A common piece of developmental feedback is the need to move from tactical to strategic thinking. But what does that look like? The author, who has coached thousands of leaders to help develop their strategic thinking capabilities, has identified three core behaviors to work on: acumen (thinking), allocation (planning), and action (doing).
Having worked with more than a quarter million managers over the past 20 years to sharpen their strategic thinking capabilities, I’ve realized that many leaders with wonderful potential are unfairly branded with the “tactical, not strategic” label, causing their careers to stall out. For far too long, determining whether someone was tactical or strategic has been a subjective guess based on job titles, instinctual hunches, and cherry-picked observations.