or shortcomings evident. You need to be able to defend your strategy when questioned by others. Defending your strategy against other Team members further hones your thinking and logic, helping you better communicate and execute the strategy. Considering opposing ideas, perspectives and opinions further enhances your strategic thinking skills by forcing you to step back and look at the short and long-term views.
  • Always keep learning. The body of knowledge related to strategy is massive. Learn from your work and the experiences of others, as well as books, references, journals, society memberships, presentations, and conferences. Be committed to constant learning and self-improvement.

THE TAKEAWAY

Strategic thinking is essential for business today, regardless of your role or industry. Remember, you can practice these skills in your daily life as well. Try exercising these skills as you plan and face challenges in your own life. Finding an effective solution or alternative will be easier.

 

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Stay Interviews are a great and budget-friendly tool managers can use to gauge employee satisfaction, company culture, and shared thinking on improving and growing the organization.

 

Executives have two roles; 1) creating value and 2) motivating talent. Value creation requires combining resources and capabilities to sustain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Motivating talent requires leveraging human capital through effective management so resources can achieve their highest productivity. Companies that have struggled to survive through the COVID pandemic now face an even more significant challenge, the “Great Resignation,” which has dramatically altered what an employer must do to motivate and retain talent.

A recent survey found more than half of working Americans will be looking for a new job in the next 12 months. Bankrate’s August 2021 Job Seeker Survey found that 55% are likely to do so. Another 28% said they’re not actively looking for a job but still expect to move companies in the next year. As a result, businesses are looking for creative ways to replace workers that have left their workplace.

Keeping the current workforce is critical to minimizing the challenges of hiring today. Businesses now use signing bonuses and dramatically higher wages to help attract new workers. As retention efforts escalate, intelligent employers are instituting something new; “stay interviews .”A Stay Interview is the opposite of an Exit Interview: Instead of asking why an employee is quitting, a stay interview focuses on what motivates the employee to stay employed, what could be better about their work experience, and how they envision the next stage of their career within the organization.

Stay Interviews are a great and budget-friendly tool managers can use to gauge employee satisfaction, company culture, and shared thinking on improving and growing the organization. Managers who conduct stay interviews can retain top talent, engage their employees, and lower employee attrition in ways that others cannot.

A Stay Interview is a structured discussion a leader conducts with an individual employee to learn specific actions the leader can take to strengthen the employee’s engagement and retention with the organization. Managers are best suited to perform the stay interview since they have a more profound knowledge of the challenges employees face daily and potentially more power to make necessary changes. Stay Interviews can boost morale and workplace engagement by signaling to the employee that you are interested in their perspective on the job and the company and willing to make adjustments if necessary to keep them and keep them happy.

Some guidelines to follow as you plan for your Stay Interviews.

These interviews should be held privately with preplanned questions to keep the conversations productive and on track. Notify the employees that you will be conducting “stay interviews” with the workforce to uncover what makes them happy at work and what can be changed if needed.
There are many good interview questions that you can use for these conversations. The best questions to get the employee to share rich and detailed ideas are open-ended. These are some examples that the Society for Human Resource Management recommends:

  • What do you look forward to when you come to work each day?
  • What do you like most or least about working here?
  • What keeps you working at this company?
  • If you could change any one part of your job, what would that be?
  • What would make your job and overall work experience more satisfying?
  • How do you like to be recognized for your work?
  • What talents do you have that are not being used in your current role?
  • What would you like to learn more about, within or outside of your current role?
  • What motivates (or demotivates) you?
  • What can I do to best support you as your manager?
  • What can I do more of or less of as your manager?
  • How would you describe our company culture to a brand-new employee?
  • What might tempt you to leave?

Once the interviews are complete, the next step will be acting on the information received. If employees have provided honest, legitimate concerns, take steps to correct them.

Whatever insights you gather will be useless unless you are determined to act on them. After analyzing the findings of your Stay Interviews, one must reinforce what works, change what doesn’t, and assess how your efforts are working out. Importantly, you don’t need to do everything people tell you but prioritize the requests from those you deem more valuable.

So, are you ready to get to those Stay Interviews with your employees?

References:

https://www.bankrate.com/personal-finance/job-seekers-survey-august-2021

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-forms/pages/stayinterviewquestions.aspx

https://www.fastcompany.com/90715052/how-to-conduct-a-stay-interview-with-your-employees-and-why-you-should

https://www.zenefits.com/workest/why-you-should-conduct-stay-interviews-to-retain-top-talent/

 

Got Strategy?

Strategy is complex; it involves making tough choices, choosing what to do, and choosing what not to do. Good Strategy changes the actions and behaviors of the organization’s workforce.

Every company says they have a Strategy; many do not, including those that believe they do.

Let’s start by seeing what Strategy is not. When the redundant, non-essential, and distracting elements are removed, what remains begins to look more like Strategy.

Strategy is critical to business success. Creating and executing an effective business strategy is a task that the CEO and C-Suite cannot readily delegate to others. When Strategy is weak, objectives are unclear, resources are not properly allocated, communication and marketing are inconsistent, competitive advantage is eroded, and financial goals are not met. Operating with a flawed strategy that is not a strategy at all will lead to poorer outcomes for the business.

Richard Rumelt in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy concisely states that to detect bad Strategy, look for one of the following:

1. Fluff: Bad Strategy is a simple statement of the obvious combined with a generous sprinkling of buzzwords creating the illusion of high-level thinking. It may sound Strategic but lacks any actionable direction.2. Failure to face the challenge: Bad Strategy does not define or recognize the business’s challenge.
3. Mistaking Goals for Strategy: Goals or desires are not strategies. Goals support the Mission; Strategy supports and directs how the Goals are to be achieved.
4. Bad strategic objectives: Strategic objectives are set by the leaders. Strategic objectives are wrong when they do not address critical issues or challenges.

Strategy is not Vision or Misson.
Strategy is not Goals or Objectives.
Strategy is not a Powerpoint presentation or slide deck.
Strategy is not a mashup of words with Strategy added to it.
Strategy is not just another good thing to do.

Strategy is complex; it involves making tough choices, choosing what to do, and choosing what not to do. Good Strategy changes the actions and behaviors of the organization’s workforce.

“Strategy brings relative strength against relative weakness.”

Richard Rumelt

Making these decisions is hard. It requires focusing on what you are building and letting go of that which no longer serves your objectives.

Letting go is hard.

So, how good is your Strategy?