Make connections
The capacity to understand relationships across different parts of your organization, and to spot patterns and trends in seemingly unrelated events and information, constitutes a hallmark of strategic thinking. By seeing relationships, patterns, and trends, you can generate valuable solutions to problems and reduce the amount of detail you must grapple with in order to make decisions.
Consider these examples of seeing relationships, patterns, and trends:
- A new IT system. By serving on a cross-functional team comprising managers from several other parts of your organization, you learn that the IT group is proposing that the company install an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that links customer databases and other software applications throughout your company. But your group has just decided to adopt a stand-alone customer database. You realize that your group and IT will be working at cross-purposes if both plans move forward. You conclude that it would be better to hold off installing your stand-alone database until you know more about whether the ERP project will be approved.
- Automobile manufacturing processes. You're reading an article about a method for improving shop-floor processes in auto manufacturing. You find yourself thinking about ways to apply some of the method's principles to your own unit's operations—even though you lead a customer call center, not a manufacturing unit.
- Defecting employees. You work in human resources, and you notice that the employees who leave your company for jobs with other organizations increasingly tend to be those individuals who possess unique technical skills and knowledge—such as expertise with leading-edge software applications and familiarity with the latest code-writing practices. This trend prompts you to examine how your organization uses recognition and rewards to retain employees who possess unique and rare skills.
- Customer complaints. As you're reviewing customers' anecdotal comments on complaint forms compiled from the past year, it strikes you that many of the different comments seem related.
For example, you see explicit remarks such as "Your reps don't know anything about the product you're selling." But you also see more ambiguous comments, including "Fed up with lousy treatment" and "Don't have time to keep calling." You begin to see an underlying theme related to sales representatives' competency—and devise ways to define and strengthen required competencies.