Building Strategic Capacity

Strategic planning requires complete focus, a willingness to adapt and collaboration. But, no matter how well-thought-out your plan is, there are core skills teams need to develop in order to successfully meet their objectives.

These necessary skills — which vary, depending on the level of responsibility you hold with the organization — include an ability to delegate team members to perform various jobs within a given project, an ability to take on leadership roles in different facets of the organization and an ability to ensure your work is connected to the overall strategy.

Proficiency in these competencies will enable leaders to not only develop strategy, but also to get it done. 

Organizational Considerations

How a plan gets developed, who is involved and each member’s level of responsibility is an organizational consideration which may involve only top leadership.

However, depending on the level of collaboration within a team, the decision may take into account the input of team members. 

Knowing who will take on which roles helps the organization identify the skills leaders will need to develop. 

Also, knowing how it is going to work is key to figuring out how you make it work. 

Leadership Competencies

Because of these dual responsibilities, leaders might also be assigned ownership for parts of the plan not related to their own department. Effectively, the same person can have three roles. 

The combination of roles prompts the need for a specific set of skills that form the leader’s strategic capacity. Usually, these skills don’t all exist naturally within a leader.  An intentional focus on growth is a responsibility for each person involved. 

Strategic capacity includes the ability of the leader to collaborate, influence, connect strategy to action, delegate, develop others and solve problems. Strong strategic leaders need to possess all six abilities.

Collaboration is the willingness to listen, hear and consider others’ points of view. This is most necessary for a leader when working with his/her peers. However, it is also needed when working with the teams he/she supervises. 

Influence is the ability to help others listen, hear and consider your point of view. This is a required skill for collaboration to be fruitful.  This is also a key skill in gaining commitment and engagement toward the goals at-hand or when convincing others to allocate resources. 

The ability to connect strategy to action depends on the leader’s ability to generate ideas, identify how those ideas can become real and generate activity to support those ideas. This is how a leader both contributes to the development of strategy and ensures the execution portion of it. Very few of us are successful without work. 

None of these strategies can be executed without the ability to delegate to others. Delegation frees up time to think about problems that need to be solved within the strategy and ensures the strategy stays on track. 

Impacting Your Leaders

If you are not in a leadership role within your organization, there are things you can do to ensure that your work is connected to strategy. First, ask questions that help you understand how your daily work supports the overall objectives. Be sure you know what those objectives are. Be sure you are changing as needed. 

Second, you should develop your own ability to collaborate and influence others so that you can encourage your leadership team to communicate to others the things you do not know. That will build overall engagement. 

Finally, every individual in an organization (leader or not) can and should seek to be an informal leader by setting solid examples for engagement, commitment and paying attention to the things that your organization holds as most important. 

Patti and Ken Leith are managing partners of EDGES Inc., a strategic planning and process efficiency firm based in Bentonville. They also own and operate e-Gauge Inc., a software services company specializing in strategic execution, talent management and project management. They can be reached at 479-203-7198 or 970-515-7898.