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Your business is growing, and you pride yourself on having built a capable team.
Yet somehow, you still find yourself at the center of every important decision.
Your team looks to you for answers, waits for your direction, and seems hesitant to take strategic initiative.
Sound familiar?
Here's the uncomfortable truth: If your team isn't thinking strategically, it might be because your leadership is accidentally preventing it.
"Leaders unleash the best in others, and leaders extract answers from people," says Kyle Guemmer, one of our executive coaches who specializes in developing strategic leadership. "If you don't delegate decisions, you won't develop leaders."
The difference between businesses that merely survive and those that truly thrive often comes down to this: Survival happens when you work in the business, but growth occurs when you work on it. This means moving beyond tactical day-to-day operations to develop strategic thinking throughout your organization.
Let's explore six leadership behaviors that might be stifling your team's strategic growth and, more importantly, how to stop them.
1. Stop Giving Answers
When a team member comes with a question, what's your instinct?
If you're like most leaders, you immediately provide the answer. It feels efficient. It feels helpful.
But what we're actually doing is training our team to stop thinking for themselves.
Think about it: When you face business challenges, you don't have someone standing by with all the answers. You have to figure things out.
This process of wrestling with questions and finding solutions is exactly what develops strategic thinking—and it's exactly what we're denying our teams when we jump in with quick answers.
Instead of providing answers, try being a question curator. When team members come to you with problems, respond with thoughtful questions that help them discover solutions themselves.
Yes, it takes longer, but remember—the goal isn't efficiency. It's effectiveness.
2. Stop Solving Problems Alone
"I think oftentimes leaders are actually protective of their people," Guemmer notes, "and so we try to make those decisions in isolation... really robbing others the opportunity to take ownership."
This protective instinct, while well-meaning, can be devastating to developing strategic thinking.
When we solve problems alone, we're not just shouldering an unnecessary burden—we're depriving our team of valuable learning opportunities.
Consider whether withholding information truly serves your team's best interests or if it just serves their current comfort.
Growth rarely happens in comfort zones, and strategic thinking develops through engagement with real challenges.
3. Stop Hoarding Context
Remember your first day in a new role?
The overwhelming amount of information you had to absorb?
Now, imagine if someone had shared with you all the context, history, and lessons learned that led to the current state of things. How much faster would you have developed strategic understanding?
This is what we often deny our teams by hoarding context.
We expect them to make good decisions but don't share the full picture that would enable those decisions.
It's like asking someone to complete a puzzle without showing them the picture on the box.
Essential context to share with your team:
- The "why" behind previous decisions and strategies
- Lessons learned from past successes and failures
- Historical context that shapes the current direction
- Long-term vision and how decisions connect to it
- Industry Insights that influence strategic choices
4. Stop Moving Faster Than People's Understanding
"Mostly clear is frustratingly unclear," Guemmer warns, adding that "unset expectations is front-loaded resentment."
When we move faster than our team's understanding, we create a gap between our vision and their ability to execute effectively.
How do you know if you're moving too fast? Watch for these signs:
- Team members seem hesitant to take initiative
- You find yourself repeating the same information multiple times
- People are making decisions that don't align with your vision
- There's a growing gap between expectations and results
- You hear phrases like "I didn't know" or "I wasn't sure."
This isn't just about pace—it's about the quality of understanding and buy-in.
Taking time to ensure comprehension might feel slow, but it's infinitely faster than having to redo work or fix mistakes caused by misalignment.
5. Stop Overvaluing Quick Responses
Here's an interesting observation: We often mistake quick responses for good thinking and slow responses for poor engagement.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
Some team members are "fast-twitch" thinkers who respond quickly with multiple ideas. Others are "slow-twitch" thinkers who process more thoroughly before responding.
Neither approach is inherently better—both bring valuable perspectives.
Creating space for both thinking styles means:
- Share strategic topics before meetings
- Allow silent reflection time during discussions
- Create multiple channels for feedback (verbal, written, immediate, delayed)
- Value both initial ideas and refined thoughts
- Recognize that different questions require different processing times
- Adjust meeting structures to accommodate various thinking styles
6. Stop Overprioritizing Efficiency
In our drive for efficiency, we often sacrifice the very things that would make us most effective.
Strategic thinking rarely feels efficient in the moment. It requires patience, investment, and comfort with apparent inefficiency.
But here's the paradox: Taking time to develop strategic thinkers throughout your organization is actually the most efficient path to sustainable growth. When more people can think strategically:
- Decisions get better
- Problems get solved faster
- Your organization becomes more capable of handling complex challenges
Moving Forward
The path to developing strategic thinkers isn't about adding new processes—it's about stopping behaviors that inhibit strategic thinking.
Building strategic thinking capacity requires:
- Identifying where you might be blocking strategic development
- Creating intentional spaces for different thinking styles
- Documenting and sharing context behind decisions
- Measuring progress by the quality of team decisions
- Valuing both quick insights and deep reflection
- Investing time in developing others' strategic capabilities
Start by examining your own leadership habits. Are you making any of these mistakes? Remember, change starts with awareness.
Begin replacing immediate answers with thoughtful questions. Create systems for sharing context and understanding. Value different thinking styles. Most importantly, measure progress not by how quickly decisions are made, but by how many people are capable of making good decisions.
Your business survives when you work in it, but it truly grows when you work on it. The same principle applies to your team's strategic thinking capacity. Stop working in their thinking, and start working on developing it.
The journey from tactical to strategic thinking isn't always smooth or comfortable, but it's essential for sustainable growth. As you release control and create space for others to think strategically, you'll find your team becoming more capable, more engaged, and more equipped to handle whatever challenges come their way.
After all, the mark of truly great leadership isn't having all the answers—it's developing others who can find them.
