Developing strategic competencies: a starting point; behaving, thinking, and becoming strategic is not easy, but it is critical for increasing your value to your organization. (CareerPath).

At the Core

This article:

* Defines what it means to be "strategic"

* Discusses how to think and behave strategically

People and organizations that refuse to adapt to a changing environment often marginalize themselves--or worse, they may render themselves valueless and therefore expendable.

There are many examples of this lack of strategic adaptation. One of the better known is the case where not thinking strategically reduced the once-powerful U.S. railroad industry to a minor role in the larger transportation sector. Similarly, the Swiss watch industry, once the standard for watch making around the world, became a marginal player when it refused to take seriously the advent of the quartz movement and battery power. The Japanese, however, understood well the strategic value of these technologies. Understanding how to think and behave strategically can ensure both value addition and viability.

Focusing on strategic planning is more critical than ever before for records and information managers. Changes in business toward globalization, electronic information systems, and an understanding of information converted to knowledge as the ultimate business asset have known no industry or professional boundaries and have resulted inevitably in an increased reward for applied strategic competencies and a relative devaluation of all non-strategic competencies.

This devaluation of non-strategic competencies is occurring because routine tactical tasks have become especially vulnerable to being outsourced or "automated away." Strategic thinking and strategic behavior, however, rely on connecting information, experience, learning, leadership, foresight, and decision-making skills, and therefore remains the exclusive domain of humans. Thus, to make yourself "strategic" means to truly create job security that can never be automated away.

"Strategic"--What Does It Mean?

Merriam-Webster's 10th Edition Collegiate Dictionary (2001) defines strategic as follows: "of great importance within an integrated whole or to a planned effect." This definition could apply to an individual as well as an organization; thinking strategically about one's career is a useful practice. Closer still to the corporate sector is the treatment in Webster's New World Vocabulary of Success (1998): "[a strategy is] a plan of action to achieve the goals of a business or organization; strategies describe how to meet goals and objectives."

Such definitions may seem complex, but the reality is much simpler. For instance, you learn that you will be taking a business trip paid for by your organization. You arrange the trip so that your family can come and vacation with you after the business ends. Ideally, you'll have a vacation and part of it will be paid for (honestly, of course) by someone else. If you have done this in the past, then you have put "strategy" and "strategic" into practice. You are simply trying to creatively leverage an existing situation for maximum benefit. This is strategic thinking.

There are two other words critical to grasping strategy as used in the organizational environment. Perhaps the most important one is goal. This term is central to understanding strategic because ultimately it is not enough merely to want to move in some imprecise direction; we must want to move toward a clear goal used to fulfill our organization's mission.

The other term, tactical, covers small tasks that may or may not have anything to do with any larger goal or effort. There are tactical elements to anything strategic (e.g., specific tasks that support implementation of a strategic effort), but there are also many tasks that support nothing larger or higher than the task itself.

Being Strategic

To behave strategically has nothing necessarily to do with any particular kind of management other than effective management--"being strategic" is always a part of effective management. Even the smallest, most menial task imaginable can benefit from the application of the principles of strategic management. This is because being strategic simply means constantly asking the question, in an appropriate context, "What is it that I (my group, my department, my company) can do now to move us toward our organization's future goal?"

Imagine a continuum: From a clerical level ("scanning technician") all the way up the line to the chief executive of great ideas. Applying the concepts of strategic management at each and every step and at every one of the many job titles along this continuum will improve the value of that position to the organization without necessarily changing those activities that represent the position's core competencies.

With each of the many job titles, the specific tasks involved in being strategic will change. There are, however, several overarching principles that never change: in virtually every case where the concept of being strategic is applied, the activities will be concerned with looking "forward" or toward the future. This means the activities to be carried out will be goal-driven, and the next step will be to "flow from the goal." The most vital element of this goal from an organizational and business perspective is to add value.

Thinking Strategically

Another important element common to any job when practiced strategically is that the focus will be directed outward. The expertise needed and an understanding of opportunities and dangers can be gained only by comparing what is happening inside with what is happening outside. So "strategic," at whatever level it is practiced, commonly means looking outward or being outwardly directed.

Perhaps the scanning technician is naturally curious and driven, and these very characteristics lead him to constantly search the external environment to acquire additional understanding beyond his basic core competencies of work quality and productivity. This is thinking strategically.

Eventually, the technician gains enough insight to realize that there is equipment, of which his superiors are unaware, that would enable his unit's productivity to increase by 15 percent every year for the next five years. Becoming educated to these possibilities, formulating a goal and a plan to achieve these productivity gains, establishing relationships, and communicating with those individuals who are in a position to help make this happen means that this scanning technician is thinking and behaving strategically.

Unlike the scanning technician's position, it is likely that the core competencies of the position of "chief executive in charge of great ideas" are purely strategic. In the business environment, any idea that adds value for customers, partners, and the organization as a whole constitutes a great idea. Thus, any idea that adds value anywhere is a great idea. This enables a wide range of possibilities for our chief to handle and reinforces one of the most essential of all strategic tendencies: Strategic means big picture. There will be many possibilities, and those possibilities will expand across functions, departments, and even industries. Boundaries will cross or blur. Solutions to problems might come from anywhere and look like anything.

Strategic Leadership

To be successful, executives must rely heavily on their ability to establish, cultivate, and manage meaningful human relationships. Why are relationships important? Strategic is "big," and the bigger the picture, the less one can know about everything needed from smaller, more specialized areas that help make up the big picture. If you cannot know everything you need to know because there is simply too much to know, you must rely on those in your network of relationships. The more you are involved in an inherently strategic effort, the more you must rely on the knowledge and expertise of those making up your network of personal relationships.

Thus the specific skills related to the development of good human relationships become inherently more important. For developing, maintaining, and cultivating relationships, this will mean inspiring trust in others as well as correctly judging the character of those you will come to rely on. It also means understanding the importance of reciprocation and empathy in considering the multiple perspectives of those involved in your network of relationships.

The network of relationships developed by those working in a strategic domain first and foremost informs the decisions of such individuals by giving them access to multiple levels of expertise they cannot attain on their own. Of course, the more strategic the domain, the bigger the goal and the less probable that any single individual alone can accomplish all the tasks necessary to achieve that goal. This is why leadership is another important element of the strategic equation.

Writing about leadership and leadership skills has become the preeminent growth sector in management consulting. Thousands of books have been written about leadership in all of its aspects. One of the best known contemporary writers, Warren Bennis, suggested that the essential elements of leadership are guiding vision, passion, integrity, trust, curiosity, and daring. One of these elements in particular, vision, gets to the heart of being strategic.

Vision makes up a critical element for anyone in a leadership position because it is closely aligned with future-directed goals. A vision is simply a view of how one wants the future to be. It will be a description, in reasonable detail, of a company or department in two, or five, or more years. A vision is also a "stretch" toward something better. It would be useless to create a vision that has the department looking in five years exactly as it does today. You hope to create a vision that represents something better, something improved. This vision, when communicated to others through leadership, gives people the inspiration and understanding needed to enable them to perform the numerous tasks that will transform this vision into reality.

Perhaps the most critical difference between the scanning technician who is behaving and thinking strategically and the chief executive who also is thinking and behaving strategically, lies in the scope and breadth of the issues with which the two must deal. While the scanning technician is behaving strategically and might be concerned with how to increase scanning quality and productivity, the chief executive might be asking if the organization should be in the business of scanning at all or outsourcing this kind of work instead as a tactical step in an organization-wide strategy to reduce operational expenses and free up resources for the strategic use of information. The ideas the chief executive considers go above and beyond the scope of any one individual, department, or function in the organization. By definition, the chief executive looks forward and outward to make proposals relevant to the highest organizational levels. But those in both positions should be committed--each in his own way and at his own level--to maximizing use of the organization's information assets.

Developing Strategic Competencies

Constant learning is an important pursuit for anyone wanting to think and act more strategically. Pursuing all the learning assets available through both conventional and unconventional means is necessary. For the records and information manager, this might mean attending all relevant conferences and trade shows, reading the field's books and journals, taking seminars and courses provided by the most knowledgeable people in the field, and visiting the information management functions of other organizations. Management research shows that the more strategic the function, the more critical becomes the ability to traverse a broad range of disciplines with ease while seeing and creating natural, new connections between what to some might seem disparate ideas.

A study of leaders functioning at the highest strategic levels makes this fact abundantly clear. U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney changed roles: from running an oil company to negotiating Mideast peace. Cheney had limited hands-on experience actually drilling oil wells and limited actual experience dealing with the subtleties of Arab-Israeli relationships, but he possesses an understanding of "strategic" competencies at the highest level and has cultivated a top-notch network of relationships along the way. Such competencies enable individuals to move more easily into a larger and more strategic realm.

Those wishing to behave strategically, regardless of their job title, should understand that leadership is not necessarily synonymous with "being in charge." The scanning technician may not be in charge of anything, but if he is to make those around him understand the value of the new scanning technology, he must communicate, act, and inspire as a leader does.

A classical MBA education includes many strategic elements in the corporate environment and the study of leadership. The pursuit of an MBA for any professional would most certainly point the way toward many of the competencies required to act strategically in a given profession. It has been said, however, that an individual striving to attain the knowledge inherent in any MBA program could instead read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover every day for four years; the results would be identical. An exaggeration, perhaps, but in the data-rich world in which we live, the dogged, active, constant pursuit of useful information has become an overwhelming factor in transforming information into strategic value.

The Internet has certainly made continuous learning and the expansion of knowledge easier. This capability can enhance development of a strategic vision. There are numerous point-cast (as opposed to "broadcast") services available on the Internet--many of which are free--that can tailor the information received to suit an individual's needs. Subscribing to several of these online newsletters and investing five to 10 minutes daily in scanning these services can be one of the easiest ways to expand your understanding of the larger business environment surrounding your organization and industry.

Developing a larger strategic value for your organization also means having information that looks beyond its immediate sector and into the broader external, political, social, economic, and technological environment. Bits of this awareness added daily begin to accumulate. Spending time each day looking for emerging trends and related information is often referred to as environmental scanning. Over time, the knowledge acquired will develop the credibility to support the value-added future-sensitive propositions you will make as you support, create, and behave strategically.

The RIM Connection

Eugenia Brumm, Ph.D., CRM, maintains that for a RIM to think strategically requires learning how to "develop an awareness of the organization's core capabilities, understanding the vulnerabilities of the organization, and understanding the industry--the line of business that the organization is in" (InfoPro June 2001). Any records and information manager functioning at a high strategic level in an organization must get close to the business of the business rather than be preoccupied with a service function at a tactical level, a function which can be easily outsourced. The RIM professional's view must be external and broad; there will be a constant search for improvement in value and organizational-wide relevance. For a high-level RIM strategist, organizational improvement cannot be limited to a small tactical niche (such as productivity increases in scanning technology) but must be strategic and for the organization as a whole.

These high-level tasks would support an external-looking, organization-wide, big-picture view of the issues of RIM relative to the organization and industry. In other words, RIM professionals functioning at this strategic level will go above and beyond the day-to-day issues of running the RIM program. They will understand information and records as an integrated and integrating part of the larger corporate mission of creating value.

Being strategic is not about immediate, day-to-day technical issues or problem solving. Information services can be outsourced, strategic planning cannot. Not everyone working in RIM is suited for the move into "pure strategic management." Some RIM professionals may prefer continuing with a technical and tactical focus and think that strategic information management at an organization-wide level is beyond their reach or is simply not something of interest to them. But "being strategic" is a way of viewing reality that can occur at many levels: low, intermediate, or high.

Probably the single most important idea that a RIM professional can acquire from all the clamor of "strategic this" and "strategic that" is simply the understanding that "strategic" can be applied anywhere and that to do so moves that "anywhere" to some place better. For some, that place may be within their existing jobs or in their own careers relative to the career possibilities in their overall industry. At the highest levels, it might be records managers with high-level strategic competencies who build so extensively onto their core RIM competencies that they find themselves peers with those making decisions at the highest organizational levels.

References

Bennis, Warren. On Becoming a Leader. Addison-Wesley: Reading, MA. 1989.

READ MORE ABOUT IT

Corrall, Sheila. Strategic Management of Information Services: A Planning Handbook. London: Aslib/IMI. 2000.

Evans, Philip, and Thomas S. Wurster. Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy. Harvard Business School Press: Boston. 2000.

McGee, James V., and Laurence Prusak. Managing Information Strategically. Wiley: New York. 1993.

Pettigrew, Andrew, Howard Thomas, and Richard Whittington. Handbook of Strategy and Management. Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA. 2002.

Keith Orndoff is president of Future Impact Education. He is a contract futurist with companies such as General Motors, Global Pastique, and the Texas Center for Superconductivity. He may reached at [e-mail].