What You’ll Learn

Your boss just told you to “think strategically,” but what does that mean? Acting on this feedback is crucial for anyone looking to advance their careers—especially aspiring leaders. But it rarely comes with concrete advice on how to do it.

At a basic level, thinking strategically means maintaining a broad perspective on every aspect of your daily work, from making decisions to setting your team’s priorities and managing your own productivity. To do so, you need to understand your company’s key objectives and strategy and keep those driving forces front of mind when you’re faced with tough choices and competing goals. You must also align your team with these organizational needs, so that they’re working on the projects and initiatives that contribute most to executing the company’s strategy. And you must remain agile, able to identify changes in your business environment and alter course when objectives change.

It can be difficult to prioritize big-picture needs over short-term demands—and to know how to switch between the two. This guide provides practical tips and approaches to help you embed strategic thinking into your everyday work, so you can strike the right balance, create real value for your organization, be known as a strategic thinker—and achieve your own career goals.

You’ll learn how to:

• Be more strategic in your daily work
• Ask questions to better understand your company’s strategy
• Demonstrate your thinking skills in ways that your bosses will notice and respect
• Make faster, better decisions
• Identify when to broaden—or narrow—your perspective
• Detect patterns in internal and external trends
• Set your team’s priorities based on goals, resources, and timing
• Navigate conflicting objectives and manage trade-offs
• Cut projects that are no longer adding value
• Communicate a company vision to your employees
• Align your team to execute the strategy
• Deal with common problems like unclear strategic goals or a strategy you disagree with