Ask The Coach

Ask the Coach appears regularly in New England In-House. Two expert executive coaches, Dr. Lew Stern and Linda Lerner, share their thoughts and ideas in answering your questions on complex management and leadership issues and difficult work situations.

We are excited to be able to bring together the depth of experience and insights that these two coaches offer. The topics for this question and answer format will be based on your questions and those most frequently asked by their clients. Lerner and Stern will respond to one or two questions and we reserve the right to edit questions for clarity and length.

Have a question? Send it to:[email protected]. (No names will be published.)

Question: I am a senior attorney in a medium-sized corporation. My role includes general law practice within the company as well as managing a group that serves the corporate division. I report to the general counsel and recently received my end-of-year performance review. I was rated well overall with one area identified for development in the coming year: strategic thinking and planning. I’ve always thought of myself as a good planner and I tend to take the next year’s projected business into account in putting together my plans. When I asked what I need to learn to do or do differently all I was told was that I need to think more strategically and make my plans more strategic. What can I work on to move more in this direction?

Answer: Strategic managers focus on the bigger picture and the longer term. Rather than spending most of their time thinking and working to win the immediate battle with existing resources, they focus on winning the war or thinking about and planning what it will take to accomplish long-term goals. To be more strategic means to think outside of your own area and managing the day-to-day with what you have.

You also need to focus on the world outside your own area, the factors outside your group, and even outside your company that you could influence the degree to which your organization is able to achieve its long-range objectives. Strategic thinkers and leaders are more transformational than transactional – transforming their organizations for the future more than just managing the day-to-day transactions. They improvise with the end result in mind.

These days, strategic plans tend to focus at least three years out. So for you to think and plan strategically you need to be working as though you are playing a three-year chess match, always considering five to ten moves out, always imagining scenarios of what might happen and how you and your organization could be prepared for and deal with the most likely scenarios.

When people refer to strategic planning they may mean many very different things. Some people think of strategic planning as a top-down, financially driven, resource-allocation plan to accomplish three- to five- to seven-or-more-year financial objectives. Others think of strategic planning as a customer- or market-driven, product, service, or technology plan that forecasts future needs of key customers or constituents and how best to meet them.

Still others think of strategic planning as an opportunistic process with very little long-term planning, but rather, with an approach to look out for and immediately respond to emerging problems or opportunities. For you to be effective as a strategic thinker or planner in your organization you need to find out how strategy is thought about and developed where you work.

Most strategic, longer-term plans include some basic components: Market or customer strategies, financial strategies, HR strategies, technology strategies, and/or other key strategies that can drive your organization into the future.

For each basic component, strategic planners usually ask at least four questions: What are the long-term goals? What approaches will you use to achieve those goals? What initiatives will you implement to apply these approaches? How will you measure your long-term results and track your progress along the way to make any needed changes to the plan?

Strategic thinkers really do think and spend their time differently than those who are more tactical. Rather than primarily managing to “get the wash out” they lead to decide the best way to get the wash out in the future and whether washing is the best thing to be doing in the long term. They challenge the status quo, ask lots of “what if” questions, and dream and communicate in inspirational ways about possibilities rather than what exists today.

Strategic thinkers delegate much of the day-to-day transactions to other people so they can focus a good part of their own time on evolving the organization to meet future needs and create and capitalize on opportunities.

In your role as a senior attorney you probably cannot focus most of your time on strategy, but you may be able to shift some of your thinking, resources, and day-to-day activities in the strategic direction. Being strategic is not something you do completely or not at all. Rather, it is a continuum from tactical to strategic with each person needing to find the right place between the two ends that best matches the current and future needs of your operation.

In the same way as the expression “think globally, act locally” suggests the need for organizations to keep the bigger picture in mind as they focus on the immediate and local demands in front of them, you too can achieve an appropriate balance of managing for the here-and-now while leading the way into the future.