How Cultural Strategic Thinking Plays A Part Within An Organization
Strategic thinking requires the ability to think creatively about what is in front of you, how it will change, and how you can impact that change to your benefit. Strategic thinking involves planning and making choices that support an organization’s long-term objectives; especially in large organizations, it takes more than just organizational leadership to do this effectively.
If you can cultivate strategic thinking organization-wide, cultural strategic thinking can be the element that makes an organization stay relevant in relentlessly challenging times.
Cultural strategic thinking increases autonomy and team member’s confidence when decision-making and boosts creativity; it leads to increased adaptiveness and responsiveness of an organization to rapidly changing landscapes.
Understanding Cultural Strategic Thinking & Its Impact
To understand how cultural strategic thinking plays a part within an organization, consider the shared beliefs, values, and behaviors that define an organization’s identity. Organizational culture is the rules, attitudes, and conventions that govern employee interactions and collaboration. By instilling a culture of organizational strategic thinking, you can ensure that even micro-, daily decisions will reflect the organization’s beliefs and long-term goals.
Cultural strategic thinking within an organization fosters autonomy, boosts creativity, and enhances adaptability to changing landscapes. By aligning values with goals, involving the team in decision-making, promoting open communication, and fostering a learning culture, leaders can cultivate strategic thinking organization-wide, ensuring relevance and resilience in challenging times.
Cultural strategic thinking boosts employee engagement and alignment by giving teams a purpose and authentic ways to live out organizational values as presented by leadership. Strategic thinking promotes learning, experimentation, and flexibility to support change and innovation, leaving the organization adaptable and resilient.
Implementing Cultural Strategic Thinking
So how do we, as leaders, promote cultural strategic thinking within our organizations?
- Craft a Clear Mission & Statement, incorporating personal and professional values words: Create a compelling organizational vision that outlines the desired culture and strategic goals. Ideally, do this with input from key personnel and stakeholders to get cultural buy in from the get-go. We recommend creating a list of both personal and professional values words to use to incorporate into these statements collectively. This helps all team members feel they ‘see themselves’ within the mission of the organization.
- Align Values & Goals: Once you have your mission, vision & values defined, complement your strategic goals (whether short term or long term) to match the organization’s values and ambitions as spelled out in the statements.
- Involve the Team: Invite all workers to participate in decision-making and strategy formulation. Gather people together for regular “Deep Dive” meetings to discuss and implement strategy. You can do this department or organization-wide.
- Open Communication: Encourage team members to share comments, ideas, feedback, and communication between themselves and with their higher ups. Use meetings, digital platforms, and suggestion boxes to encourage conversation, even on a digital team. Here’s some tools we use to regularly communicate with our team.
- Foster a Learning Culture: Encourage organizational learning and flexibility to foster innovation and transformation. Leadership should model desirable cultural behaviors and emphasize adaptive strategic thinking. Regular team member evaluations should be feedback loops between management and staff, allowing for a transparent and more lateral work culture.
Why can’t my team think strategically?
Resistance to change, organizational practices, and unclear strategic goals might hinder cultural strategic thinking. Usually, it’s a leadership issue. If you’re asking yourself this question, it’s a good time to turn the finger around and instead ask how you can support your team to be more strategic thinkers.
Clear strategic vision communication, staff training, leadership support, and ongoing adaptiveness to feedback will help you overcome this issue. Don’t know where to start? We can help!
Cultural strategic thinking is essential to creating an engaged and thriving work culture. It affects organizational adaptability, levels of healthy, autonomous decision-making, and team member engagement. Companies that emphasize cultural strategic thinking will thrive and compete in the ever-changing landscape of organizational development.
