My Leader Isn’t Strategic: 4 Simple Actions You Can Take to Enhance Your Impact and Predict Changes Before They Happen

When a leader lacks strategic vision, it can be challenging to understand your own purpose within the broader company context. This often drives you to focus on immediate tasks, unclear priorities, and can give you a sense of disconnection from the overall business impact or even make you feel stuck. If you find yourself in this situation, here are some steps to help you gain perspective, uncover opportunities, and increase your strategic impact.

Learn the Business

Make sure you know what your company’s annual and long-term goals are and find out the way they plan to achieve them. This can be found in the company’s strategic plan. 

Not sure what the strategic plan is or need some help understanding it?  Ask your leader for help interpreting the high-level themes.  Or make friends with your company’s marketing leader and ask them to summarize what is key to company leaders this year.

Practice summarizing what you hear in straightforward, practical language, then think about what that could mean for you, your department, and try to find the connections between the work you are doing and how it helps the company achieve its goals.

Think Bigger About Your Work

Do you know how your key initiatives impact other departments and contribute to the success of your company’s customers? Do you know how your projects might support colleagues in achieving THEIR goals?  Have you thought about how your work might impact customers?

Imagine how your approach and the outcomes of your work might impact your colleagues in other departments, positively or negatively.  Can you find a way that your approach or that changing the scope of your project could help them win too?

Draw connections between what you are working on and how your company’s customers can succeed.  How might even an internal process improvement connect to how your customers want to experience working with your company?

Thinking about your work in a bigger context provides a powerful perspective that helps you prioritize and focus your energies where it matters most.

Analyze the Situation

Step back and take stock of your environment.  This gives you the space to identify threats and resources before they show up.  To do this, pay attention to what is on the mind of your leaders and understand how they win.  Learn what measures are important to each of them and learn what those measures mean to the business, and how your work connects.

Identify who could be potential champions and detractors of your initiatives. Not sure who is who?  Plan some stakeholder interviews to learn more about your colleagues, leaders and what is important to them.  Ask questions about your work and try to uncover any hidden impacts on THEM if you should succeed or fail to achieve your goals.

Building more awareness of your situation will help you predict changes and shifts in priorities well in advance.

Exercise Strategic Curiosity

In your team meetings, ask questions that help uncover how your team’s priorities and reveal how the team’s decisions connect to the company goals.  Is the team getting stuck in the weeds? Bring better focus by asking “What business problem are we trying to solve?” or “How does this project help us achieve our goals?”

Here is a list of powerful questions you can ask to elevate the conversation at any meeting.

Respectfully asking questions to learn more about the reasons behind the work you are doing and the decisions that are made will help you learn more about the way your leaders think and will provide a context that can help you act and make decisions more autonomously. 

Evaluate Data and Develop an Outside-In Perspective

How do you know that the way your team works is a best practice?  Spend some time gathering information about other companies’ best practices.  Join professional organizations and find ways to benchmark your team’s methods against leading companies in your field.

Identify three thought leaders to follow and find one or two new ideas or changes to bring to your next team meeting.

Ask your colleagues and yourself; where would having more information or data help me do my job better?  Where could more data validate our approach?

By integrating more insights into your discussions and interactions, you can create greater clarity for yourself and for your colleagues -- even if your leader isn’t strategic.

Want to benchmark your team’s strategic capabilities?  Download this assessment and find out how strategic your team is operating.

You don’t have to wait for your leader to set the direction to make a strategic impact. By understanding the business, thinking bigger about your work, analyzing your environment, asking insightful questions, and seeking out data and best practices, you can start driving meaningful change right where you are. These steps will help you add more value and make a real difference in your organization. Remember, being strategic is a mindset you can develop, no matter your role.