Acting & Thinking Strategically

The instinct, when a direct report brings you a problem, is to tell them how to solve it. Don’t. Telling people how to get it done feels efficient and it does nothing for them in the long run — they come back with the next problem, and the one after that.

Coach the muscle instead. Get curious about how they arrived at their decision, what issues they’re seeing, what options they’ve weighed. When you give people tools instead of answers, they see firsthand how their actions ripple out and affect others. By asking more questions, listening differently, and asking your team to experiment and reflect, you build a strategic skill that serves them for their whole career — and, not incidentally, makes your own job a lot easier.

What “strategic” actually means

Strategic means leading in a way that advances goals and creates long-term advantage. Put plainly: taking actions that lead to goals, with an eye on the future, focused on things that matter. It shows up in three places.

Strategic skills — understanding trends, anticipating problems and opportunities, seeing things differently, prioritizing well, communicating simply, and bringing others along.

Strategic thinking — connecting dots, recognizing threats and opportunities, staying curious, asking questions, and holding multiple perspectives at once.

Strategic behavior — communicating effectively, managing your time, and inviting risks and challenges rather than avoiding them.

Prepare yourself before you coach

Your own mindset shapes the questions you’ll ask and what you’ll choose to work on with people. Before you start coaching anyone else, get honest with yourself:

• What are my beliefs about strategic work?
• How have my experiences shaped that thinking?
• How do I define strategic behavior?

You don’t need to be world-class at every strategic skill to coach it. You need a clear-eyed read on your own strengths and weaknesses, so you know when to pull in help from someone else.

Share the goals and the strategy first

Here’s the part new managers skip. Before your team can be strategic, they need the foundation. Ask yourself:

• Does my team understand the organization’s strategy?
• Do they know the department’s goals and high-level priorities?
• Can they tie their own work to those goals?

If the answer to any of those is no, the team is missing the raw material to think strategically at all. You can’t coach strategic behavior into a vacuum. To fix it:

1. Communicate vision and strategy regularly. Vision is where the company wants to go; strategy is how it’ll get there. How often depends on your industry’s pace of change — once or twice a year in a mature one, four to twelve times a year in a dynamic one.
2. Connect the dots out loud. Explain how your team’s work ties to corporate priorities, and how your department fits in.
3. Emphasize value creation, not just revenue. Chasing revenue or profit is not the same as creating value. Real value creation demands a deep understanding of the customer and a genuine appreciation for every key stakeholder.

Set the example

You can’t expect the team to be strategic if you aren’t. A gut check:

• Do you actually know your company’s vision and strategy? Do your peers? If not, that’s where to start.
• Do you understand the value drivers? (Convenience is a huge one for Amazon — so they focus, monitor, and innovate relentlessly on it.)
• Do you keep up with trends and opportunities, and encourage differing perspectives?
• Are you genuinely curious — leaning into questions before reaching for answers?
• Do you make time for strategic thinking, or does the calendar eat it? Carve out time to reflect.
• Does your communication reflect your thinking? Being strategic means speaking simply and succinctly enough that people can grab the essence of your message.
• Are you comfortable influencing others — challenging the status quo, getting buy-in from peers, spearheading change? Do you think of yourself as a risk taker?

Coaching strategic thinking

Once the foundation is there, the coaching is largely about training people to read signals — to make trend observation part of the job rather than something that happens to them.

• Watch the data, trends, and signals coming in from the environment, internal and external.
• Make observing trends part of the role, not an occasional fire drill.
• Clarify what kinds of data you actually want people watching, so the attention lands somewhere useful.

The whole arc is the same one you started with: questions over answers, experiments over directives, reflection over rescue. Do it consistently and you’re not just shipping this quarter’s work — you’re building people who’ll keep getting more strategic long after they’ve left your team.