Episode 3 - Why Women are Seen as Being Less Strategic (and what to do about it)

Listen to Episode 3 - Why Women are Seen as Being Less Strategic (and what to do about it)

Today, I'm addressing a term that gets tossed around every boardroom, team meeting, LinkedIn post, and sales QBR report.

The term has been stretched so far from its actual meaning that it's basically useless, and that word is strategy.

In this episode, I’m going to walk you through what strategy actually means, what it absolutely does not mean, and why so many people (leaders included) are using it wrong. I'm also going to tell you why, if you're a woman trying to move up the corporate ladder, this word matters for you more than it does for almost anyone else in the room with you. There's a reason for it, it's frustrating as hell, and that reason is certainly not that you're lacking the skill. Make sure you keep reading because you'll want to know about this, and as you read on, the facts and data are probably going to make you want to throw something.

Here's the thing about buzzwords (and strategy has certainly become a buzzword): They start out as legitimate and useful concepts. Then everyone starts using them because they think it makes them sound important and these words end up getting so overused that eventually nobody's really sure what the term really means anymore. It's like when you say a word too many times and it starts to sound not sound like a word anymore…You know what I mean? In these types of situations, though, nobody wants to be the person who raises their hand and asks for clarification on what the term means because it’s assumed that we all just know. The term strategy has become the poster child for this phenomenon.

If you walk into almost any organization, you'll hear it constantly.

We need a strategy for this.

What's our growth strategy?

We need to think more strategically.

She's not as strategic as we'd like her to be.

That last sentence, “she's not as strategic as we'd like her to be”? You've probably heard some version of that said about you or about another woman you work with. Remember that statement because I'm coming back to it in a bit.

People name-drop strategy into conversations, like others should be impressed that they know what it is, but if you ask most people to actually define strategy, or to tell you specifically what the strategy is, you'll get a lot of confident sounding vagueness and no real detail. This is a problem because a word that really should mean everything in business effectively means nothing.

I'll be direct here because this is something people get wrong all the time, and I'm not being direct to try to make anyone feel bad for not knowing this. I'm being direct because it's something that we all need to know and understand. A goal is not a strategy. \Write that down, tattoo it on your leadership team's brains if you have to. Tell everyone you know that a goal is not a strategy.

We want to grow the business. That's a goal. A perfectly reasonable one, but a goal nonetheless.

We want to increase market share. That's a goal.

We want to be the industry leader. Yet another goal.

We want to improve employee retention. Yep, that's still a goal.

None of those statements tell you how, they tell you where you want to end up, but they say nothing about the path you're taking to get there, and answering that how is the entire job of a strategy.

So if a strategy isn't a goal, then what is it?

A strategy is a specific set of actions, decisions, and resource allocations you're going to take, make, and pursue in order to reach your goal. It is an actual plan. If you want to be seen as strategic, you need to be the one with the plan. Next time someone says “our strategy is to grow the business”, you'll know that what they've actually told you is their goal. The strategy comes into play after you've set the goal.

So, okay, you're going to grow the business. How? Through what markets, with what resources, on what timeline, and what are you going to do differently than what you're doing right now? The answers to those questions are your strategy.

Now, we all grasp concepts differently, so I'll give you another way to think about this. It's more of visual “picture it in your mind” kind of thing.

Picture your business, your career, whatever you've got going on, as three layers. The top layer is your goal, it's your destination, it's the end of the journey, it's where you want to end up. So, for this example, where do you want to end up? Let's say that your goal is to grow revenue by 30% over the next two years.

The middle layer is your strategy, it's the route you'll take to get there. How are you going to actually do it? How are you going to grow revenue by 30% over the next two years? An answer could be “we're going to expand into two new regional markets, launch a referral program, and build a mid-level offering to capture a client segment we're currently missing out on”

The bottom layer under the strategy is your tactics. Tactics are the specific actions that make up the strategy. They're the turn-by-turn directions on the route. So, how are you going to do all those things you mentioned in the strategy? Well, we're going to identify target markets by Q1. We're going to build our referral program by Q2, and then launch the new mid-level offering by Q3.

That's it. Goal, strategy, tactics. They are three different things with three different levels of specificity, and you need all three if you want to have a real shot at hitting your goal. These terms aren't interchangeable, so make sure you're using them correctly (using terms correctly is also a great way to increase your credibility in an organization because it demonstrates your knowledge and business savvy). It shows that you know what you're doing.

When a team can't tell a goal from a strategy, a few things happen, and they're all bad. The first thing that usually happens is that people start moving in different directions because they have no shared understanding of why they're doing what they're doing. This wastes time and money, both of which are extremely valuable resources in organizations.

Second, when things do go sideways, nobody really knows where the breakdown happened.

Was it the goal? No, of course not.

The strategy? No, that was fine too.

The execution? No way. Everyone's talented here. We know what we're doing.

Well, guess what? It had to be one, two, or all three of those things, and you better be able to figure out which it was! If you never clearly defined the goal, the strategy, and the tactics, you have no way to diagnose what broke when something does go wrong.

When you can't pinpoint the problem, people will start to feel like “strategy” is just something that leadership likes to toss out there when they don't have a real answer for something. It becomes a “not real” thing, which, yeah, sometimes that's exactly what's happening. Being able to clearly articulate the difference between a goal and a strategy isn't me being particular for the sake of it. It's the foundation of actually having a shot at successfully executing on anything.

Now I’m going to get into a piece of the subject that I think matters most, especially for women who are trying to move into leadership roles or increase their presence at work. This is also where I call back to the beginning of the article where I said you'll probably want to throw something.

Leadership researchers, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, ran 360-degree evaluations on tens of thousands of leaders: over 47,000 men and 24,000 women. Also, note the difference in leadership numbers there. The male leaders were almost double the number of female leaders that they surveyed. Sounds about right. Anyway, each of these leaders in the study was rated by their manager, their peers, and their direct reports.

The women outperformed the men on the majority of the leadership competencies measured, with the exception of one specific competency: strategic perspective. Men were rated higher on that one, and here is what is so frustrating. That perceived gap in strategic perception shows up early in a woman's career, and that perceived gap doesn't close until the woman reaches around age 50, so that's basically half of her career.

It has nothing to do with them actually being less strategic. It is all related to the perception of women in the workplace, and that perception is that the younger you are, the less strategic you're assumed to be. Additionally, it's not just this one study that highlights this data. Other research has found the same pattern. Women get rated highly on leadership performance and execution, but lower on vision and strategic thinking.

Meanwhile, research looking at actual strategic thinking ability (not the perception of it) found no meaningful difference between men and women, especially once you get to the senior levels. So, the ability is there. Like I said, it’s not a skill problem, it's perception. So if you've ever been told that you're “not strategic enough” and didn't really sit right with you, there's a decent probability that what was said wasn't actually about your strategic skill. It was about how you were being perceived in the workplace.

I'll tell you why I care about this so much (and if you read my introductory post - episode zero - you already know part of my story). I was passed over for a promotion that I had earned (and was pretty much promised) and the reason I was given was that leadership had concerns about my ability to implement strategic plans. The role ended up getting split into two roles and handed to two men, one of whom had no sales background or strategic implementation experience at all. At the time, I didn't really understand what was happening. I just knew it felt wrong, and I knew I was pissed. Now I know it's a recurring theme, and that I'm far from the only woman that this has happened to. Not that this makes it any better, by the way, but I wasn't alone.

This is exactly why I want you to understand what strategy is, and to get really good at demonstrating it out loud, because you're probably doing more strategic thinking than you're getting credit for. The solution to that isn't just to think even more strategically, it's learning to make your already existing strategic thinking visible in the language that your organization already recognizes as strategic.

Now, there's a concept in leadership literature…Peter Northouse covers it in his textbook, Leadership Theory and Practice. I referenced this textbook in my graduate studies, and it is absolutely amazing. I think it's worth the cost of buying it and reading through it if you want to get into leadership, or if you're in leadership, even if you're not in a master's program. It could be so helpful for you. Anyway, Peter Northouse, in his book, Leadership Theory and Practice, talks about what I think is one of the most useful frameworks for understanding what should actually be expected of you strategically at different levels of an organization. The core idea is that skills and competencies that matter most to your success are not the same at every level, and they change pretty significantly as you move up the in the organization. At the lower levels of an organization, like individual contributor, entry level, or anything that's not a leadership role, what matters most are your technical skills, which are the abilities to actually do the job, your functional knowledge, and your hands-on expertise. This is where you build credibility. Your technical skills serve as the foundation for your credibility within an organization.

As you move into middle management, technical skills still matter, but they're not the main event anymore. What starts to matter more in middle management areas are what Peter Northouse calls “human skills.” Human skills are your ability to lead people, communicate effectively, build relationships across the organization, and manage others instead of just doing the work yourself.

And at senior leadership levels, what matters the most are conceptual skills. And “conceptual skills” is really just a more formal term for saying strategic thinking. It's seeing the big picture and thinking several moves ahead, connecting the dots across the organization, and making decisions without having complete information.

Here's why this matters for you right now, wherever you are on that goddamn corporate ladder. If you are earlier in your career and someone tells you that you need to be more strategic, it is worth asking them, “strategic at what level exactly?” Because if you're two years into your career and your manager wants you thinking like a VP, that is an unrealistic expectation. Your job at that point in your career might genuinely be to just master your daily functions. But if you're a woman, or anyone, but really if you're a woman who's been in a mid-level role for a while and you are watching the men around you move up while you are staying stuck, it's worth asking a different question: “Am I still leading with technical skill when the next level is evaluating me on something else, like my human skills?” And just as important, “is that something else actually being recognized when I demonstrate it?” The rules and valued abilities change as you move up in the organization. Most people are never taught this, and even fewer women are taught it, which is why I'm teaching you about it right now.

So, what does strategic thinking look like in practice? It means you're not just solving today's problem. You're asking why this problem keeps coming up and what would prevent it from happening again. It means that when you're given a goal, you don't just nod and say, “okay.” You ask about the plan.

What do we need?

What could go wrong?

It means you can zoom out from your daily tasks and see the bigger picture, which is how your work connects to the broader goals of the organization, and it means you're comfortable taking a minute to make a thoughtful decision instead of just plowing forward with the first answer that pops into your head. These things are all learnable skills, and like most learnable skills, you get better at them with practice. Unfortunately, there is no “snap your fingers” magic thing you can do to suddenly be an expert in strategic thinking. Here's the thing you need to remember though. It is not enough to just think strategically in your head. You have to say it out loud in front of people using language people recognize as strategic. Things like:

“here's the risk I'm anticipating…” or

“here's how this thing connects to the Q3 goal…” or

“here's the plan and how we came up with it...”

Don't keep this thinking to yourself. Make it visible, and make others aware that you have the skill.

I've heard it said so many times over my 20-plus year career, and if you've worked in sales at all, you may have heard these phrases too, but “a goal without a plan is just a wish” and “hope is not a strategy.” Unfortunately, these overused statements are true. Getting clear on your actual strategy, connecting it to your goals, and making sure your team understands both is foundational to whether any of it actually works.

To reiterate: strategy is not a buzzword. It is not a synonym for a goal, and it's not a term that you should be dropping into a sentence to sound more polished. A strategy is a specific, intentional plan for how you're going to pursue a goal. Without it, you are relying on hope. And like I just said, hope is not a strategy.

So, the next time you're in a meeting and someone drops the S-bomb, pay attention.

Are they actually presenting a strategy?

Are they actually telling you how they're getting to their goal, or are they telling you a goal that's that they're mislabeling as a strategy?

And the next time someone tells you that you need to think more strategically, take the feedback, figure out where you fall on the corporate ladder and see what strategic thinking should reasonably look like at your level. If you're doing the strategic thinking already and it's not being seen as strategic, that's not a problem for you to fix by continuing to do what you're doing or just working harder and hoping that they'll eventually come around and notice. It's the perception problem I described earlier in the article rearing its ugly head. You solve that problem by becoming more visible, speaking up, and demonstrating your skill so that others see it and take notice.

Growth takes time, it takes direction, and it takes practice. But now that you know what strategy actually is and isn't, you're better equipped to build a strategy for your own growth, and to make sure it gets noticed.

I hope you found this content useful. I'm Lauren. This is Glass Ceiling Smashed. Go grab your hammer and let's break something together.

You can find the sources used to write this episode/article in the show notes for this episode linked at the beginning of this post.