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Erin, welcome to unlearning work, where we empower you to redesign your job by rethinking work habits, behaviors and strategies. I'm your host. Erin Merideth, a work behavior enthusiast and leadership strategist. Join me as I explore various work related topics and provide practical insights and real life examples. We'll examine the nature of work from the ground up, and deliver bite size episodes with actionable advice twice a month. Welcome to unlearning work. I'm Erin, and I want to talk about something that comes up a lot in conversations I have with clients. It usually sounds like this. I keep getting told I'm not strategic, and this one really throws people off, because they're not confused, they're not lost, they actually have good ideas, but somehow those ideas aren't going anywhere. So that's what this episode is about. Stop trying to be right, and how strategic thinking actually works at work. Because what's getting labeled as not strategic is usually something else entirely, and once you see it, it changes how you show up in these rooms. Most people think being strategic means having the best idea. It doesn't being strategic means knowing which ideas will actually move. And those are not always the same thing. If you ever sat in a meeting thinking this makes no sense. Why aren't we doing the better option and then watch nothing change this episode is for you, because the problem isn't your thinking, it's where you're aiming it. So let's break that down into a real situation. I was working with someone who had been given feedback that she wasn't strategic. And this happens a lot, because not strategic is usually what people say when someone's ideas aren't landing. But when we actually talked through her work, it didn't hold up. She could see patterns. She understood trade offs. She had good instincts. So the question became, if she's thinking, Well, why isn't it translating? And this is where it got clear. In meetings, her first move was to think about her team. What do we need? What's the right solution? How do we improve this? That's a very natural place to start. But here's the gap. That's not how decisions get made, and this is where I want to pause for a second, because this is the part people skip. Strategic Thinking is not just about your ability to think it's about your ability to read the system you're operating in, because every room has a decision maker, a set of constraints and an unspoken definition of success, and if you don't prepare for that first, you can be completely right and still get ignored. In her case, she was in a room where the goal wasn't improvement. It wasn't it was containment. Leaders were trying to reduce risk, stay compliant, and manage limited resources. So every time she pushed for a better solution, it felt like friction, not because the idea was wrong, but because it didn't match what the room was trying to do. And this is where most people misread the situation. They think, oh, they don't get it when it really is. They're solving a different problem than you. So let's shift how to think about that. Here's the reframe. If you take one thing from this episode, it's this strategic thinking is not about having better ideas. It's about aligning to how decisions actually happen, and that requires a different starting point. Not what should we do, but what will this leader actually say yes to? Now that might sound like you're lowering the bar, but you're not. You're changing the game, because once you ask that question, you start to see things differently. You start to see what pressure they're under, what they're trying to avoid, what they actually have the capacity to support. And most decisions sit inside those realities. This is where people get stuck. They keep adding more logic, more detail, more passion, but they're still operating inside their own frame, and if the frame doesn't match the decision maker's reality, nothing moves. So in my example, in her situation, she was trying to improve the experience for patients and families, which is a great goal, but leadership wasn't engaging with that. Why? Because the real constraint was resources and trade offs across programs. So the emotional argument didn't move anything. But when the conversation shifted to lost revenue tied to a gap, everything changed. It was the same problem with different framing. Now that's a strategy. So the question becomes, how do you actually do that in real time.
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Let's make this practical, because this is where most people say, I get it, and then go right back to old habits. So here's how you shift in the moment. First start with success, before you start with solutions, before you say anything, ask yourself, what does success look like in this. Room. And if you're not sure, ask it out loud, because success can mean very different things. Sometimes it means do the minimum, so we don't create risk, keep things stable, stay within budget. And sometimes it means improvement. But if you assume improvement when the goal is stability, you're going to feel blocked every time. So anchor, there first two, find the real decision. Center. Every room has one, even if it looks like a group discussion, someone is carrying the weight of the decision. Your job is to figure out who owns the outcome, who influences them and what matters to them, because if you aim your message at everyone, you often miss the one person who matters most. Three understand the constraint before you push the idea. This is where strategy becomes very real. Instead of asking, what's the best solution? Ask what can actually happen right now. So in her case, the constraint wasn't lack of care. It was bandwidth, competing priorities and resource limits. So pushing a full solution was never going to land, but a targeted adjustment could. That's the difference. Four, turn your idea into something that moves people. Ideas don't move things. Energy does, and in organizations, energy usually comes from metrics. So instead of saying, This will improve the experience, you say, this reduces rework, this saves time, this closes a revenue gap in the example, identifying loss revenue tied to a training issue created that get up and act moment. That's what you're aiming for. Five narrow your focus. You're not trying to win everything. You are trying to move something. So ask yourself, what are the one or two things that matter most here? Then design those to fit the system. Everything else becomes not now, and that's a strategic choice, not a compromise, six separate what you want from what will work. This is a part that takes practice, because you might care deeply about a better outcome. You might see a smarter path, but strategy asks you to pause and say, Is this the moment for that? Because if leadership is not ready or cannot support it. Pushing harder doesn't create change. It creates resistance. From this example I have, if the leader doesn't believe in it, it will not happen. So the move becomes, align. First, deliver what matters, build trust, then expand from there. And that's how influence actually grows over time. Now let's pull this into practice. So here's something simple to try this week in your next meeting. Before you speak, pause and ask, what does success look like here? Who actually decides that? What are they trying to protect and what metric would make this move? Then shape your point around that, not to make it smaller, but to make it land. And after the meeting, take two minutes and reflect, where did I push my perspective instead of aligning to the room, and that's where the learning is. In closing, strategic thinking is not about being the smartest person in the room. It's about being the most aware of how the room works. When you understand what success means, what constraints exist and what drives action. You stop fighting decisions and you start shaping them, and that's when your work actually moves. This week's reflection is, where are you holding on to being right instead of designing for movement? And what would change if you aligned first and then built from there. If this episode gave you something to think about, try it in one meeting this week. Don't change everything. Just pick one moment to pause, ask what success looks like, and adjust how you show up. That's where this work starts. And if someone came to mind while you were listening, share this episode with them. Start there. That's how this work moves. I'll see you Next time. You Hey,
