How to Build Strong Work Relationships

How to Build Strong Work Relationships

In Atomic Habits, James Clear writes that behavior change happens when you build on existing habits, make change in small increments so it’s easy to do, leverage a system, and make the behaviors part of your identity. The actions to build strong relationships with work colleagues are habits. Here are ways you can build your relationship-building habits at work.  

Build on existing habits

• Make a meaningful connection. You’re already meeting with someone, so take advantage of that time together to spend a few minutes learning about the other person. No extra time needed; shift your attention and intention to connect. By showing sincere interest, they’ll remember how you made them feel in a positive light.

Make change in small increments

• Ask how you can help them. This flips the interaction from what you want to how you can be a resource for them. They’ll appreciate the gesture, you get to learn something about what’s on their mind, and it opens opportunities to follow up. 

• Send a quick follow up note, with appreciation for their time and a reflection or resource related to your conversation. It shows you heard them. 

Create a system for staying connected

• Track the date of your last meeting and put a reminder on your calendar to follow up. Take notes in a way you can easily access, so that when it’s time to follow up you can quickly refresh on what you talked about and continue the conversation. 

• Schedule time. Pat Romboletti, author of Bulletproof Your Career, recommends dedicating one hour every Friday morning to sending updates and reconnect notes to your network. 

Make relationship-building part of your identity

• Relationship building is about providing value and expecting nothing immediate in return. It becomes who you are when you are excited to share updates about a project a colleague is working on, trends in their industry, or connected to something their favorite hobby. Building relationships this way, you are:

• A connector

• A trusted partner

• Someone who cares about other people, and 

• The person they’ll go to for insights on their challenges. 

What is one action you will take today to foster your relationship-building habits?

To learn more about effective relationship building, check out the Twelve Skills brief Expanding Relationship Building. 

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Expanding Relationship Building Workbook. It will help you put these ideas into practice and boost your relationships. And best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

The Real Value of Workplace Relationships

Work happens through people.

Especially in uncertain times, as Generative AI accelerates organizational change, it’s critical for leaders to have strategic, mutually supportive relationships. Why? Having access to expertise and support from colleagues inside and outside your organization increases your effectiveness because you can bring different perspectives that add value to your ideas and execution. 

Yet for many of us, building strong relationships feels like an afterthought, and when under time pressure it falls off your priorities compared with just getting the work done. 

How can you build valuable working relationships when feeling pressed for time? Our 3E relationship building process - to Express, Engage, and Expand - focuses your relationship-building efforts for maximum impact for your time investment. 

The first step in effective relationship building - Express - is about your emotional intelligence. How aware are you of your emotions and how you are showing up with others? How attentive are you to the emotions of those around you? By being more emotionally aware and engaged with other people, you’ll build stronger relationships in the normal course of work. 

The second relationship-building step - Engage - is about being a relatable human being who makes other people feel valued. At a networking gathering, help others feel included by taking the initiative to introduce yourself. Ask questions, genuinely listen, and share your related interests. You’ll build a stronger relationship and be more memorable by showing interest in them than if you did all the talking. Clinch their trust by following up quickly with note that shares a takeaway from your conversation.

The Expand stage is about managing your relationships strategically. Start by listing your top professional contacts and evaluating their collective strength and mutual value. Are your relationships primarily in your organization or industry? Are you getting diverse perspectives that broaden your thinking? Who are the super-connectors who can help you expand your network? How have you contributed value in these relationships? This will help you diagnose gaps and opportunities about where to build or strengthen your work relationships. 

To learn more about effective relationship building, check out the Twelve Skills brief Expanding Relationship Building. 

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Expanding Relationship Building Workbook. It will help you put these ideas into practice and boost your relationships. And best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Five Steps to Improved Communication

Communication is an essential skill for leaders. It’s a key ingredient to building trust, fostering teamwork, and clarifying direction. Unfortunately, many leaders don’t do it well. Why not? Part of the challenge is that managers communicate so often (and so informally) they forget to focus on the needs of the audience and employ the basic principles that foster overall effectiveness in leadership communication. The good news is with a little effort and a smidgen of structure, leaders can significantly ‘punch up’ their messaging in ways that will improve overall receptivity and understanding. To do that, it helps to follow the five simple (and sequential) steps highlighted here.

Step 1: CLARIFY: The first, and arguably most important, element of effective communication is clarifying why you’re sending the message you're planning in the first place. Are you trying to persuade a group of employees to work the weekend? Convince senior leaders to adopt your plan? Explain the reasoning behind a major policy change? The specific reason isn’t as important as just having one (although a good one is advisable). In the absence of a clear purpose, developing an effective message will be difficult.

Step 2: CONSIDER: After you’ve taken the time to clarify the reason for your message, you’ll want to understand what your audience’s state of mind is as well as what their needs are. This step is often overlooked by message givers to their detriment. Without a firm grasp on the audience’s wants and needs, you run the risk of communicating something that either doesn’t resonate or worse, is interpreted unfavorably—neither outcome will advance your purpose, in fact, they could undermine it. Be sure to take steps to understand what’s going on inside the minds of your audience before you craft your message.

Step 3: CREATE: With both purpose and audience understood, you’ll want to move to message creation. Regardless of whether your message is given verbally or in writing, be sure to hit on three key elements that have formed the basis of effective communication since antiquity: ethos, your character and credibility as the message giver; pathos your empathy for your audience (see Step 2), and logos the logic or fact-based aspect of your argument. Think of these three elements as legs of a stool—with them your message will be sturdy; without them, you’ll topple over.

Step 4: CHOOSE: Before you reach for the keyboard, ask yourself if the channel you’re picking to send your message will be the most effective. Chances are there’s a more efficacious channel (or channels) through which to send your message. Some mediums, like email or blog posts, are easy to create and can reach a wide range of recipients, but don’t provide much context. These are known as lean channels. Others, like face to face meetings or phone calls, reach fewer people but do so with greater impact. These are referred to as rich channels. Effective communication often requires a mix of both. Regardless of which ones you choose, do so with the forethought of maximizing your impact.

Step 5: CONVEY: Unsurprisingly, the final step (and remember it took a while to get here!) is convey, meaning, sending your message. With the preceding four steps done well, the likelihood generating a favorable outcome increases significantly. Just be sure to avoid making the last step—Convey—be the first one in your communication process. Otherwise it may be back to the drawing board and—as highlighted at the start—to Step 1.

Communication can be a challenge for leaders at any level, but it doesn’t have to be. The five steps discussed provide an easy to follow recipe for clear messaging success. Keep them in mind (and in front of you) when you’re getting ready to send your most important missives. Your audience will be glad you did.

If you’d like to learn more about executive presence, check out the Twelve Skills brief Developing Clear Messaging.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Clear Messaging Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

The ABC’s of Executive Presence

Have you ever wondered what makes a business executive look like, well, an executive? If you’ve given it any thought, you’ve likely noticed a few things about top leaders that stand out. First, they look the part, meaning, whatever environment they’re operating in—from the basement of a tech start up to the C-suite in a FORTUNE 100 corporate office—they present a visual image that says “I’m a leader here”. Next, they carry themselves with a certain air of confidence and swagger. People conclude they’re in charge because they act like they are. Lastly, they speak with authority, expressing a self-assured demeanor as they do. If these three things resonate with you, you’ve picked up on the important cues senior managers often transmit. Now let’s take a quick tour of the ABC’s of executive presence, exploring each one in turn.

1. Appearance is how you present yourself in the workplace in terms of dress, grooming, and posture. It’s true standards of dress have changed over the past few years thanks to the remote work revolution, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a dress code where you work; every place has them—formal or informal. Regardless of your environment, it’s essential you take the time to understand how you’re showing up looks-wise at work—your success depends on it. If everyone in your athletic apparel company wears hooded sweatshirts, jeans and trendy sneakers in the office, showing up in a button down shirt and a blazer sends the unmistakable message that you don’t understand “how we do things around here”. Whether you’re trying to fit in or thoughtfully stand out, you need to demonstrate you know the rules of the game when it comes to dress code and grooming.

2. Boldness shows calm, courage, and confidence in the face of challenging situations and the ability to speak honestly and directly even when you’re feeling uncomfortable. One of the characteristics that we value in leaders is confidence. It give people the feeling that no matter what happens, the challenges we’re facing or opportunities we’re exploring will work out favorably—and should the not for some reason, we’ll still be okay. As leadership author Peter Bregman points out in his Harvard Business Review of the same name, “Great leaders are confident, connected, committed, and courageous.” All of these embody the boldness we want, even seek, in our leaders.

3. Communication relates to how we express our ideas when speaking or presenting. As far as leadership effectiveness is concerned, communication is one of the most important skills to be developed. Seasoned executives radiate presence when they speak, projecting their voice clearly with words that are easy to understand. In terms of message delivery, professionals don’t use filler words like ‘um’ and ‘you know’. They’re also thoughtful regarding the pace and tone of their speech so they can reinforce important messages. Some of the best known politicians were former actors and their aplomb delivering messages became hallmarks of their time in office.

There you have it: The ABC’s of executive presence—Appearance, Boldness, and Communication. You need to check your appearance, making sure you fit in before you try to stand out, consider how bold your physical presence is, and review your patterns of communication. Together these three components of executive presence engender confidence and inspiration in colleagues. Sprucing up any one of the three areas will improve how you’re perceived as a leader and quite possibly your overall effectiveness too.

If you’d like to learn more about executive presence, check out the Twelve Skills brief Enhancing Executive Presence.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Executive Presence Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Four Steps to Improved Problem Solving

In our last post we said that the most effective starting point for improving your problem solving was by ensuring you’re solving the right problem. Assuming you have, then it makes sense to go about finding a solution. That’s where a good process comes in. Remember, a problem is simply the variance between the current state and the desired state. To close the performance gap, it’s important to be deliberate about the steps you take. We believe following a simple, four-step process, will help you significantly improve the likelihood you’ll reach a favorable outcome.

1. Define: When asked, 85% of executives admit that their companies are poor at problem diagnosis (yet another problem). It’s hard to properly diagnose, let alone solve, a problem that is poorly defined. The best way to ensure the issue you’re addressing is the right one is by defining the problem in a way that paves the way for effective analysis. Using a team, bringing in outside experts, and thinking through various ways to formulate the problem are especially useful during this step.

2. Decompose: Once a problem is well defined, it’s tempting to jump right into ‘solution mode’—brainstorming ways to address the challenge. Resist this temptation because often times the solution to a problem isn’t as obvious as it seems at first. The problem needs to be broken down, or as we say decomposed, into potential causes. A logic tree or issue tree is an effective way to aid in thinking through the potential drivers of the problem. Structured thinking using an approach like this is a sure fire way to improve your odds of success.

3. Analyze: With the potential causes of the problem identified, now you can begin in earnest investigating the source(s) of the issue. You’ll want to examine each potential cause to determine if it is the root cause of the performance gap. A very effective technique for this is the “Five Whys”. By asking the question ‘why’ until you get to the point you can’t answer it anymore (typically this takes five times), you’ll end up at what will likely be the root cause. At that point, you can identify potential solutions.

4. Act: But a potential solution is just that—a potential solution. You’ll need to implement the intervention you’ve developed and then check to see if it actually solved the problem. There’s a chance it only addressed part of the performance shortfall. If it wasn’t a root cause after all, it might not have any of it. The reason you act and then recheck is to determine the degree to which improvement has been made and decide what you might do next.

Problem solving is something managers engage in every day. Unfortunately, they rely more on experience and intuition than structured thinking. No doubt, ‘gut feel’ can help in addressing challenges. It’s structured thinking, however, that will yield the most benefit, especially when the problems you face are complex.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Unlocking Problem Solving.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Executive Presence Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

How to Improve Problem Solving: Determine Your Real Problem

When it comes to improving problem solving, people typically focus on ways to enhance their process. It’s good thinking and can yield positive results. Training your team in problem solving methodologies is a great way to get everyone grounded. Speeding up the process can be effective too. Even sharpening your analytical skills is beneficial. That said, the very best way to improve your approach may be to just ask right at the start: “What problem are we trying to solve?”

This might seem so obvious it’s hardly worth mentioning. Who would intentionally solve the wrong problem? As it turns out, lots of people do and they’re not even aware of it. In fact, it’s one of the most common biases that plagues managers: Plunging In. Chances are you’ve experienced it yourself at some point.

Here’s an example. 

A large social service organization had so many open positions it was impacting their ability to deliver care to their customers effectively. Shifts were under-staffed causing managers to do front line work driving up over time hours and pushing the entire workforce dangerously close to burnt out.

Managers concluded they must have a recruiting problem.

So they dug in and worked diligently to improve recuriting. And it worked. They accelerated hiring and onboarding as planned. The result? Hiring improved, but turnover increased.

The managers then figured the issue must be training. It seemed reasonable that new employees coming into the organization must not have the skills they need to be effective in their fledgling roles. Thus, a new training program was quickly designed and implemented. At the end of the next quarter the managers were frustrated to find that training expenses went up while turnover and retention didn’t budge.

Exasperated, a cross functional team was chartered and they finally asked the ever important question: What’s the real problem here? 

As it turned out, once the team explored the process end to end, they discovered the turnover problem wasn’t a byproduct of hiring, onboarding, or training—it had to do with the how the organization was delivering services. Ultimately, the team redesigned the way work was done, which entailed innovating the care delivery process and changing the staffing/supervisory model to so that fewer staff were needed, not more.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “If I had a hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” We’re not sure if that’s the right mix of time (or even if Einstein actually said this) but the wisdom is consistent with combating Plunging In bias.

Spend time up front determining what your real problem is and you’ll save yourself time and money on the back end figuring out what you were trying to do in the first place.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Unlocking Problem Solving.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Problem Solving Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Red Cells: The Antidote to Groupthink

“How can our leadership team avoid groupthink?” This is a question we’re asked frequently when advising on strategy. It’s a problem that many teams face when it comes to thinking strategically and there’s a variety of causes.

Sometimes it’s the team’s composition that’s the challenge—the team lacks diverse perspectives, the kind needed to cultivate truly new insights. In other situations, it’s that the team’s longstanding routines have grown stale generating few new ideas. It could be that novel, offbeat insights are frowned upon due to senior member behaviors or politics. Regardless of the reason, groupthink is an Achilles Heel to teams that prevents genuine creative thoughts from emerging. But there is a solution, one that comes straight from the military: red cells. 

Red cells were developed during the 1980’s by special operations leaders to pressure test the effectiveness of American military plans and tactics. The practice is often used in war games to represent an opposing force whose mission is to disrupt the friendly force’s plans. With that background, it’s easy to see how the concept can be applied to strategy efforts. There’s a few simple steps needed to make the practice work:

1. Charter, Select, and Separate Red Cell Members. A red cell should be expressly included as part of the strategy effort at the start. Team members should be comprised of leaders and employees who are know for their nontraditional views of the business. They should be told their mission but shouldn’t participate in any of the strategy efforts of the main team, at least initially. In fact, they should be separated from the main group entirely.

2. Steep the Red Cell in Competitor Tactics. While the main team engages in strategizing, so too should the red cell—but from the perspective of competitors. Red cell members diligently study competitor plans and strategies to get themselves into the mindset of their organization’s most significant competitors. This outside-in perspective is needed to ensure they are adequately prepared to respond from the viewpoint of an adversary.

3. Focus on Disrupting the Core Strategy. When the strategy is complete, the red cell analyzes it with the express purpose of identifying gaps and undermining the effort. They should make choices and conceive responses that would severely hamper or fully disrupt the strategy. 

4. Update the Strategy Using their Findings.  When their interrogation is complete, both teams should unite—main members and the red cell—to review their findings, revisit the core strategy, and make key adjustments. The red cell’s perspective will be both informative and instructive for the overall team.

If you’re unsure whether the red cell concept can be successfully applied outside of the military, don’t be. The idea has been similarly tested in a business book entitled Kill the Company (a very red cell like title). In short, it works.

Groupthink is a debilitating behavior that undermines the kind of strategic thinking teams need today. Employ a red cell and watch how the effectiveness of your strategizing improves.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your strategic skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Strategic Leadership Starts with Strategic Thinking

Who are strategic leaders? There’s two answers to this question.

First, strategic leaders are specific people—the executives who sit at the top of an organization. They comprise members of the board of directors, the top management team (TMT), and senior leaders who head major business units, functions, or geographies.

Second, strategic leaders are those managers who think and act strategically. They are known not buy their position, but rather their behavior. They, too, are strategic leaders but by action, not title.

Many leaders aspire to be both—more strategic in their day-to-day work as well as senior leaders rising in their organization. We assert that focusing on the latter—becoming a more strategic leader behaviorally—is the best path to achieving the former—a strategic leadership post. So how does one get from the backroom to the boardroom? According to the authors of Becoming a Strategic Leader: Your Role in Your Organization’s Enduring Success there are three individual skills that are required:

1. Strategic thinking. The intellectual and social process skills needed to enable a broad understanding of the organization and how it fits (and evolves) with its environment.

2. Strategic acting. The actions necessary to drive the organization toward its desired future destination despite challenges, obstacles, setbacks, and uncertainties that arise along the way.

3. Strategic influence. The behaviors needed to gain commitment from stakeholders, both inside and outside the organization, to compel progress toward strategic outcomes.

While each of the three are essential, strategic acting and influence will be of limited value if they are taken absent effective strategic thinking.

Senior leaders are expected to have the conceptual skills needed to not only survive, but thrive in the fast moving VUCAD world—volatile uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and digital. Anyone who wants to ascend the corporate latter will need to be a proven strategic thinker well before they step into those roles.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your strategic skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Think Before You Think Strategically

This might seem like an odd title for a post: Think Before You Think Strategically. You might be asking yourself, “Isn’t this what strategic thinking is all about? Changing the way I think?” It is. But to understand how to improve your approach to analyzing data and information, it helps to take the time to think about how you go about thinking in the first place. Unfortunately, people skip this activity to their detriment. Thinking about how you think—or metacognition as it’s known—is a key ingredient to thinking more effectively. If you’re interested on improving your own metacognition, here’s a few helpful hits to start you thinking.

1. People Often Aren’t as Smart as They Think. Do you know anyone who, no matter what you say to them, responds with “I knew that already”? There’s a possibility they did, but it’s more likely they’re suffering from a cognitive bias know as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. There’s ample research that shows when people are polled about things like driving, their health, and other behaviors, they rate themselves as well above average. People who are overconfident are especially prone to this bias. A dose of reality is a good starting point for upping your thinking.

2. You Can Improve Metacognition. Virtually everyone can improve how they think, if they try. There are a variety of resources available to assist. Prompts geared toward planning, monitoring, and evaluating highlight what you’re thinking in real time and encourage reflection when you’ve finished. Other techniques such as polling, conducting self and/or group assessments are beneficial practices too. Keeping a learning or reading log can be especially beneficial.

3. How You Organize Information Matters. If you do keep a learning log, one of the most effective approaches to structuring how you engage with, and process information, comes from the Cornell Note Taking System. As basic as this sounds, it’s a very effect tool that improves understanding and retention. Sound a little ‘old school’, note taking that is? Maybe. But research shows that writing notes by hand is more effective than with a computer. That said, the Cornell Note Taking System can be adapted for tech users as well. If you’re interested in learning more, The Learning Strategies Center at Cornell offers a free, publicly available online course in Canvas.  Even if you’re not interested in taking the course, there’s helpful videos to watch on the site.

Anne Hutchinson one of the early American feminists is quoted as saying, “I have been guilty of wrong thinking.”  She is not alone—most of us have. Take the time to explore your own cognition and your ability to think well and strategically will improve.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Tools to Get Started with Strategic Thinking

If you’re reading this post you probably agree strategic thinking is an essential leadership skill. We at Twelve Skills concur. But it begs the question, “If it’s so important, why don’t more people do it?” There’s a few reasons we’ve come across in our work that are often offered to explain the malaise:

• No time—“I just don’t have time to”

• No direction—“No one told me to”

• No idea—”I don’t know where to start”

Unfortunately, if you really want to get better at strategic thinking you’ll need to:

• Find the time—you have more time than you think

• Seize the initiative—great leaders make things happen on their own

• Engage in skill building—because everyone can improve

Here are a few ideas on how to jumpstart strategic thinking for yourself and, as importantly, for your team:

• Understand your context with PESTLE Analysis: Work with your team to define the context you work in. What key factors are shaping your competitive environment? Where might change drivers be coming from? Use the PESTEL analysis to explore your Political, Economic, Societal, Technological, Legal, and Environmental variables. See if the industry analysts agree with you by comparing your work to published analyst reports.

• Explore future trends with the Time Cone: Brainstorm the impact of trends from your PESTLE analysis using the Time Cone. Consider what might happen over the short, medium, an long-term horizons. Try to picture, as tangibly as possible, what different futures might look like. And don’t be afraid to look outside your competitive arena to detect potential disruptors or inflection points beyond your normal periphery.

• Set up Futurist Discussion Groups: Nature abhors a vacuum, so don’t work in a one. Gather your team to discuss and share what you’re learning together. Prepare for group work by engaging with sources such as pod casts, think tanks, and analyst reports. Facilitate robust dialogue about future trends and what you could be doing now to prepare for their impact.

These are great strategic thinking starting points for any individual. If you’re a team leader or Learning & Development manager, these can especially be powerful tools to help develop talent—and engage senior leaders on topic they’re concerned about. No matter your role, strategic thinking is everyone’s job.

If you’d like to access tools like the Time Cone for yourself or your team, get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here. 

Starting Point for Strategic Thinking: A Good Question

There’s no shortage of advice on how to think strategically—current blog authors included (see below). There are principles, practices, processes, steps—that, if followed, promise to top up your thoughts on the challenges and opportunities the future holds. To be fair, there’s value in almost every piece of advice. But regardless of which approach you choose, all methods should start the same way: with a good question. A good question helps you avoid three problems that can frustrate your efforts from the start.

1. Alice in Wonderland Problem. In the book Alice in Wonderland, when Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which road to take, he responds laconically, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road can take you there.” This is true with strategic thinking and fairy tales (not to mention your life; see here if this applies to you). If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, all the web searches you conduct and articles you read won’t have much value. More likely, they’ll probably lead to frustration stemming from information overload.

2. Forest for the Trees Problem. You’ve no doubt heard someone quip, “She can’t see the forest for the trees” when a person is so close to a situation, they miss the big picture. When searching for information—especially when hopping from one bit to the next—it’s possible to become so focused on the particulars you lose sight of the overall scheme. The right question calibrates where you are in the details.

3. Blinding Flash of the Obvious Problem. There are few events more unnerving than conducting far-reaching research, getting to the end, summarizing what you learned only to discover that your ‘novel insights’ have been widely known for the past decade. As humorous (and humiliating) as this sounds, it happens.  An effective question ensures canvasing the information landscape yields as much of what’s known in an area of interest as possible.

Karl Wieck the renowned organizational theorist noted that research often starts with some issue or problem that piques your interest; a problem or paradox you’d like to know more about. Same with strategic thinking. Taking time to define and refine what you want to know, will put you on the path to better learnings. 

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Four Steps to Thinking More Strategically

Senior leaders often wish their managers were more strategic. But it’s hard to think big thoughts when you have operational alligators snapping at your feet every day. Assuming you can shake them loose, the key question then is, “How do I get started?” Here’s a four-step process you can follow to get going.

1. Gather: Start by collecting and reviewing strategic information pertinent to your business: analyst reports—what the experts are thinking, shareholder reports—what your leaders are saying, articles written about your organization and your competitors—what the observers are seeing. Data like annual reports, employee surveys, customer information, are all great sources most managers have access to. Start there.

2. Analyze: Next, review this information in depth—that’s what analysis is. Make notes, create summaries—use a tool like a mind map to structure your thoughts. It’s not enough just to explore collected information, you need to structure it to identify trends, patterns, exceptions, major shifts, any insight that might stimulate your thinking about the future.

3. Project: Then, shift from analysis to creativity. Send your mind into the future by imagining what a future or futures plural could potentially look like. Envision a world where technology plays an even greater role than it does now, where work is vastly different, where existing energy sources yield to new ones, where no language or travel barriers exist, and collaboration is truly global. Picture different scenarios and how they might affect your organization. Shell is a company renowned for their multidecade scenarios—watch how they do it here—Shell Scenarios

4. Strategize: Finally, consider what actions you would take right now if you were a senior leader preparing for the future you see. Identify what would need to change today to be ready. Think about your products, services, workforce, investments, policies, competitors, stakeholders—any facet of organization life that would need to adapt to prepare for the eventualities of a new frontier.

Does this sound like something you can’t fit into your daily schedule? Good, don’t try. Set aside a time and place for this kind of reflection. Make it a habit and you will benefit from it. Imagine the value when a group of managers do it regularly—or an executive team.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking as well as all of the other Twelve Skills topics.

Serious about following the process highlighted in this post? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook to get started now. Each activity follows the steps to help you boost your strategic thinking skills. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

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What the Best Strategic Thinkers Do

Improving your strategic thinking might sound like a daunting task. With an ever-swelling ocean of information swirling about, it’s dizzying just imagining where to begin. The good news is becoming a great strategic thinker doesn’t start with endless web searches or petabytes of data to get going—it begins with simply setting time aside to think about the future. 

That sounds easy but it isn’t.  When people hear this advice, their response is often: “How do I set aside time to think about the future when I can’t even find time to finish the work I have today?” Here’s three simple steps you can follow to begin carving out the time you need.

1. Make a Commitment. You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.’ But even before you take the first step, you’ll need to make a commitment for the journey. A commitment says—to you especially—becoming a stronger strategic thinker is a priority. The demands of operational work will always crowd out strategic thinking, putting the important at the mercy of the urgent. Those who excel at peering into the future deliberately set aside time today to contemplate what it might look like.

2. Find a Place. Not everyone does their best thinking in the same way or even in the same place. Some people can find solitude and peace of mind amidst the backdrop of a busy coffee shop. Others need the silence of a library to gain the clarity they need. Regardless of whether your best work is accomplished in the presence of a barista or alone in a quiet study room, locate a place where you can retreat and let your imagination run free.

3. Set a Routine. It would be wonderful if during your first thinking session you conjured your company’s next big product idea. Wonderful yes; likely, no. Becoming a great strategic thinker requires a routine. To start, block a time as short as 15 minutes on your calendar, every week, (and hold it no matter what) to start developing your point of view about what the future may bring.

As romantic as the blinding flash of insight sounds, most great ideas don’t come that way. It took Thomas Edison thousands of experiments to develop the incandescent lightbulb. Hopefully, your greatest discoveries won’t require that long; but like Edison, they’ll need commitment, a familiar place, and a regular routine to turn your thoughts into your own breakthrough thinking.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking as well as all of the other Twelve Skills topics.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

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Welcome to the Twelve Skills Blog

If you’re landing here for the first time, welcome! We’re grateful you’re taking time to explore the Twelve Skills world. We created Twelve Skills based on our work with dozens of organizations, scores of managers, and hundreds of students over the past 20 years. Over our careers, we observed a specific set of skills that people need to develop to advance into roles of of greater responsibility. While technical abilities are essential early on in careers, its the skill related to leading people that matter when it comes to moving up.

We tested our historical observations by looking at leadership development programs produced by top tier consulting and human capital firms. We didn’t stop there. We examined a range of business publications that highlighted the skill leaders need to succeed. Or findings led to the development of the six areas and twelve skills found in our ‘dartboard’.

To summarize, as managers climb the corporate ladder, they need to master strategy and its correlate results. They also need to build high performing teams that develop talent. And while the world outside evolves, they must be able to communicate effectively to drive change. Within each of these areas are two specific skills constitute the bulk of what leaders must be able to do as they become more senior.

To ensure we brought the best, most useful thinking to Twelve Skill readers (and users!), we selected content from one of the best known and trusted sources in business research over the past 100 years—Harvard Business Publishing (HBP). As strategy consultants, executive coaches, and Ivy League educators, we’ve not only used—but in some cases helped create—ideas that have shaped how management is practiced today. Twelve Skills provides a concise, curated, and actionable set of tools aimed at helping anyone who practices them become recognized as an effective leader in their role and, as importantly, someone who is ready for greater responsibility.

With that said, take a look around the Twelve Skills site. You’ll find free resources that include a book chapter, a short assessment, links to related videos and articles, downloadable ‘cheat sheets’, a quick start guide and best of all, a comprehensive (and complementary!) workbook anyone can use to improve their skills, their team, and even their entire organization. We also have a Twelve Skills Linked In group—join and connect with like minded colleagues who are traveling on similar development journeys.

Thank you again visiting our blog. Check our Linked In group or this spot for reading and reach out if you have questions or would like any thoughts on how to get the most out of The Twelve Skills!

Laura and Ed