6 Signs You’re a Strategist or Just a Manager

There is no test that can accurately assess a person’s strategic management capacity. But there are six questions below that may indicate the extent of that competency. Try answering to get more ideas for developing your own strategic thinking.

Do you have a business vision?

Steves Jobs and Wozniak – the two founders of Apple Computer envisioned “the democratization of computers”. Your vision when starting any business is the “guideline” – a long-term direction for the whole process, not a short-term goal. An employee with strategic management skills will be able to articulate his vision clearly in just a few sentences.

Do you have a philosophy of action?

The core philosophy is the mission for your day-to-day operations and your team/business. An organization with a philosophy of action enough to convince the people in the organization to follow it has achieved 50% of success. And so, not only care about the philosophy of the company and yourself, you also need to know the business philosophy of the competitor company.

Does your organization have a competitive advantage?

The core thing for a group/enterprise to survive is to have a position in the active market segment, based on a certain competitive advantage. In other words, your organization must be number 1 or 2, or at least in the top of the top competitive organizations in the segment. For example, competitive advantage is reasonable price, unique design, reputable brand or strength in supply.

In other words, a strategist will identify the factors that motivate buyers to choose his company’s product over another equivalent product. Similarly, the team under you also needs to demonstrate an important role in the company.

Can your employees work independently?

CareerBuilder has written about employee empowerment in the past. By a strategically managed company becomes a consortium in which each employee is an entrepreneur, responsible for managing certain tasks. Each group can be considered a micro-company, supported by the resources of the whole group and headed by managers.

In order to promote the ability to work independently, the company’s board of directors should issue regulations, directives and guidelines so that managers can be responsible for their business units. Instead of passive submission, their task is to be creative, self-directed within the limits allowed to return the best results according to the directive. And so on to the subordinates.

Do you have a vision when arranging personnel?

When trying to achieve a certain goal that the subordinates are not qualified for, some managers take over the function of that person. That leads to that employee’s role becoming redundant while the management is overloaded and can’t get all the work done as before.

Thus, a leader with a strategy must be able to set up an executive mindset and implement the strategy in a scientific way. Instead of working for employees, leaders need to know how to handle an immediate crisis and plan long-term and systematic training.

Do you have a new approach?

This capability includes: Guiding employees to develop their vision and goals, instead of setting limits for them; Initiating new activities and projects, not just completing the required work; Ask questions and suggest solutions.

As such, if you have the ability to lead, question, launch, and run new things that no one else has done to drive sustainable growth and profitability for the company, that’s one aspect of your strategic ability. comb. At the same time, you are not hindering the creative ideas of your subordinates, but enabling them to find possible solutions – that integrity is also a strategic ability.

For you to become a strategist, it is not only a matter of personal competence, but also requires the permission of the company’s management to be proactive and creative. And where managers and subordinates are trained in strategic thinking as well as how to apply strategy to work, there is a company capable of sustainable development.

Vinh Phu