Blip-Zip Executive Summary
Are you feeling stuck in the daily grind? Aspiring to strategic health leadership? Master strategic thinking & become a top health leader. Learn seven powerful methods to develop a strategic mindset, embrace continuous learning, and drive positive change in healthcare. Embrace continuous learning, think holistically, and collaborate for impactful change. It’s time to unleash your strategic power.
Blip-Zip Takeaways
- Sharpen your strategic mind: Escape the daily grind, cultivate a disciplined mindset, and embrace new ideas.
- Embrace lifelong learning: Continuously develop your critical thinking, agility, and adaptability to thrive in a changing world.
- Think holistically & collaborate: See the bigger picture, value diverse perspectives, and work together to achieve ambitious goals.
Keywords and Themes (Hashtags)
#Strategic-MindedLeadership #StrategicHealthLeadership #SHELDR #HealthcareLeadership #LeadershipDevelopment #StrategicThinking #TransformationalLeadership
Table of Contents
Introduction to How to Become a Strategic-Minded Health Leader (SHELDR)
In my research, teaching, and executive coaching roles, I often hear emerging leaders counseled to “be more strategic.” What does being more strategic mean? As students at Air War College in 2000-2001, we were always reminded that our next job would be more strategic.
While well-intentioned, the advice on putting it into practice could have been more explicit and helpful. That could be a clue: strategy is about succeeding in a dynamic and messy world. VUCA VUCA!
So, I began my journey to be more “strategic minded” throughout the school year, followed by a string of strategic-level assignments and projects and completion of my doctorate. Now, I’m committed to developing more strategic-minded leaders so the US can be the healthiest nation in the world.
Enya’s Challenge
Most leaders understand that strategy is intended to assess the environment, generate ideas, and bring an organization to a more advantageous position. Right?
A strategy should drive a concept for a new product, service, process, or partnership. Thus, being strategic is about generating a bright idea, such as delivering medical supplies and drugs to rural patients via drone. Doing that will make me a better strategic health leader (SHELDR)!
Right? Well, Maybe.
Being strategic means having a plan, a list of goals, and a means to achieve them linearly. Sounds logical to me. While a strategy has goals, the strategy itself is not a goal. Listen up, now. A strategy is a carefully designed plan on how to achieve goals. Identifying the goal and strategizing the plan are essential, but until you follow through with the execution, no progress will be made. In my experience, I strongly advise leaders to grow and develop themselves as strategic leaders to thrive in a dynamic, complex, and turbulent world. In other words, strategy takes thinking.
I have learned not much about what we think about but why and how we think about issues.
Knowing this should drive leaders to become more strategic-minded early on in their careers and not leave “strategy” to the privileged few in the front office or start in the latter part of their careers.
The question becomes: how do I become more strategic-minded? Answer:
The Power of Enya.
The Power of Enya
Strategic-minded leaders are not necessarily in the big idea business, even though new processes, products, or innovations should be standard practice. Preferably, a strategic-minded leader develops a habitual disciplined mindset: open, creative, and connective, and a character that allows them to escape the tyranny of the in-basket and daily entanglements.
Escaping can be done via several tactics. For example, several years ago, I conducted a lunch-n-learn session titled “Power of Enya.” The session was on teaching successful time-pressured operational leaders how to carve out time to develop themselves and think strategically.
For me, I would get up early and read while listening to Enya to exercise the right side of my brain and think about the future even though it was one week to three months out. The process allowed me to slow my thinking, envision the future, and plan by using both sides of my brain. Today, some call it mindfulness. As corny as it sounds, the approach was one of many tactics that carried me to several strategic-level leadership positions. The point is that leaders can find the time and be creative in developing themselves to be more strategic-minded.
Most leaders build their careers on operational prowess and mastery of tactical details. They are often promoted based on those skills and assigned a more strategic-level position under the halo of “possessing the potential for greater responsibilities.” In fact, over the years, I have observed them succeed, stumble, fail, or a combination of the three. Many assume the principles of strategic thinking are straightforward. They are not.
Strategic-minded leadership is more about the long view or the big picture than the immediate horizon. For example, those who think about the next evolution of their organization rather than the entanglements of a significant merger will emerge as strategic leaders, and their organizations will be better off. Being strategically minded requires an open and broader systems perspective rather than a fixed, narrow, silo focus.
Strategic thinking requires a combination of visioning, active listening, collaboration, and agile thinking. Although this sounds easy, it is not. In fact, as part of my dissertation work, I interviewed a senior strategic health leader who plainly stated that most individuals promoted out of operational-level positions had a higher propensity to stumble and fail than those who had taken on strategic-level or transformational projects throughout their careers.
To think strategically still strikes many emerging leaders as a “to do” soft skill item. They procrastinate accordingly and eventually catch up to them. Critical, agile, creative, and adaptive thinking skills seem fuzzy to operational leaders.
Strategic leaders speak of aspiration, environmental conditions, complexity, interconnections, weak signals, and patterns of opportunities. In other words, strategic thinking combines right-brain (creative, intuitive, non-linear) and left-brain (analytical, precise, linear) activities.
That is where employing the Power of Enyamust starts earlier to develop strategic thinking habits. The Power of Enya should drive one to develop oneself along the way in their operational leadership positions.
What is Your Power of Enya Tactic?
Leaders should turn the mirror on themselves. They should ask: what got me here may not get me there. In my classes and seminars on SHELDR development, I conduct a small group exercise using a disruptive, innovative idea by asking questions centered on Simon Sinek’s book Why. The exercise challenges students to ask why, why not, why, and purpose, and then what, how, when, and how will you know. Interestingly, most participants jump from the “what and how” and often diverge to why it will not work. Needs improvement. Only a few Enyas there.
Then, emerging strategic leaders observe, listen to all perspectives, and put pieces of the puzzle together as if they are thinking fast and slow and using both sides of their brains. They then steer the group toward an aspirational future state, identify competitive advantages and sources of advantage, and collaboratively guide the team to figure out how to implement the idea rather than let it die on arrival. That is the Power of Enya!
To improve strategic thinking, leaders should ask critical questions to understand their external environment—that is, the world they and their organization exist in today and tomorrow, say 2050. What dynamics, such as innovation and regulatory mandates, shape that environment? How has it changed over time, and why? What are other players, such as community health providers, doing? For what reasons? Who lives next to their space? How can their activities influence it? It means knowing that change or disruption, as wrenching as possible, is the new normal.
Questions such as these help aspiring strategic leaders develop insights and hypotheses about the landscape in which they are trying to survive and prosper. I still listen to Enya to this day, but now I have Google to pique my curiosity. What is your Power of Enya Tactic?
What is Enya’s Main Message?
The future of the healthcare system is at stake. Creating the world’s healthiest population should be the aspiration. That takes strategic thinking at all levels. For example, Kaiser Permanente did not just decide to think outside the walls of their overburdened hospitals by swimming upstream to leverage the social determinants of health (SDOH), such as public and community health systems or individual lifestyles generating poor health conditions.
A long series of trend analyses and listening tours shaped Kaiser Permanente’s decisions to be more active participants in identifying the root causes of poor health in the community, preventing chronic diseases, and reducing overcrowded emergency rooms. For example, to address the root causes, Kaiser Permanente defragmented its system to focus on vulnerable populations, mobilized experts to encourage better nutrition-based courses and lunches in schools, elevated how the prevalence of asthma is related to poor housing conditions, and sponsored farmer’s market as means to improve the health and prosperity of the community.
Another effort aims to work with employers on modifying lifestyles to be more self-sufficient and productive and screen for food insecurity in specific locations.
They are creating a strategy such as Kaiser’s as a strategic thinking activity. This mindset should be honed constantly at all levels, not merely during annual strategic planning cycles.
At Kaiser, it is getting outside their comfort zone through strategic thinking and integrating the community’s mind, body, soul, social, and clinical aspects. I am sure the nurses and administrators at Kaiser saw the value of sponsoring a farmer’s market to reduce pressure on an overburdened healthcare system and create healthier populations.
It must have been that a future Kaiser Executive attended my Power of Enya session! Not really. However, it did take a lot of strategic-minded leaders to connect the dots to facilitate and illustrate how leveraging the SDOH impacts healthcare delivery.
What Now, Enya?
To start, I suggest you reflect on the management tools you have used throughout your leadership journey thus far. I have shared mine. What is yours? Some tools are for strategic thinking; others are not. Who can live without their to-do list?
However, reliance on lists in a non-linear world pulls the mind to the left side of the brain or the tyranny of the moment. The Powers of Enya or tools such as environmental scanning, professional reading, taking on an assignment or project outside your comfort zone, journaling, practicing mindfulness, and networking with others help sharpen your strategic thinking.
Those are the Powers of Enya! What are your Powers of Enya?
7 Methods on How to Be a Strategic-Minded Health Leader
To develop leaders with an eye for strategy, consider these seven approaches. The methods emphasize the importance of mindset, self-awareness, and continuous learning in developing strategic leadership capabilities. They encourage leaders to move beyond the daily grind, think critically, and collaborate to create sustainable and impactful strategies.
- Leaders can break free from the monotony of the daily grind by cultivating a “habitual disciplined mindset” that encourages them to be receptive, imaginative, and social.
- Get in touch with “The Power of Enya”: This metaphor suggests that leaders should make time for strategic thinking, even if it involves listening to unusual methods, such as relaxing music (like Enya), to inspire new ideas.
- Join the ranks of those who value continuous education: Always push yourself to learn more, especially in critical thinking, agility, creativity, adaptation, and operational expertise.
- Embrace a holistic viewpoint on systems: Consider the larger picture and the interdependence of different factors rather than focusing on short-term tasks and compartmentalization.
- Try to listen attentively and work together: Assemble various viewpoints, foster teamwork, and steer groups towards ambitious objectives.
- Poke holes in the assumptions: To acquire insights and spot opportunities, you need to know your external environment, look at trends, and ask questions.
- Form a strategy based on the “Power of Enya”: Discover your unique way to train your brain to think strategically and push yourself to think creatively.
Strategic thinking is not an innate talent but a competency cultivated through habit, effort, practice, and the right tools. By embracing these methods, leaders can develop the mindset and practices necessary to become influential strategic thinkers and drive positive organizational change.
Summary and Conclusion
The ability to think strategically is a technique for success at any level. It should not be perceived as an innate ability or a purview of a lucky few. The news for emerging leaders is that these are soft, fuzzy skills not easily obtained with OJT or classroom experience.
The good news is, like any habit or skill, strategic thinking skills can be built with creativity, focus, discipline, and practice. You must train yourself to be a strategic-minded leader. To grow as a strategic leader, you must develop your ability to lead and think strategically simultaneously.
If you do not, your “halo” of operational success will catch up with you. The best strategists are not necessarily in the strategy game—they are in the thought-process game and thought processes lead to a good strategy. They carve out time and apply various tools to become a better SHELDR.
That is the Power of Enya!
Ready to unleash your strategic potential and become a top healthcare leader? Here are some questions, additional resources, exercises, and self-assessment tools to help you.
Deep Dive Discussion Questions
These questions will help you reflect on your leadership journey and apply article concepts.
- Consider your leadership style. How would you describe your strategic thinking?
- Think about a difficult situation. You approached the situation strategically. The experience taught you what?
- Imagine leading a team that creates your company’s strategic plan. How would you encourage collaboration and consider diverse perspectives?
- Identify your own “Power of Enya” tactic. What activities or practices can you incorporate to stimulate strategic thinking and cultivate a broader perspective?
- Discuss the concept of “social determinants of health” (SDOH) with your colleagues. How can your organization leverage SDOH to address the root causes of poor health in your community?
- Imagine you are leading a strategic planning session for your organization. What key questions would you ask to encourage critical thinking and collaboration among your team members?
Professional Development and Learning Activities
These activities will improve your strategic thinking and leadership.
- Assess your strategic leadership skills. Many online resources, including the American Hospital Association’s “Strategic Leadership Self-Assessment”, are available.
- Take a strategic leadership course or workshop. Many universities and professional organizations offer strategic thinking programs for leaders.
- Read strategic leadership books and articles. Here are some suggestions: “Good Strategy Bad Strategy” by Richard Rumelt, “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows, and “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization” by Peter Senge.
- Join a strategic leadership network. Sharing best practices and learning from others can be beneficial.
- Conduct a self-assessment of your strategic thinking skills and identify areas for improvement.
- Develop a personal strategic plan for your professional development.
- Shadow or mentor other leaders who are known for their strategic thinking skills.
- Volunteer for challenging assignments or projects that will allow you to stretch your strategic thinking muscles.
- Practice active listening and seek diverse perspectives when making decisions.
- Embrace a growth mindset; be willing to learn from your mistakes
References and Resources
- Strategic Management and Leadership for Health Professionals https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4478655/
- Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills, Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2013/01/strategic-leadership-the-esssential-skills)
- World Health Organization Constitution, https://apps.who.int/gb/bd/PDF/bd47/EN/constitution-en.pdf). Defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
- Kaiser Permanente Thrives by Addressing Social Determinants of Health, Harvard Business Review (https://www.kpwashingtonresearch.org/our-research/research-areas/social-determinants). This article discusses how Kaiser Permanente is addressing social determinants of health and improving population health outcomes.
- World Health Organization. Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health: Workforce 2030. https://www.who.int/publications-detail-redirect/9789241511131.
- The Center for Creative Leadership. What Strategic Leadership Means. https://www.ccl.org/leadership-challenges/strategic-leadership/
- Strategic Thinking, Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2023/11/how-to-become-a-better-strategic-thinker
- Strategic Leadership for the Healthcare Executive, McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/leadership-as-the-starting-point-of-strategy
- Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. This book explores the concept of mindset and its impact on success, including its role in developing strategic thinking.
