Explore Your Strategic Capabilities
Here’s something you’ll never hear in business: “Let’s promote her to a senior leadership role…she’s highly tactical.” The greatest compliment a leader can receive is to be referred to as “strategic.” A survey of more than 10,000 senior executives showed that 97 percent believe the leadership behavior most critical to an organization’s future success is being “strategic.” Additional research with more than 60,000 executives around the world found that a strategic approach to leadership was 10 times more important to the perception of effectiveness than any other factor studied.
The Strategic Quotient is a measure of your strategic capabilities as exhibited through your mindset and behaviors. Your strategic capabilities consist of how you think, plan, and act strategically. The good news is that each of these areas of being strategic can be developed and improved with deliberate practice. If IQ gets you hired, and EQ gets you promoted, then SQ gets you to the C-suite.
The first step on the path to fulfilling your strategic potential is to understand where you are today. I developed the Strategic Quotient (SQ) to help you determine exactly that—your baseline strategic capabilities. The SQ assessment is based on more than 20 years of research and uses the 3A Framework of the three critical disciplines for being strategic. These three disciplines are:
- Acumen (Thinking) – The generation of insights to create new value.
- Allocation (Planning) – Focusing resources through strategic trade-offs.
- Action (Acting) – Prioritizing and executing initiatives.
The SQ is used to identify opportunities for development of a person’s strategic capabilities, and, following a targeted intervention, to determine whether the individual understands and applies the disciplines of Acumen, Allocation, and Action. A person’s score on the SQ may indicate the likelihood they can successfully apply and demonstrate these strategic capabilities.
Primary and Secondary Dimensions of the Strategic Quotient
The SQ Assessment is comprised of 50 statements to determine the performance level of how one thinks, plans, and acts strategically. Here are five sample statements from the SQ Assessment:
Investment: $99
Average time to complete: 12 minutes