Thinking and Acting Strategically – What are your underlying strategic theories?

We have been taking a sustained look into creating your personal leadership development plan. A plan that considers your journey as a leader. No one else’s, just yours!

To help create your plan, we’ve been adapting a framework originally developed by Ginger Lapid-Bodga in her book What Type of Leader Are You? that outlines four key leadership areas, namely:

1. Self-mastery
2. Personal skills
3. Enterprise skills
4. Leadership skills

Today we go further into developing and understanding your set of enterprise skills. We use the language of enterprise skills because enterprise refers to a broader skill set than just business or financial skills. Enterprise skills include both left brain and right brain skills that help to create your organization’s desired future state as well as your ability to think and act strategically as a leader. Like I said, a very broad set of skills.

Today’s blog is focusing on thinking and acting strategically, which is super important.

Before we can think and act strategically, we have to develop our theories about the future we seek to create. Please watch this very helpful video from Roger Martin that highlights the difference between your strategic theories and the process of strategic planning.

Your strategic theories about the future help guide the implementation of everything you do. Without a set of strategic theories to be your guide, you are just managing tasks to get you through the day, week, and month.

Let’s use a few of Design Group International’s strategic theories as example:

1. We believe that it begins with design. By posing questions to Clients, a Process Consultant is able to help Clients gain clarity on the it they are seeking to discover and transform. The Client defines their it, not the Process Consultant.

2. Organizational transformation happens by co-creating solutions with a Client to the challenges they are experiencing and keeping them from a vibrant future. This is why we use the language of walking alongside.

3. By providing a shared platform to build their consulting practice, our Process Consultants are able to stay focused on delivering Client value, hone their craft, and develop their own consulting business. By pooling our resources, we are able to deliver a business enterprise that supports our consultants.

These three strategic theories (and a few others) drive everything we do. Developed by our Founder, Mark L. Vincent, they have been honed and further refined over two decades by our Partners. These theories help us think and act more strategically.

In What Type of Leader Are You?, Ginger establishes six underlying competencies to nurture and develop your ability to think and act strategically. To help you develop them, here is a rather simple self-evaluation framework. On a scale of 1 to 5, rate yourself on the following competencies of thinking and acting strategically:

1. Developing a compelling vision
2. Clearly articulating your mission
3. Crafting well-defined strategies
4. Creating quantifiable goals and successful tactics
5. Deeply understanding the economy of your industry, marketplace, and customer-base
6. Knowing your organization intimately and comprehensively, more specifically its:
   • Structure, systems, and people
   • Products, services, and technology
   • Finances and underlying economy

A radar graph (shown below) is a great way of identifying which area you want to work on. A radar graph simply compares your self-assessment to a predetermined goal (in this case 5) In addition to doing your own self-evaluation, you may want to consider asking your leadership team to evaluate you and you them.

Having an underlying strategic theory in place helps you think and act more strategically. What theories do you have about the future of your business?

Mind how you go,

Lon

Lon L. Swartzentruber

Design Group International
Managing Partner & CEO

PS: If you would like to talk with me about your leadership journey, please give me a call me at 616.516.9870, or schedule a 30-minute discovery call , or simply email me at lons@designgroupintl.com.

If you wanted to go deeper, please read:

A New Way to Think, by Roger Martin

Infinite Game, by Simon Sinek