Inspire New Thinking with Strategic Leadership Development

Rich Horwath blends his practical experience as a former Chief Strategy Officer with his expertise as a bestselling author and professor to provide individuals, management teams and entire organizations with the strategic thinking skills to reach their leadership potential. The business training process of helping managers develop their strategic thinking skills enables an organization to become more competent in both strategy development and execution. By embedding the three disciplines of strategic thinking at the individual level, organizations can use leadership development training to create a core competency that continually fuels competitive advantage. Leaders can embed a strategic thinking competency within their groups by following three steps:

1. Create common knowledge: What is strategy, how is it different from your business model and what is its relationship to competitive advantage? If your team doesn't have an understanding of these basic concepts and how they influence one another, it's unfair to fault them for failed strategy execution. Incorporate strategy training programs into the start of your strategic planning process to ensure everyone is starting from the same place.
2. Create common language: Begin your next staff meeting by having people write down their definitions of terms such as goals, objectives, strategy and tactics. There will most likely be a wide range of answers. Develop a universal language of the key terms for discussing strategy and provide periodic strategy programs to cement the learnings.
3. Create common tools: Using only one tool to develop strategy (i.e., SWOT Analysis) is like giving an artist only one color to paint with. Introduce, practice and apply at least six tools in your strategy workshops to build the team's strategic capabilities. By doing so, you'll ensure your people are thinking strategically and holistically about the business.