Striving to Level Up? Focus on “The Big Five”
While today’s career world for many is about something other than “The Climb,” my coaching ranks and workshop programs are filled with individuals striving to scale their impact and, for many, gain a seat at the executive table. If you are motivated to grow your responsibilities and engage at a senior management level, you must cultivate your knowledge and skills in these five critical areas:
- Developing as a strategist
- Cultivating executive presence
- Leading at scale
- Growing your influence
- Leading innovation and change
Your ability to generate positive results with and through others earns consideration from those above you for taking on more. However, displaying competence in these five sets of activities/behaviors is the admission ticket to the executive ranks.
In this series, I unpack each of the five, offering guidance and resources for those interested in The Climb as part of their career progression. Note: my Senior Manager Program focuses on these over a five-month period, blending training, cohort, and coaching.
In part one of this series, I offer guidance on developing as a strategist.
Where Do Strategists Come From?
I wish there were a simple formula for developing as a strategist. There isn’t. It takes time, experience, exposure to strategy issues, and a chance to engage in decisions often shrouded in risk and ambiguity. It also takes assertiveness. You have to push your way into the work of strategy in your organization. Sound executives are always looking for individuals who can translate market, customer, and technology forces into ideas to create value. Inherent in this is your need to be seen as someone who can bring clarity and guidance to complicated and complex situations. They won’t see you if you don’t stand and speak up.
Those operating close to customers and markets have a head start. They see the impact of a firm’s decisions for products, programs, and pricing on customers. They understand market dynamics, customer emotions, and even competitor actions. Those are valuable data points, but not enough.
Good strategists understand the landscape beyond the current customer issue or the latest product feature request. They see the emerging forces of change in all its many forms. They translate noise into patterns and patterns into ideas. They make sense of these factors and connect the issues to identify and articulate how their organizations can leverage or mitigate them. It’s their ability to move beyond rumination and discussion to analysis, assessment, and recommendation that is key to their development as strategists.
Learn to Use the Tools—It Takes Time on Task
You could arm me with the best quality, highest-end woodworking tools for my shop, and I still couldn’t make cabinets, tables, or chairs that anyone would describe as good quality. The same goes for handing me an instrument. I picked up a guitar recently. I’m not sure, but I think it begged me to set it down.
There are no black boxes or magic answer machines for strategy. It’s a thinking (and then acting) person’s game. In a career of study and thousands of hours of working on strategy across all sectors, I’ve found three tools more equal than all the others in helping me and my colleagues think through our situation to arrive at a strategy.
Check out my article, “For Strategy Work, It Pays to Learn to Use the Right Tools,” where I teach you to Find the Kernel, Learn to H.O.P., and Paint with a Palette. These three toolsets offer more potential than relying simply on the ever-present S.W.O.T. analysis technique.
Spend time with the resources I point to in the above article and start integrating them into your thinking and dialog with others, and everyone will notice.
Develop as a Critical Thinker
For those motivated to expand their strategy skills, there’s nothing more important than stretching and flexing your thinking skills. In my experience, good strategists work hard to strengthen their skills by:
- Cultivating Beginner’s Mind Thinking—striving to see situations through a fresh perspective and working hard to push their dominant logic and experience-based biases out the door.
- Leading with Curiosity—invigorating their sense of wonder and asking questions that many would shy away from for worry that they might sound like less of an expert.
- Learning Framing—no, this isn’t about finishing your basement; it’s about looking at situations from multiple angles—for example, positive and negative—and then developing unique solutions for those frames.
- Cultivating Analogical Thinking Skills—effectively observing and learning from other environments and ecosystems outside their core business or industry and then striving to see how they might adapt or adopt different approaches. Consider: why might the emergence of autonomous vehicles create a massive demand for artificial hearts? (attribution to others/source unknown)
There’s more. A lot more. But search on those and start employing them with the issues you encounter and in the groups you work with. Teach people how to use the Six Thinking Hats framework, and you will be raising the skills of everyone around you for critical thinking.
Study Strategy
In a world of change, we often forget to look to history for guidance. Human psychology has largely remained unchanged over the millennia, even with all the variables changing around us. I’ve yet to meet a successful strategist who didn’t have a keen curiosity and knowledge of historical examples across business, world leaders, past crises, and others. Push beyond business books to biographies and histories and bring your critical thinking to those situations.
If reading isn’t your forte, study and play games. Chess, Monopoly, the ancient game of Go, and many others offer outstanding lessons in strategy.
Learn to Build Coalitions to Explore, Experiment, and Execute
Items two to five of The Big Five identified above are all about developing the communication and people skills to galvanize others around a common objective and execute it. Until you engage in solving the issue, introducing a new approach, product, or pricing, or exploring a seemingly attractive market, you’ve not engaged in strategy. It takes building support, gaining sponsorship, and galvanizing the right resources to execute. You need to grow your influence and learn to lead at scale—even if leading doesn’t mean having the resources reporting directly to you. Effective leaders learn to navigate gray zones by building coalitions!
Get Pushy!
Get involved with initiatives focused on doing something new to generate improved outcomes. This is beyond participating in process improvement activities, although those are healthy and promote critical thinking and stakeholder analysis. Ask your boss if you can support a new initiative. Share your well-developed ideas. Offer insights to prompt dialog. Aim to provide an executive briefing on your findings and ideas. And, importantly, engage in the small talk and hallway or post-meeting conversations that can lead to assignments.
The Bottom Line for Now:
I’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic, yet we have to start somewhere. Part of your admission ticket to the executive ranks is how people assess your ability to think, decide, act, and generate good outcomes with and through others in the face of ambiguity. As you cultivate competence with the items in this article, there’s plenty more to learn and explore. For now, I want you to start building experience with strategy.
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Check out Art Petty’s Senior Manager Program—Cohort-based learning, expert instruction, guest experts, executive coaching, and an unrelenting focus on cultivated competence and confidence for The Big Five skills essential for senior managers and emerging executives. LEARN MORE
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