Strategic Thinking Skills When Managing Others

You may have seen fewer customers face-to-face, you may have moved more customer service activities online or you may be interacting with customers differently in the front office. Your front desk operations, supply purchasing, inventory management, mail handing and office workflows may have changed in profound ways. And likely, your administrative professional has been on the front lines of all this change. 

Being a strategic manager of administration means reflecting on the broader consequence of decisions and actions in such a way as it produces more significant impact. Henry David Thoreau put it this way, “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” Every employee can find opportunities to think more strategically. 

Key Strategic Thinking Skills in the Workplace as a Manager 

Anticipate You may not be making decisions of this significance for your company, but your direct reports and department can benefit by anticipating solutions to challenges – such as technology changes, organizational changes or customer behavior – before they arrive. 

Challenge Both managers and leaders need to follow the highest standards of ethics, honesty, transparency and consistency. This does not mean sharing everything one knows, but it does mean sharing what you can when you can and staying true to your word. Effective administrative assistants in the right roles add efficiency and professionalism to your work, so make sure to be honest with them and challenge them to perform to the best of their abilities.  

Interpret Once you’ve formed the habit of challenging your assumptions, you’ll find an increasing need to make something out of the data you’ve collected to redefine them. This will require skill in analyzing trends and good old-fashioned creativity. 

Decide Decisions that affect many people and your business as a whole should take an amount of time equal to its impact. Small, everyday decisions, however, can also benefit from a few moments of thought to consider hidden consequences and creative alternatives. 

Align Having a plan isn’t going to do anyone much good if you can’t get it executed. The skill of communicating the vision and building enthusiasm is key for a strategic manager. 

Learn A strategic leader chooses to learn from all experiences, even failures. The trick is to do the hard work of really learning what went wrong! Only by studying failures and successes can you understand the factors that created one instead of the other. And only then will you be able to reproduce or correct those factors the next time. 

How to Develop Strategic Thinking  

Finally, while saying strategic thinking is important, developing an organizational culture of strategic thinkers can be challenging. The day-to-day crush of responding to immediate demands often overwhelms a slower paced strategic response. Robert Kabacoff, author of the MRG Strategic Leader report, shares these methods for fostering strategic thinking in your organization’s management approach: 

• Give managers time! Encourage your team to build a habit of setting aside time for strategic planning. 
• Keep your managers informed. Strategic thinking depends on having information ready to hand about both the organization you are working in and the industry at large. 
• Communicate your organization’s vision. Managers can’t steer their teams towards a destination if they don’t know where they’re going. 
• Reward the effort of strategic thinking, even when experiments sometimes go wrong. Encourage evaluation of mistakes instead of punishment. A punitive approach will only suppress creative experimentation. 

Developing the ability to manage others is crucial for anybody who is or wants to be a leader. Managing Emotions Under Pressure is a communication course that helps managers of all skill levels to learn how to control their emotions and keep their professionalism at the forefront of their managerial talents.  

There are a wide variety of courses, from online seminars to easy to access webinars at your fingertips with the help of Pryor Learning, from our communication category to our category on managers and leadership, knowing how to lead others is crucial to making a difference in the corporate world.