NextGen Know-How: How to be more strategic

A few months after I was promoted to director of human resources, my vice president called me into her office to discuss my new role. She noticed I was still doing some work from my previous position as a human resources generalist and said that I needed to learn to delegate those things to my team members. Even though my responsibilities had changed, I was still answering benefit questions and fixing payroll issues when employees called me. This was keeping me from focusing on more strategic work like developing training programs for our managers. I was struggling to let go of the technical HR work I was good at, and my old task-oriented work was getting in the way of performing what was necessary in my new position. Employees were used to coming to me with payroll and benefit issues, and since I wanted to be helpful, I would take care of their issues instead of directing them to the HR assistant. While I was being of value to those individual employees, I was not contributing the best value I could to the credit union.

If you’ve ever had a manager tell you that you need to be more strategic and struggled to understand what that meant, you are not alone. In my experience as a leadership consultant and coach, this is one of the biggest challenges that keeps managers and executives from being successful in a leadership role. The more senior the leadership position, the more strategic thinking and focus is required for success. Strategic work is typically not as activity based as the tasks we are used to in more technical positions. In a leadership role, “being strategic” could include coaching and developing employees, influencing others toward results, planning, developing ideas and strategies, communicating goals to your employees or researching industry trends. In my position as HR director, being strategic meant analyzing our employee talent, assessing the skills and competencies managers needed to be successful and developing training programs to elevate the leadership skills of our managers and executives. This was an ongoing, long-term focus and often felt harder to accomplish than my previous position, which focused on daily technical tasks.

While strategic thinking is a skill that can be developed, many leaders still struggle to do it successfully. That’s because being strategic is a practice, not just way of thinking. To be more strategic, leaders need to develop practices and structures that support higher-level thinking and execution.

 

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