From the course: Teamwork Essentials: Stand Out as a Valuable Team Member

Hone your strategy skills

From the course: Teamwork Essentials: Stand Out as a Valuable Team Member

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Hone your strategy skills

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- High performing teams need team members who are able to think strategically in order to be proactive, adaptable, and innovative, and this helps you stand out as a key contributor. Here are five surprisingly easy ways you can reconfigure your thinking to be more strategic. Ask strategic questions, for example how are we differentiating ourselves to competitors? Where will our growth come from in the next five years? How could we respond to the threat presented by potentially disruptive competitors? Ask why. Develop a habit of often asking yourself why am I doing this? This reminds you of the big picture, and aligns your decision making with the team and company goals. Consider alternatives using inversion. If you're solving a problem think about the worst case scenario really. For example you explore all the potential risks and concerns, including if this was to fail what could have caused the failure? If we ran out of resources, what would we do? By considering weaknesses in advance you're better able to prepare for and mitigate them before they arise. Identifying gaps, address these four priority areas. Vision, how does this fit in with the big picture. Goal, what are the facts and what's the immediate objective? People, who is impacted, and how have we engaged them and how do they feel about this. Task, what needs to be done to make this happen? Conduct a post-mortem. In the world of management, a post-mortem is a post-implementation review. Once you finished a project reflect on what went well and what didn't. What could be better next time? What were the gaps? What do you wish you knew when you started? You can even take this a step further and do this with your team. Doing these regularly helps to build a habit of strategic thinking and the more you do it, the better you get.

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