6 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers

Paul J. H. Schoemaker

You're the boss, but you still spend too much time on the day-to-day. Here's how to become the strategic leader your company needs.

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In the beginning, there was just you and your partners. You did every job. You coded, you met with investors, you emptied the trash and phoned in the midnight pizza. Now you have others to do all that and it's time for you to "be strategic." 

 

Whatever that means.

If you find yourself resisting "being strategic," because it sounds like a fast track to irrelevance, or vaguely like an excuse to slack off, you're not alone. Every leader's temptation is to deal with what's directly in front, because it always seems more urgent and concrete. Unfortunately, if you do that, you put your company at risk. While you concentrate on steering around potholes, you'll miss windfall opportunities, not to mention any signals that the road you're on is leading off a cliff.

This is a tough job, make no mistake. "We need strategic leaders!” is a pretty constant refrain at every company, large and small. One reason the job is so tough: no one really understands what it entails. It's hard to be a strategic leader if you don't know what strategic leaders are supposed to do.

 

After two decades of advising organizations large and small, my colleagues and I have formed a clear idea of what's required of you in this role. Adaptive strategic leaders — the kind who thrive in today’s uncertain environment – do six things well:

 

Anticipate 

Most of the focus at most companies is on what’s directly ahead. The leaders lack “peripheral vision.” This can leave your company vulnerable to rivals who detect and act on ambiguous signals. To anticipate well, you must:

• Look for game-changing information at the periphery of your industry
• Search beyond the current boundaries of your business
• Build wide external networks to help you scan the horizon better

 

Think Critically

“Conventional wisdom” opens you to fewer raised eyebrows and second guessing. But if you swallow every management fad, herdlike belief, and safe opinion at face value, your company loses all competitive advantage. Critical thinkers question everything. To master this skill you must force yourself to:

• Reframe problems to get to the bottom of things, in terms of root causes
• Challenge current beliefs and mindsets, including your own
• Uncover hypocrisy, manipulation, and bias in organizational decisions

 

Interpret 

Ambiguity is unsettling. Faced with it, the temptation is to reach for a fast (and potentially wrongheaded) solution.  A good strategic leader holds steady, synthesizing information from many sources before developing a viewpoint. To get good at this, you have to:

• Seek patterns in multiple sources of data
• Encourage others to do the same
• Question prevailing assumptions and test multiple hypotheses simultaneously

 

Decide

Many leaders fall prey to “analysis paralysis.” You have to develop processes and enforce them, so that you arrive at a “good enough” position. To do that well, you have to:

• Carefully frame the decision to get to the crux of the matter
• Balance speed, rigor, quality and agility. Leave perfection to higher powers
• Take a stand even with incomplete information and amid diverse views

 

Align

Total consensus is rare. A strategic leader must foster open dialogue, build trust and engage key stakeholders, especially when views diverge.  To pull that off, you need to:

• Understand what drives other people's agendas, including what remains hidden
• Bring tough issues to the surface, even when it's uncomfortable
• Assess risk tolerance and follow through to build the necessary support

Learn

As your company grows, honest feedback is harder and harder to come by.  You have to do what you can to keep it coming. This is crucial because success and failure--especially failure--are valuable sources of organizational learning.  Here's what you need to do:

• Encourage and exemplify honest, rigorous debriefs to extract lessons
• Shift course quickly if you realize you're off track
• Celebrate both success and (well-intentioned) failures that provide insigh

 

Do you have what it takes?

Obviously, this is a daunting list of tasks, and frankly, no one is born a black belt in all these different skills. But they can be taught and whatever gaps exist in your skill set can be filled in. I'll cover each of the aspects of strategic leadership in more detail in future columns. But for now, test your own strategic aptitude (or your company's) with the survey at www.decisionstrat.com. In the comments below, let me know what you learned from it.

 

Paul J. H. Schoemaker: Founder and Chairman, Decision Strategies Intl. Speaker, professor, and entrepreneur. Research Director, Mack Ctr for Technological Innovation at Wharton, where he teaches strategic decision-making. Latest book: Brilliant Mistakes

 

SOURCE: www.inc.com

5 Steps to Better Leadership Charisma

Brian Evje

Charisma is not a substitute for genuine leadership. These five steps can help you develop, and blend, the two.

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Leadership charisma and personal charisma are very different things. They both involve the same kinds of personal attributes--the ability to project confidence, the capacity to engage others, skill in articulating ideas, vision, and goals—which may explain why some leaders aim for one when they should be developing the other.

 

Personal charisma is centered on the individual, as is the case with celebrities. Leadership charisma exists when a leader is charismatic in the service of the organization, for a greater good, or a higher purpose.

 

While personal charismatic traits can help a leader, too much of a good thing becomes unhelpful. Leaders who concentrate on constantly influencing others, for instance, may reduce the motivation and ability of their people to stake out their own opinions.

Here are several things to consider when growing your own leadership charisma.

 

1. Ask yourself: Why?  The key to knowing which type of charisma you want to develop is rooted in your understanding of why you want to be more charismatic.  You must ask yourself, “Why do I want this?”  Do you crave attention, want validation, or are you trying to address some insecurity?  Do you want to be magnetic because you think that’s what a leader should be?  How does being more magnetic serve your leadership responsibilities?  How will this enable you to better serve the organization?  To better attend to your unique burden of being a leader?

2. You must be comfortable in your own skin. This is a broad encapsulation of the vital importance of knowing who you are as a leader, and why you are a leader, before you attempt to change your charismatic capabilities.  Your “skin” in this sense is everything from your personal values and drivers to the precise point you currently find yourself in your life’s journey.  Ask yourself, “What makes this leadership role at this time in my life the right role for me?  How have I prepared?  How will I continue to learn?”  

Many leaders make the mistake of avoiding these difficult questions and instead focus on external characteristics of charisma. They simply think, “I need to be more persuasive when interacting with my direct reports,” and then go nuts trying to be more persuasive. Nobody likes that. Ungrounded charisma is abrasive and troubling.  (I’ll write about the dangers of charisma in the final installment of this series.)  If you do not first determine how you fit into your own skin, it will be painfully obvious.

3. You must be comfortable in your own body.  Effective charismatic leaders have a sense of their physical selves and an ease about how they show up in front of their teams.  This is not to say you have be Baryshnikov. But many of the attributes of charisma are expressed physically, and a leader must learn how to literally embody charisma.  

How do you physically interact with people?  What are you physically aware of when you engage in one-on-one conversations, among a small group, in front of a large audience?  How do you modulate your voice, your listening, and your attention?  How do you non-verbally communicate your engagement with others?  How do you invite others to engage with you?  While the research is not universally conclusive, it is clear that the physical, unspoken interactions between people are overwhelmingly influential in human relationships.  Leaders who do not work on how they “show up” do so at their peril.

4. Practice, ideally with a Coach.  The attributes of charisma contain tangible and intangible elements – and working with a trusted Coach provides a framework for working on both these elements. You need to have an outside perspective on your physical behavior to learn about your internal thought process.

For example, if you want to work on a tangible element of charisma such as public speaking, you must connect the physical work of evolving your voice with the psychological work of why the work matters to you.  The recent film about Margaret Thatcher provides an excellent dramatization of a leader taking lessons to improve the tenor and tone of her voice and her ability to speak in public.  As a result of this work on her physical voice, Thatcher discovered her “internal leadership voice” that was grounded in her personal convictions.  It is a defining moment in her leadership development – and the result of practice.

5. Practice in a safe place.  Too many leaders think they can wing it when it comes to developing their leadership.  They try new things in front of their teams without first practicing, sometimes without much forethought. Bad idea. Performing well in the moment depends on practicing before the moment.  

Practicing in private with a coach provides an opportunity for clarity on your intent, and allows for trial-and-error.  While mistakes in public are inevitable and necessary, many mistakes are made much more usefully in private.

 

The good news is that if you want to practice leadership charisma, a little goes a long way. You are not endeavoring to call attention to yourself – you are developing new capabilities because your role requires you to shift your focus slightly and exercise these attributes.  You don’t have to become someone else or transform yourself. Just find the connection to your organization that will allow you to stretch yourself.

 

As noted in a recent article on Presidential leadership in The Atlantic, “Not even FDR was FDR at the start.”  He practiced, he learned, and he developed genuine leadership charisma.  You can too.

 

Brian Evje: Brian is a management consultant with the organizational effectiveness practice of Slalom Consulting and an advisory board member ofAstia, a global not-for-profit dedicated to increasing women's participation in high-growth businesses.

SOURCE: www.inc.com

Is Your Leadership Showing?

Brian Evje

You're the CEO of your company. But do you look and act like a leader? Here are five ways to get started.

Most members of a team know when they’re doing their work well. They often have a particular area of expertise, and they have deadlines and deliverables. 

 

For leaders, it’s a bit different. How do you show that you’re leading? Here are five competencies that good leaders demonstrate. They are related to one another, and each is framed with a question to help you think about opportunities to display leadership.

 

1. Visibility

We know that leaders need to be seen by followers--from formal presentations and announcements, to a crisis, to simple “managing by walking around.”  The less-obvious occasions, however, are easily overlooked. They can be lost opportunities, or powerful expressions of leadership.

 

As a leader, when do you feel out of your comfort zone? Maybe it’s when you have to deliver bad or unpopular news, or mediate a conflict between direct reports, or perform a necessary task that you just don’t like. One CEO client told me that he found it hard to celebrate the “small to medium wins” that his team wanted acknowledged. He considered these victories just part of doing business. His solution was to ask his executives to publicize accomplishments up to a certain level, allowing him to save his praise for the really big achievements.

 

Ask yourself, “How am I visible to others when I don’t want to be?” The answer is not to pretend to like being visible--far from it. Instead, ask yourself this question prior to an uncomfortable event, and use it to help you prepare. Consider some behavioral options, and put yourself in a different mental space. Then you’ll be able to be visible in a more productive, less stressful manner.

 

2. Preparation

Many leaders are great at preparing the logistics of leadership (the facts and figures in a plan, or the pitch for a presentation). Too many leaders, however, don’t prepare regularly for the deeper daily requirements of leadership. This is a shame, because most leaders face complex challenges, relentless claims on their time, and increasing pressures to deliver on goals over which they don’t have direct control. A bit of regular preparation goes a long way.

 

Just as athletic activities involve physical, mental, and emotional energies, leadership is a “whole-body practice” and requires preparation of the whole person. The next time you are running through your checklist prior to a leadership event, ask yourself, “How have I prepared my whole self for this?”

 

3. Comfort

This is closely related to preparation, because leadership discomfort is greatly enhanced by a lack of preparation. In order to be more comfortable as a leader and to appear that way to other people, you need to practice (which is simple preparation repeated).  By “comfortable,” I don’t mean perpetually happy or even relaxed--I mean groundedin your complete embodiment of leadership.

Ask yourself, “How do I display that I am comfortable with the responsibilities and demands of leadership?” Look for nagging doubts in the back of your mind; or instincts that need to be surfaced around what you feel should be happening instead of what is happening, or that feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach about an issue not faced. This is valuable data, and if you do not address your lack of grounding and comfort, others will certainly sense it for you.

 

4. Listening

One reason that modern leadership is hard is because an effective modern leader must listen to others. Though few people manage to do it, this may be one of the easiest competencies to demonstrate--provided you can resist the urge to talk.

 

Ask yourself, “What one thing can I tell myself as a reminder to listen more?” It’s vitally important that you think up an effective cue. If you can’t come up with one, that in itself could indicate a deeper internal misalignment.

 

5. Blend

This list started with visibility. When the opposite is required, a leader must blend in. Otherwise, he or she risks drawing attention away from the people and issues at hand. When you pull back, it makes it easier for other people to bring you hard problems, bad news, and perspectives that challenge the status quo. 

 

As a leader, it’s not all about you. The clearest way to demonstrate this is to find the right moments to step out of the spotlight so that other people get the attention they need. Ask yourself, “When necessary, how do I lower the volume of my leadership presence?”

 

Though leadership can be hard to demonstrate at times, regularly questioning how you embody your role will serve your leadership well.

 

Brian Evje: Brian is a management consultant with the organizational effectiveness practice of Slalom Consulting and an advisory board member ofAstia, a global not-for-profit dedicated to increasing women's participation in high-growth businesses.

SOURCE: www.inc.com

10 Questions That Create Success

 Geoffrey James

Want help focusing on what really matters? Ask yourself these on a daily basis.

Think that success means making lots of money?  Think again.

Pictures of dead presidents have never made anybody happy. And how can you be successful if you're not happy? And buying things with that all money isn't much better. A new car, for instance, might tickle your fancy for a day or two–but pride of ownership is temporary.

Real success comes from the quality of your relationships and the emotions that you experience each day. That's where these 10 questions come in.

Ask them at the end of each day and I absolutely guarantee that you'll become more successful. Here they are:

1. Have I made certain that those I love feel loved?

2. Have I done something today that improved the world?

3. Have I conditioned my body to be more strong flexible and resilient?

4. Have I reviewed and honed my plans for the future?

5. Have I acted in private with the same integrity I exhibit in public?

6. Have I avoided unkind words and deeds?

7. Have I accomplished something worthwhile?

8. Have I helped someone less fortunate?

9. Have I collected some wonderful memories?

10. Have I felt grateful for the incredible gift of being alive?

 

Here's the thing.  The questions you ask yourself on a daily basis determine your focus, and your focus determines your results.

These questions force you to focus on what's really important. Take heed of them and rest of your life—especially your work—will quickly fall into place.

 

Geoffrey James writes the "Sales Source" column on Inc.com, the world's most-visited sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies From the World's Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source

SOURCE: www.inc.com

Positive Thinking: How to Change Your Future

Geoffrey James

Want to be more successful? Change the way you view the world by adopting these 10 beliefs.

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If there were only one thing that I could communicate to readers, it would be this all-important observation:

The results that you get in business (and in life) are simply a byproduct of your beliefs.

Human beings all live in a cycle, in which beliefs and results are inextricably linked.  Here's how it works:

• Your beliefs determine how you feel about each situation, because those beliefs tell you what each situation means.
• Your emotions (and attitude) determine how well (or badly) you'll perform in any given situation.
• Your performance, naturally enough, is directly connected to your results. Though there may be other factors in play, it's only your performance over which you have control.
• Finally, your performance reinforces your beliefs, in either a negative or positive way.

The following diagram encapsulates this process:

Expectations vs. Reality

To illustrate how this works, I'll use an example from the world of sales.

Imagine a salesman who must do cold calling to build up a sales pipeline. This salesman has a deeply held belief that "if, first thing in the morning, I get 10 rejections in a row, it means I'm going to have a bad day and not make any sales."

 

The moment that salesman approaches that "10 rejection" threshold, he begins to adopt an apprehensive attitude, wondering whether the 10 rejections will "prove" that he's going to have a bad day.

 

He begins to feel fear and defensiveness, which immediately creep into his voice. He starts thinking about his "bad day" rather than listening to the customer. His apprehensiveness virtually guarantees that he'll get the (ominous) 10th rejection--at which point his emotional state (which is already low) will plummet further.

 

The sales rep is now absolutely sure that he's going to have a bad day. His despair makes him even less effective.  After a few hours, he stops cold calling, having "proven" his belief. And then, the next day, he starts the process again, worried about those all-important "10 rejections."

In other words, his beliefs are creating a future of failure.

 

Hanging On to Bad Beliefs

You'd be surprised how many people hang on to beliefs that create failure--without realizing that their beliefs are just as unrealistic as the "10 rejections" superstition. I couldn't possibly go through the entire list, but here are three that I hear a lot:

• Mondays are always depressing
• The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
• Life sucks, and then you die.

The absolute worst example I ever saw was a guy at a nearby lake who was fishing with his shirt off. He had a tattoo on his shoulder that read "Born Loser." True story.

Anyway, I don't want to belabor the point. What's important here is to adopt beliefs that create a brighter and better future.

 

This is essential, because just as lousy beliefs put you into a descending cycle--where failure becomes ever easier--powerful beliefs can put you into an ascending cycle, where success becomes easier.

With that in mind, here are 10 beliefs that, in my view, consistently create positive emotions, better performance, and much better results:

• I always act with a purpose.
• I take responsibility for my results.
• I stretch myself past my limits daily.
• I don't wait for perfection; instead, I act now.
• I learn more from my failures than my successes.
• I take my job seriously, but I do not take myself too seriously.
• I use rejection to renew my humility and sharpen my objectivity.
• I use both negative and positive feedback to keep on target.
• I am careful about what I put into my mind and body.
• I seek out people who are similarly motivated to improve themselves.

I wish I could say that I thought of all of the above myself, but the cycle described above and the "success beliefs" that follow are actually based on a life-changing conversation I had with the legendary Art Mortell, author of The Courage to Fail.

 

Geoffrey James writes the "Sales Source" column on Inc.com, the world's most-visited sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies From the World's Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source

 SOURCE: www.inc.com

Success Secret: Change Your Internal Dialogue

SALES SOURCE | Geoffrey James

Don't talk yourself out of success. Improving the words you use to describe your own experience can make your future brighter.

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Everyone in business knows that words are important. Some companies spend millionsof dollars to get the perfect wording for their corporate, marketing, and sales messages.

Since words are important, it's absolutely crazy to be careless when you're communicating with the most important person in your business world: you!

 

Just as the words you use to describe your company to customers predetermine how successful your company will be, the words you use when you talk to yourself (meaning in your own mind) predetermine how successful you will be.

 

If your internal dialogue constantly uses words that leech your energy, you'll always be fighting an uphill battle. What's more, that negative self-talk has a habit of slipping into the words you say to others, which can cast a pall on everything you do.

 

By contrast, if your internal dialogue uses words that uplift you, you're greasing the wheels to become more successful. What's more, a positive internal dialogue is inevitably echoed in your day-to-day speech, making those around you more success-prone, too.

Because this is an important point, I'm going to illustrate it with one of the examples from yesterday's post: Rejection.

 

How the Word Rejection Creates Failure

I cannot tell you how many times I've heard the following remarks from would-be entrepreneurs: "I don't like selling because I hate rejection." They're usually not aware that they're making an important part of their job more difficult than it needs to be.

 

The word rejection carries emotional baggage. It conjures up memories like 1) getting shot down when asking somebody out on a date, 2) not getting a hug from a loved one when a hug was desperately needed, and 3) not being "good enough" for somebody else, even though you did your best.

 

Making a lazy mental association of selling with rejection is just plain stupid, because nobody like being rejected. That's the last thing you want in your mind when you're trying to communicate the value of your ideas and products.

 

Top salespeople--the ones who earn millions of dollars a year--never think about selling in terms of rejection. If a situation or customer call doesn't go their way, they use different words, like speedbump or God's delays are not God's denials.

 

I'm not talking about something theoretically here. I know from my own personal experience that using a more powerful word than rejection to describe your sales process can accelerate your success.

 

When I wrote my first business book, I got 20 so-called rejection letters before I got anyone interested in it. Here's a fact: Some writers feel utterly crushed when they get even one rejection letter. Many of them give up, because the "rejection" makes them so miserable.

 

In my case, though, I wasn't bothered, because I never thought of them as rejection letters. I thought of them as stepping-stones. Every day, I removed those letters from their folder, laid them out on the floor, and physically walked over them, imagining how fabulous I'd feel once I got my first big book contract.

 

I then used that emotional energy to sell the book idea to even more agents and publishers. Eventually, those stepping-stones led to a contract, and that book later became a huge success, launching my career as a professional business writer.

 

How to Change Your Internal Dialogue

If you really want to be successful, you'll spend the extra effort to edit your internal dialogue so that it supports your goals. This is not at all difficult, and here's the basic recipe:

 

1. Listen to Your Thoughts 

As you go through the day, be mindful of the words that you use, in your own mind, to describe your experiences and those around you.

 

2. Write Them Down 

Recording your internal dialogue on paper will help you see more objectively the words you use, because you take them out of the context of your habitual mental use of them.

 

3. Categorize Each Term 

At the end of the day, mark each word or term as positive, neutral, or negative relative to what you're trying to achieve

 

4. Substitute More Powerful Words

For negative words, devise neutral alternatives. For neutral words, devise positive alternatives. For positive words, find alternative words that are even most positive.

 

5. Post the Alternatives Where You Can See Them

This is just a simple list with the old words in the first column pointing to the new words in the second column.

 

6. Make the Substitution Habitual

Whenever the old words show up in your internal dialogue, consciously substitute the alternative word. Continue until the substitution is automatic.

Here's a quick example, taken from the world of sales:

• Rejection->Speedbump
• Frustration->Nervous Energy
• Afraid->Excited
• Failure->Sales Lesson
• Boss->Coach
• Feeling Good->Feeling Fantastic!
• Disappointed->Surprised
• Cold calling->Dialing for Dollars

The more time you spend transforming your internal dialogue in this way, the more your thought processes will reinforce your quest for success.

 

Geoffrey James writes the "Sales Source" column on Inc.com, the world's most-visited sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies From the World's Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source

SOURCE: www.inc.com