strategy — BLOG — Next Levels Coaching

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 critical factor in their organization’s success – yet 96% said they lacked time for it. The irony is telling. Everybody agrees it matters; few make space for it.

If you can be the leader who bucks that trend, you’ll gain a true competitive advantage. No one will schedule your strategic thinking for you – you have to decide it’s worth protecting.

The Barriers to Strategic Time:

1. Short-term focused. Most leaders want to think strategically but stay trapped in the near term. Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found that nearly all leaders feel “too busy putting out fires.” That means they never climb above the day-to-day chaos to reimagine the bigger system. Some leaders do not know how to step away from the whirlwind. For example, Lisa, an HR VP, 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 time to rework defective processes and devise a more scalable system that would streamline the hiring process, saving significant time in the long run.

2. Poor email management. The constant flood of emails keeps leaders trapped in the immediate and often distracted by the unimportant. According to a Radicati Group analysis, the average professional receives 126 emails per day, and some of the executives I coach receive more than 400 per day. If you were to categorize your messages, which ones truly create value, and which simply drain time and energy? How much time do you spend in your inbox versus how much you want to? How does this time investment serve your long-term goals? What’s your plan to free yourself from this time-consuming activity? Strategic leaders reclaim focus by creating boundaries — batch processing, designating “no-email hours,” or using their inbox as a decision tool, not a to-do list. No one is going to change your inbox for you; you have to change your relationship with it.

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 in all places at all times? Our routine can put a damper on strategy time. How can you reallocate your time to prioritize unfamiliar, non-routine activities and 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 a previous task related to execution because you do it well, enjoy it, and gain confidence as you accumulate expertise in that one task. The problem is that while you are doing that work, you might be neglecting other activities, such as strategic planning and setting vision and direction, which are skills the business needs more. What produced your past successes will likely 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 step out of your comfort zone and build new strategic muscles.

To avoid these challenges, create strategic space in your schedule:

Strategic thinking does not require a sabbatical or extensive leadership retreats – it requires space. 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 – freeing your mind from the constant hum of tasks, emails, and notifications. If you’re trying to fit 110% of work into 100% of time, the math simply doesn’t work. You have to make room for thought, not just activity.

Create more white space. Block thinking time and treat it as sacred. Even short, uninterrupted windows can help your brain shift from reactive to reflective. You can’t have breakthrough thinking when your mind is still loading yesterday’s to-do list in the background.

Toggle between heads-up and heads-down modes. Strategic leaders know when to look up — scanning the horizon, meeting people, exploring new ideas — and when to look down to execute with focus. Too much heads-up time, and you risk distraction; too much heads-down, and you can spend years perfecting something the world no longer needs. The power is in the toggle.

Cultivate your “20% time.” Google famously allowed employees to spend 20% of their time on creative or strategic projects; 3M did the same with 15%. Yet even at Google, fewer than 10% of employees actually used it. Why? Because it’s always easier to stay in the comfort zone of daily execution. Strategic thinking rarely feels urgent — until it’s too late. No one will hand you “thinking time”; you have to take it. Protect it like you would your most important client meeting.

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 strategic and think time sessions:

1. You can distinguish the urgent from the important. Stephen Covey’s 2 x 2 matrix is helpful for this, as it helps separate more immediate needs from longer, 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 best addressed through 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, enabling you to better utilize those insights in your projects and ensure alignment with the corporate strategy from the outset. You can also consider using other partners for new initiatives and creating 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 were also proactive about connecting with peers outside your organization and in your industry to understand their observations. You can share your ideas with your network to foster 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 they affect 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 a strategy.

4. Ask other strategic thinkers about their processes. Turn to people with skills you admire and learn about their process 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 by how quickly others engage and what you can discover.

5. Keep Learning. 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. Many valuable conversations are 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 a dedicated space for this type of learning? It doesn’t need to be time-intensive; even just 10 minutes of reading and 30 minutes of discussion can yield significant returns.

6. Take breaks to create breakthroughs. 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 regularly. 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. Run small experiments. 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.

Having a solid strategy can mean the difference between winning and losing, failing and succeeding. Knowing the stakes, how do you create a good strategy? What does strategy even mean anyway?

At the company level, Harvard Business Professor Michael Porter defines strategy as a unique and valuable position involving a different set of activities than your competitors or the same activities done in different ways. The Management theorist Henry Mintzberg famously defined strategy as 5 Ps: plan, ploy, pattern, position, and perspective. He explains:

· The plan helps you attain your objectives to achieve your intended position.

· The ploy is a new offering that is usually a surprise tactic that competitors would not expect.

· The pattern is understanding what was implemented before and pulling out useful aspects going forward.

· The position is your market location and the role you play in relation to your main competitors.

· The perspective is how your organization sees itself and how various target audiences perceive you.

Generally speaking, strategy is about your intention or the way you pursue the work to further the mission and creatively grow the business in various facets – employee health, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth. Let’s break down some strategy components:

1. Strategy is about choices. To do well, a company must choose to do some things great and not others. So, how do you choose? Many people like to begin broadly in these four categories to be industry leaders:

· Product leader - Nike and Apple are product leaders. They constantly change their designs or shoe technology to be the coolest and most innovative in the market. It is hard to outdo them in this category.

· Customer intimacy – This is about creating an incredible experience for the customers where they are entirely taken care of. You are prepared to jump through hoops for them. Most big companies can find this challenging, but Nordstrom is an example that offers excellence in this department. It is easier for smaller companies to do this like coffee shops, where workers know your name and have your order ready for you upon arrival. Zappos is known for exceptional customer service. Tony Hsieh shared a story about taking clients out one evening and when they all returned to their rooms, one of them craved a pizza, but room service was closed. Tony suggested they call Zappos and they came through on the request! Although they didn’t deliver themselves, they found a nearby pizza parlor that would.

· Operational excellence – This is about performing efficiently at scale. Starbucks and Chipotle have standardized their processes and have a model that can be exported seamlessly.

· Low Prices – Cost-effectiveness can be a powerful strategy. It is part of IKEA’s competitive advantage. They target young furniture buyers who want style cheaply.

Roger Martin, named #1 by Thinkers 50 says to know if you have picked a good strategy, follow this rule – “If the opposite of your choice is stupid on its face, you have not chosen. For example, if you say, our strategy is to be customer-centric or operationally effective or to value our talent, you can perform this test by stating the opposite - Our strategy is to ignore customers entirely.” If it does not make sense, it cannot work as a strategy because it would be hard to do that and succeed, let alone stay in business. Maybe regulated monopolies like the DMV can get away with this, but they do not engender much love. If the opposite of operational effectiveness is inefficiency, then that’s not a choice because it is not a profitable route.

2. Strategy is about trade-offs. Michael Porter says, “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do” because you do not have the bandwidth to do it all. Focusing on 1-2 things per quarter and adding the rest to your future list. Leaders need to know how to say no often. As Peter Drucker says, “strategy is saying no to the things that you would like to say yes to.” We can have many good ideas but only so much capacity to execute. The key is to choose a couple of priorities because when you have too many, your team spins their wheels, and there is no organizing framework since they all need your attention. Southwest Airlines is an example of a company that makes these strategic tradeoffs. They offer short-haul, low-cost, point-to-point service between midsize cities and secondary airports in large cities. They avoid large airports and do not fly great distances. Their frequent departures and low fares attract price-sensitive customers who otherwise travel by bus or car and convenience-oriented travelers who would choose a full-service airline. They empower their employees at the front desk to make decisions aligned with their priorities (e.g., planes landing on time, cheap prices, and treating customers well). It’s the reason they do not have milk on their flights because they do not have refrigerators since they have to be repaired when there are breakdowns, and that can lead to late departures.

3. Strategy is about problem-solving. What’s the space between the outcomes you're currently achieving and your aspirations? If you think about the biggest challenge in reducing client churn from 35-15%, what are the fewest battles necessary to win that war? How do you go about getting to the root of the problem to make sure you are solving the right one? How do you frame the question for the best solution?

4. Strategy is about simplicity. There is a myth that strategy needs to be complicated but to be most effective, you want to make it simple - understandable, memorable, and actionable. Research by Roger Martin supports this point. He says, “43 percent of managers cannot state their strategy. When executives are not clear on their strategy, they have to work harder to see their impact on the organization’s direction.” Moreover, execution does not like complexity. Leaders who talk about strategy in concepts and cannot make it simple to move it to a specific goal with the fewest number of executable targets will struggle. As Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” You can start with these simple questions - where are you? Where do you need to go? What resources do you need? What are your options? Which one is best to prioritize? What is the easiest workflow process? What’s your timeframe? What’s your process to reflect and reevaluate?

5. Strategy is about flexibility. You can be clear on your vision and flexible in your strategy. You do not want a strategy that will handcuff you when a pivot is in order so it is important to check in on your strategy. Pay attention to the context and as variables and circumstances require you to update your strategy, be ready. You also may not have gotten it right the first time and that’s ok, you can alter it after your strategy has been tested.

Strategy is an important part of any business and while some people try to make it complicated, it does not have to be. As Jack Welch said, “In reality, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.”

Quote of the day: “A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.” -Author Lee Bolman

Q: What’s your favorite strategy? What’s your process for formulating your strategy? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!

The next blog in this series (2/3) will focus on how to develop strategic thinking skills.

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with leaders to engage in strategic thinking for them and their teams, contact me to learn more.