Want to Get Promoted Faster? Bring Strategy Into Everything You Do
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Have you ever been told to be more strategic? Or your manager telling you that the reason you haven’t been promoted is that you aren’t strategic enough?
Well, let’s put their money where their mouth is.
So what is strategy anyway?
The Oxford dictionary defines strategy as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim”
And various gurus have given us some thought provoking quotes about strategy
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do” Michael Porter
“Tactics without strategy is the noise without defeat” Sun Tzu
“Fitting in is a short-term strategy, standing out pays off in the long run” Seth Godin
They tell us why strategy is important and what strategy needs to be, but it doesn’t tell us how to get more of it.
My definition? Strategy is a series of decisions based on insights that sets the direction to overcome barriers to achieve a goal. It means that if it’s something you must do as a business or as a brand, it’s not strategy.
To be more strategic, you need to understand all four parts:
1. Goal (What are you trying to achieve?)
2. Problem (What’s in the way?)
3. Insight (What gives us an idea about our direction?)
4. Strategy (How will we move forward?)
After over a decade of strategy work, I’ve compiled thirteen ways for anyone to be more strategic
1. Understand the bigger picture
- How does your company activities relate to the overall category?
- What is the context of the company’s offering and brand in the current culture?
- Are the tactics pushing us in the right direction?
2. Look for patterns and connect the dots
- When looking at data or hearing from participants in a workshop, ask yourself – what is common?
- What seems to be a recurring theme?
- How might disparate ideas be weaved together?
3. Know the why behind the tactics
- Why these channels? Why this content? Why this cadence?
- Why are we executing a social media campaign on Instagram?
- Why are we developing an explainer video for the website?
4. Deliberately decide what you are not doing
- What are the strategies you are considering?
- What insights give you a sense of what you should pursue?
- What are the strategies are you NOT pursuing? Why?
5. Drive towards insights, not just data
- What does the data tell you that is not typical?
- How can you leverage everything you know and make a leap from what you see from the data to arrive at an insight?
- Ask so what, so what, so what to arrive at a unique insight that makes you say “aha!”
6. Step into your audience’s shoes
- What will my audience think, feel, do about this?
- What do they buy? (Hint: it’s not “what we sell”)
- How does your message, your offer stack up against everything in the audience’s world?
7. Appreciate the impact to the business
- How does anything you do affect the business in the short term and the long term?
- How do the tactics point back to the business objectives?
- How are we strengthening or weakening our positioning in the market?
8. Have a toolkit of frameworks
- Business strategy (SWOT, BCG Growth-Share Matrix, Porter’s Five Forces, GE-McKinsey Nine-Box Matrix, OKR etc.)
- Brand strategy (Brand architecture, Brand pyramid, Aaker’s Brand Equity Model, Brand positioning, 5 Cs etc.)
9. Be curious about human behavior
- How is the irrational mind contributing to the problem?
- What is “under the surface” that we need to solve?
- What does emotion and relationship have to do with the situation?
10. Write with simple language that inspires
- What words can I remove from my copy?
- What words can I use that get an emotional reaction?
- What buzzwords can I replace with simple words?
11. Seek and deliver clarity
- Is it direct?
- Do I have to mentally figure it out?
- Can it mean something different?
12. Drive priority and hierarchy
- Which is more important?
- Are there three key things instead of a list of 20?
- If there is only one thing to remember, what would it be?
13. Find commonality in dimensions and denominators
- How can you avoid using a mix of nouns, adjectives, and verbs when describing processes, stages, or categories? (“Insight, Strategy, Execution” vs. “Insight, Strategic, Execute”)
- Are you able to group or cluster information?
- Is there one theme across everything?
There is no one way to be strategic. But following these prompts can help you step out of the tactical and think more strategically.
Ways I can help you:
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