How much of your time in your calendar is dedicated to strategy and long-term planning? In one survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% said that being strategic was the most important leadership behavior to their organization’s success. Yet, it is not being done.
Common challenges leaders have in finding time for strategic planning:
1. Short-term focused. Most leaders want to spend more time on strategy but one challenge that keeps them from the practice is being too enmeshed in the near term. Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found that 96% of leaders surveyed claimed they lacked time for strategic thinking because they were too busy putting out fires. Some leaders do not know how to step away from the whirlwind. For example, Lisa, an HR Vice President, explained how she approached her job in a transactional manner, simply aiming to get the next hire and not recognizing that she needed an entirely new approach to recruitment and retention for a fast-growing company. To do the latter effectively, she needed to step away from her workload and short-term hiring goals to create the think time to rework defective processes and devise a more scalable system that will allow her to streamline the hiring process that will eventually save significant time in the long run.
2. Poor email management. The volume of emails keeps leaders focused on immediate and sometimes low-priority concerns. According to a Radicati Group analysis, we receive an average of 126 emails per day. I have some executive clients who receive 400+ emails. If you were to categorize your emails, which ones are truly valuable and which ones are time sucks? How much time do you spend on emails? How much time do you want to spend? How is your time on emails serving your long-term goals? What’s your plan to free yourself from this time-consuming activity?
3. Failure to prioritize and delegate. When you create a jam-packed schedule and are running from meeting to meeting, you cannot contribute strategically without adequate time to reflect on the issues and consider all the options. What meetings do you need to deprioritize? How can you delegate so you do not have to be at all places at all times? Our routine can put a damper on strategy time, so how can you reallocate your time to prioritize the unfamiliar and non-routine activities to increase your capacity to act more strategically? In a ten-year longitudinal study of over 2,700 newly appointed executives, 67% of them said they struggled with letting go of work from previous roles. Trying to do everything yourself is a sure path to limiting your leadership and that of others because they do not have the chance to grow.
4. Falling into the competency trap. This is when you continue to do a previous task related to execution because you do it well, enjoy it, and get a confidence boost because you are accumulating expertise in that one task. The problem is that while you are doing that work, you might be neglecting the other activities such as strategic planning and setting vision and direction, which are skills more needed by the business. What produced your past successes likely will be different than the future wins you will need to succeed. Indeed, you can deliver amazing work on the wrong things and it will go unnoticed. If you are in stage 3 of your leadership but still doing stage 2 work, it is time to depart from your comfort zone and exercise new strategic muscles.
To avoid some of these challenges, create space in your schedule:
Strategic thinking does not necessarily mean numerous sabbaticals or extensive leadership retreats but is more about carving out consistent space. As productivity expert David Allen shared in an interview with Dorie Clark for her book Stand Out, “You don’t need time to have a good idea, you need space…. It takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don’t have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they’re suboptimal.”
Once you find that calendar time, some executives may not know how to begin their strategic thinking time. I find that some of my clients put too much pressure on themselves believing they must begin with states of enlightenment that yield novel insights, but it can start much smaller.
Here are some things you can do during your protected strategetic and think time sessions:
1. You can distinguish the urgent from the important. Stephen Covey’s 2 x 2 matrix is helpful for this in separating more immediate needs from longer and more meaningful work. Where do you want to have an impact? What will it take to achieve success? How will the organization evolve to meet challenges on the horizon? These are the kinds of deep, foundational questions that are best addressed with long-term planning.
2. Think with others to get an outside perspective. Reach out to other departments or build rapport with leaders, managers, front-line team members, and customers to listen and understand their roles, concerns, and ideas. This will add to your knowledge bank of all parts of the organization to better utilize those insights in your projects to ensure alignment with the corporate strategy from the outstart. You can also think about how to use other partners for new initiatives and create win-win experiences. As you develop these relationships, you will learn more elements of the business and know which key individuals to call when you want to brainstorm or move past an obstacle. It would help if you also were proactive about connecting with peers outside your organization and in your industry to understand their observations. You can share your ideas across your network for greater meaning-making.
3. Expand your cross-functional learning. When you understand more about all areas of the organization and know who all the key players are, each project you work on becomes a puzzle. When you move pieces, you can see how it affects others either directly or indirectly. When you consider the impacts of your decisions on all company domains, you see the big picture more clearly. That is strategy.
4. Ask other strategic thinkers about their processes. Turn to people who have skills you admire and find out what their process is as a prime learning opportunity. You can start the conversation with, “I noticed you offer really valuable contributions in the meetings; I would love to know your process for strategic thinking? Where do you get your insights from?” You’ll be surprised how quickly others engage and what you can discover.
5. Learn. Read books and articles, listen to podcasts and interviews, and watch instructive videos and webinars to expand your thinking and learn new approaches relevant to your specific situation. There are many valuable conversations happening in your industry, especially among futurists who have spent much time thinking about these topics. How do you receive regular doses of information that can spark your own? Are there classes, industry conferences, professional gatherings, or associations that you can attend? Can you form a book group with your coworkers to have dedicated space for this type of learning? It doesn’t need to be time-intensive, even just 10 minutes of reading and 30-minute discussions can yield significant returns.
6. Take a break. It can be common to think that to accomplish your work, you must increase your hours. In fact, research by Bob Sullivan reveals that productivity decreases for those who work more than 50 hours per week. When you can let your mind wander, you can come up with great strategic ideas. Lin Manuel Miranda came up with the idea for his award-winning play Hamilton when he was on vacation with his wife fishing. You can check out my other blog on the importance of taking breaks for breakthroughs.
7. Reflect. Do you regularly ask, what’s working and what’s not? How can you chronicle your successes and failures to rethink your approach to make it even more strategic? You can develop a reflective practice that can be as little as one or five minutes that will engender tremendous value because you will be more intentional about your actions and contributions.
8. Pick a small project to experiment. Is there one project you can work on regularly to develop some of your strategic skills? You can test a hypothesis and run an experiment and once you take action, reflect on your progress and learnings and then iterate to improve even more. If you just stay in your head without taking action, you will rob yourself of the best learnings, which usually come when you try something and get immediate feedback.
9. Engage in meaning-making activities. Developing great strategic thinking skills requires you to gain exposure to key roles, synthesize broad information, participate in a culture of curiosity, and gather experiences that allow you to identify patterns and connect the dots in novel ways. That’s why leadership development programs often include job rotations, cross-functional projects, and face time with senior leadership - they accelerate your critical thinking. You can take that 30-foot view to better understand those issues that get raised over and over in different parts of the organization. Why hasn’t anybody solved them yet? What’s been the dominant approach? What’s a different approach to take?
Leaders know the value of spending time on strategic thinking, yet they are not doing it because of the challenges of short-term thinking and the urgency of trivial tasks. Start by fostering a practice for thinking and reflecting that will help you develop strategies that can bring significant benefits to you and your organization.
Quote of the day: “Get off of the dance floor and look at your operation from the balcony.” - Ron Heifetz, Harvard Professor
Q: What is your thinking and reflecting practice? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!
As a Leadership Coach, I partner with leaders to engage in strategic thinking for them and their teams, contact me to learn more.
How do you create space to strategize?