Women consistently rate higher than men as people managers but fall short in the area of strategic acumen. Among the essential skills for strategic acumen are four required to plan like a CEO: “Soft eyes,” strategic thinking, understanding the “business of the business,” and process ownership skills.
Soft eyes drive the outside/in dynamic of strategic acumen. Soft eyes are alert for events and trends in the larger business environment and discern which will have the greatest impact on your organization. A woman leader with soft eyes will be able to “register” a bomb explosion on a train in Spain, the strength of the Euro against the dollar and the trend to offshore white collar jobs. From these she will be able to determine which have the highest potential for impacting her customers, her suppliers, her competitors, and her organization.
Strategic thinking enables women executives to answer questions such as:
How should my organization best deal with high-impact events and trends? Which factors can we influence (e. g. legislation, regulation, customer demand, competitive threats) and how? Which factors should we simply respond to, or cope with? What are the degrees of freedom we have, and how can we use them effectively? How do we translate these possibilities into key strategies for the organization? Will these strategies create competitive advantage to sustain our business?
At lower levels, exercise strategic thinking by creating a clear line of sight between the function or department you lead and the strategies of the larger organization. You must be able to answer the question, “How can my function/department/team drive those strategies?”
Understanding the business of the business allows you to set clear goals and create meaningful measures. It is imperative that you understand how the function(s) you lead contribute to your company’s growth, availability of cash, customer acquisition and retention, and return (profit margin x velocity).
If you are the CEO, you must be skilled at paying attention to all four and appropriately shifting your focus to areas that are out of balance. At lower levels, you must understand your department/function/team’s role in driving each area. By understanding the numbers behind the organization’s strategies, you can then define clear outcomes, the concrete measures that indicate your success in achieving them and the specific processes within your control that drive those outcomes.
Process ownership skills, or execution, comprise the major job of a business leader. The skills discussed so far are meaningless if you don’t have the ability to execute. As leaders, businesswomen own three types of processes which, if managed well, enable the organization to execute its plans: people processes, operations processes and strategic processes.
Plenty has been written about the leader’s role vis a vis people processes. Not much has been written about the leaders as owners of operating or strategic processes. Leaders who are capable process owners are skilled at making the connections between the high-level strategies, the specific processes and measures that can deliver higher customer service, higher margins, improved velocity and accelerated growth, and specific programs and initiatives which will improve processes to deliver the intended results.