How to Think Strategically and Advance Your Career

Strategic thinking can provide opportunities that will further your personal and professional success. If you want to perform strategically to advance your career, you may need to do some planning and brainstorming to make it happen. This article explains how to think strategically with a focus on how strategic thinking is related to your overall career success.

How is strategic thinking related to career success?

Strategy is an important part of growing a successful business, therefore developing strategic thinking skills makes you an employee whose skills align with business goals. Companies leverage the talents of the workforce to develop strategic planning sessions and create innovation. Shifts in company culture reward strategic thinking because planning strategy is an ongoing process. The more you can contribute to being strategic for your organization, the more you are likely to benefit from strategic thinking within your career.

How to think strategically for career advancement

Follow these steps to position yourself as a strategic thought leader within your organization:

1. Firstly, think about what trends mean for your industry

Synthesizing trends into your workday can lead you to a new, better process or piece of platform technology. Strategy leads to innovation, and a good way to start strategizing is to understand what is currently being done to advance your industry as a whole. By pondering these insights in technology and innovation you may discover that your current way of doing things is not as current or as efficient as it could be. In synthesizing trends, you can suggest improvements for your organization. 

To start this practice, begin reading industry publications, searching online for industry trends and doing some research to support your desire to grow and learn.

2. Secondly, align long-term and short-term goals

Business strategy is centered around alignment. Being strategic means thinking about long-term and short-term goals and giving them both equal attention. For example, the alignment of budgeting with business needs or core values and operations.

Having a long view of your career and what you want to achieve is important. However, to do so, you need to be able to focus on the small steps you take at each level of your career to practice moving toward your short-term goals. 

You can strategize a plan that shows where you’d like to be in one year, three years, five years and 10 years. Coupling this plan with achievable milestones will offer the most intrinsic rewards along your career path.

3. Thirdly, evaluate your own performance with self-assessment questions

If you struggle to expand your strategic thinking skills because it’s hard for you to broaden your perspective, try asking yourself challenging questions that pull you into new ways of thinking. A self-assessment of strategic thinking skills and a personal deep dive is necessary to better understand areas where you could broaden your perspective.

Consider asking questions that challenge your current way of thinking about things. For example, ‘If I continue on this path, what will success look like in a year? What about five years? What strategies could improve that outcome?’ These types of questions will help you change how you view problems in the workforce and other areas of life.

4. Then, network with other departments and seek input

Get to know your coworkers in other departments and learn how their department functions and what role they play. Consider taking interest in people across your organization from the primary workforce to senior leadership and seek input that gives you more knowledge of the organization and the industry. You can use that knowledge to gain insight for the future success of your company. There are a lot of things that need to come together strategically to make a business successful. So it makes sense that, in order to practice strategic thinking, you need to expand your network and understand the organization. 

5. Next, go outside of your comfort zone or change your daily routine

One way to broaden your perspective is to try new things. To do this, you should be willing to break the routine, to go out of your way to meet new people and have new experiences. This could be something spontaneous like trying a new place for lunch instead of the office building cafe or networking with a top executive who you wouldn’t normally approach. Changing things up gives you a chance to strategize around several new scenarios.

6. Next, develop and practice your verbal communication skills

To be strategic, you must communicate effectively. You have to practice being clear and concise, organizing your language and paying attention to the sequencing of your thoughts and actions. Strategic thinking, once developed, can help you organize your thoughts and your speech around key points. This can make you an especially strong presenter or a leader who can motivate people to get things done. 

7. Finally, be agile and think beyond your department

Agility is a key concept for many of today’s businesses. It’s a word that applies to flexibility, scalability, adaptability, fast response and being poised for growth. As an agile employee, you are prepared to adapt to changes or respond to issues inside the organization. 

Part of being a strategic thinker in the workplace means strategizing for all parts of the organization and being able to see the organization as a whole, rather than a unit of separate parts. In a culture where the business operates holistically, there is communication, collaboration and transparency. Strategic thinkers should be prepared to display these qualities in the workplace.