Featured Article

Four Cognitive Skills of Successful Business Strategists

Mario D. Wallace
Senior Strategist and Human Resources
University of Arkansas for Medical Science
Little Rock Ark.

The term strategist has been around since some of the first ancient military campaigns. Finding
the best strategist has always been a challenge for militaries and even today for local and global
businesses. The goals of business strategists are similar to those of the military since they both
seek to develop strategic plans to achieve a competitive advantage against their competitors.
Provided that we live in the era of new technological advances and hyper-competition, strategic
planning has become a valued process for business strategists and owners.
According to the Harvard Business Review article, "The Five Competitive Forces that Shape
Strategy," some scholars argue that certain firms outperform others because they understood
how to strategically position themselves in their industry and manage industry forces. In the
Journal of Management article, "Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage," the
author argues that firms outperform others by leveraging their internal resources to create
sustained competitive advantage. The article continues to explain that some leaders of firms
compete for industry superiority through trading off non-competing positions in the market.
Regardless of the method, business strategists are expected to assist clients in developing
robust strategic plans for achieving competitive advantage and accelerated business growth.
This can only be achieved when business strategists possess skills in the following four cognitive
areas.
Facilitation
Facilitating strategy focuses on engaging people in cocreating a plan to achieve competitive
advantage. The book Healthcare Strategic Planning, (Health Administration Press, 2012), states
business strategists with facilitation skills have the capacity to create engaging experiences that
stimulate active participation to create a strategic plan. They are effective communicators who
can explain the benefits of strategy and achieve buy in and participation.
Author Alan M. Zuckerman, FACHE, FAAHC, wrote the benefits of strategy are product and
market impact, financial impact, operational impact and community impact. Business
strategists with facilitation skills know how to manage the pulse of interactions to make magical
moments happen. The authors of, "Organizational decline and innovation: Turnarounds and
downward spirals," Academy of Management Review, agree that business strategists with
facilitation skills encourage people to think outside of the box and provide sustainable business
solutions.
Business strategists with facilitation skills are adept in strategy management theories,
frameworks and models such as cocreation strategies, resource-based view, Blue Ocean
strategies and Platform strategies. Given their knowledge and skills, they have the capacity to
simplify difficult constructs. They also possess emotional intelligence qualities, specifically social
awareness and relationship management. They can pick up cues from others in strategy
settings and emphatically smooth their stress behaviors. They understand power relationships
and how to influence them. They are skillful in managing conflict and creating team synergy.
Successful strategists use their facilitating skills not only to manage people in strategy settings
but also to manage strategy processes.
Analytics
"The execution premium: Linking strategy to operations for competitive advantage," Harvard
Business Press, states strategic planning is a top-down approach that engages clients in
analytical processing and strategy development and management. Business strategists have to
be adept in intelligence gathering from both primary and secondary sources. They have to be
investigatory with a keen sense of biases in data. They have to use externally collective data to
make sense of the agile market and competitor's shifting behaviors to make optimal business
decisions that accelerate business growth and create competitive advantage. They have to find
a competitive position in the market to differentiate themselves.
Business strategists need to have a strong familiarity with data analytics and data mining. Since
data warehousing has become a common business practice today, business strategists have to
leverage their data analytics and mining skills to weave through troves of data to determine
performance gaps, resource misalignments, poor quality metrics and process inefficiencies.
They have to be able to see a line of sight from internal data and the company's strategic
positioning to determine how to create a plan that provides a competitive advantage.
Strategy Development
According to some experts, strategy development is both a top-down and bottom-up approach.
The strategy process must engage the entire workforce. Business strategists formulate and
develop strategic plans with executive leaders and operationalize it for project managers,
operations managers, business managers and frontline workers within a company.
A goal of business strategists is to assist clients in building a strategy that advances the
company's position in the market and that engages a company's human capital. There are many
methods for building a strategy, and business strategists must be fluent in multiple methods.
The Balanced Scorecard, created by Robert S. Kaplan, PhD, and David P. Norton, PhD, explains
that a balanced strategy has to include objectives related to four perspectives: talent and
technology, internal process, customer and financial.
The talent and technology perspective includes objectives related to human capital
development and recruitment, cultural capital and technology capital. The internal process
perspective includes objectives related to operational management, customer management,
innovation, and regulatory and compliance. The customer perspective include objectives
related to experience, satisfaction, retention and acquisition. And the financial perspective
include objectives related to short- and long-term financial opportunities. The Balanced
Scorecard is an effective strategic management tool whether for formulating, developing,
executing or managing a strategy.
Business strategists must be able to determine a company's value gap and close the gap by
developing strategic objectives, measures, targets and initiatives. Strategic objectives must
accompany strategic measures and targets, and strategic initiatives must support and align with
strategic objectives to create strategic synergy. This strategic union must be built to support the
strategic direction of the company. Business strategists are not only responsible for developing
strategic objectives, but they also have to align the human capital to the strategy.
Kaplan and Norton conclude that a company's human capital need to align with its strategic
objectives and initiatives to operationalize the strategy. The alignment of human capital with
the strategy ensures accountability, reduces strategic risk and creates synergy. A misalignment
of human capital with a strategy creates strategic risk and jeopardized a successful execution of
a strategy.
Strategy Management
Strategy management is the bedrock of the strategy process but the weak link. Some leaders
fail to consider that a new strategy can create massive changes in an organization. When
leaders do not consider this, the strategy has a high potential of failure. Strategy often fails at
this stage because of ineffective strategy execution plans. Some companies do not know how to
effectively transition from strategic planning to strategic management. The transition must
include a strategy that manages both the people side and process side a change. The strategy
transition must also include a change strategy and a strategy for monitoring the strategy's
performance.
The Harvard Business Review article, "Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail," says
change management has to be integrated into the strategy process to minimize risk and failure
of the strategy. The author wrote that strategy brings about change and that change is constant
in all industries. Business strategists must leverage four critical elements of change
management: sponsorship, communication, resistance assessments and coalition.
The business strategist must convince client leaders to commit to being sponsors of strategies.
They have to show that they believe in the strategy, are involved in the strategy and
consistently communicate progress of the strategy. Additionally, a communication plan has to
be developed with messages designed to encourage people and sustain the strategy, and the
messages should be tailored for each tier of a company.
Some important points to keep in mind:
Communicate early wins to offset emotional impacts when targets are not researched
Take resistance assessments periodically throughout the strategy management stage
If resistance is rampant throughout a company, the strategy has a high potential of
failure
Use assessment to consistently gauge and manage resistance
Put together a change coalition team to assist in managing resistance. The team should
include leaders across the company who consistently check the pulse of resistance and
use strategies to minimize it.
Strategy managing is tedious for business strategists, yet rewarding. Business strategists have
to establish strategy-review meetings to consistently monitor inputs, outputs and outcomes of
a strategy. Kaplan and Norton recommend that strategy review meetings should be scheduled
quarterly. The scheduled meeting is used to measure the performance of the strategy by
assessing the progress of strategic initiatives and objectives. At these meetings, leaders who are
assigned parts of the strategy have to report out their progress, challenge, and
recommendations. The horizontal reporting structure allows leaders from across a company to
stay abreast of the overall status of the strategy. The horizontal reporting structure also induces
collective iterative learning and strategy adaptations if necessary.
To learn more, contact Mario Wallace at wallacemariod@gmail.com.