How Emerging Leaders Can Strengthen Their Strategic Thinking Muscle: A Candid Conversation with Leadership Advisor Jennifer Flock

As you move toward the C-suite, expectations shift. It’s no longer enough to execute well—you’re expected to think strategically, anticipate change, connect patterns, and guide others through uncertainty. And in our research, 58% of leaders identified strategic thinking as the most critical skill for navigating today’s threats to organizational health.

Yet even high-performing leaders struggle to feel confident in their ability to think strategically. In this conversation, leadership advisor Jennifer Flock examines how you can build strategic capability through deliberate habits and reflection, positioning it as a core leadership discipline rather than an inherent trait.

Jennifer, let’s start with the basics. What exactly do we mean when we talk about strategic thinking?

Jennifer: As you prepare for the C-suite, strategic thinking is the ability to lift your focus beyond immediate execution and see how your decisions shape the organization’s longer-term direction. You need to develop pattern recognition—the ability to spot themes across functions, markets, and stakeholders—and understand how trade-offs in one area affect performance in another.

To be a strategic thinker, you don’t need to have all of the answers. In fact, you need to be comfortable in ambiguity. You need to demonstrate that you are consistently widening your lens, anticipating implications, and shaping decisions with the enterprise in mind.

As you move to more senior levels, decisions won’t sit neatly within one function—they ripple across the enterprise. And that requires you, as a leader, to operate with a broader, more integrated perspective. It requires you to think beyond your immediate function or team and consider the enterprise as a whole when making decisions.

Why is strategic thinking such a critical skill for leaders right now?

Jennifer: You’re navigating an environment that’s become significantly more complex. Economic volatility, geopolitical shifts, regulatory scrutiny, rapid tech change, and evolving stakeholder expectations are all converging at once. These forces don’t move in isolation; they interact in ways that can amplify risk or create unexpected opportunity. Take AI as an example. It’s easy to frame it as a tech implementation or a productivity upgrade. In reality, it has profound implications for how value is created, how decisions are made, how talent is developed and deployed, and even how trust is built with customers and regulators. The leadership challenge is how to navigate that complexity at pace.

In this context, execution alone won’t be enough to get you to the C-suite. You need to anticipate second and third-order consequences, weigh trade-offs across competing priorities, and remain clear-headed amid ambiguity. Strategic thinking allows you to step back from the noise, identify what truly matters, and guide others with confidence—even when the path forward is not a straight line.

Many people believe you’re either able to think strategically, or you can’t. That it’s something you’re born with. What’s your perspective here?

Jennifer: While some people are more naturally inclined towards being a strategic thinker, you can develop this capability with intentional practice. And even if you already consider yourself a strategic thinker, you can build on that foundation to make it your superpower. The truth is, no one ever fully masters it—it's a continuous journey. I’ve worked with leaders who were initially known for being highly tactical—strong operators, deeply involved in execution. Over time, they were described as enterprise thinkers. So, yes, you can absolutely develop this muscle.

Often, I see leaders try to do this by working harder or moving faster. But strategic leadership typically requires something different—the discipline to pause. You need to switch from focusing only on day-to-day execution to seeing things from a higher altitude.

One leader I coached blocked an hour each week to focus only on future-oriented questions. Things like: “Which of our current assumptions about growth, margins, or customer behavior would most concern us if they proved wrong?” or, “What regulatory, technological, or competitive shifts could materially alter our position in the next 12–24 months?” or “Where might we be over-indexed on short-term performance at the expense of longer-term resilience? Over time, your peers will likely begin describing you as more strategic. Your strategic capability grows when you build consistent practices around it.

You mentioned creating space to think. Why is that so difficult for many leaders?

Jennifer: You’ve likely built your identity around responsiveness and delivery. In my conversations, I often hear concerns that slowing down will look like disengagement, with leaders sharing worries like: “I built my reputation on getting things done”, or “If I don’t stay close on a project, standards will drop,” or, “My team relies on me to move things forward.”

There’s a real sense of responsibility there. Leadership isn’t easy, and the demands on you are genuine. But if every minute is spent reacting, there’s very little room left for anticipating. Strategic clarity rarely appears at the end of a packed day of back-to-back meetings.

Whether it’s a weekly reflection block, a quarterly strategy day, or simply more intentional use of travel time, those small habits create cognitive space. Without that space, it’s difficult to lift your gaze.

Think about it in terms of percentages: How much of your time is spent on fire drills—the work that’s needed today—versus the ‘tomorrow’, the future-state work? There's no perfect rule here. The time you spend on each will shift depending on your situation. But being mindful about where you’re spending your time is critical.

How can leaders widen their perspective beyond their immediate role?

Jennifer: Curiosity plays a significant role here. Look beyond your function or industry. Pay attention to customer sentiment, regulatory shifts, tech change, and broader societal trends. You don’t need to become an expert in everything. But you do need to broaden your view.

In my conversations with emerging C-suite leaders, I sometimes ask: “Where are you getting perspectives that challenge your assumptions?” Often, there’s a pause. That might mean building relationships outside your sector, reading more widely, or asking different questions internally. I encourage leaders to intentionally seek out people who will test and challenge their thinking rather than reinforcing it. When you consistently widen your field of view, and put yourself in other stakeholders’ shoes, you start spotting patterns earlier. You’re less likely to be surprised by shifts because you’ve been scanning for them.

Why do some leaders struggle when trying to connect strategic thinking with action?

Jennifer: They keep it in their heads. I often see leaders assume that others will connect the dots. In reality, people need context. If you’re aspiring to the C-suite, you need to demonstrate that you are not only thinking strategically, but that you can mobilize others around this thinking. That requires storytelling. You need to create a compelling narrative that communicates the business direction, the goals, and importantly—the ‘why’. Boards and CEOs look for leaders who can take others on a journey with them. You need to be able to inspire others and spark change.

How can leaders help their teams build strategic capability as well?

Jennifer: Strategic thinking shouldn’t sit with you alone. Model it by asking broader questions in meetings. For example: “If we were making this decision a year from now, what might we wish we had done today?” Questions like that shift attention from tasks to implications. You can also regularly connect team objectives to enterprise goals. When people understand how their work fits into the bigger picture, they begin thinking more holistically themselves. In my experience, teams often rise to the level of the perspective you consistently invite.

Authors

Jennifer Flock is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Development Practice. She is based in Paris.