Anyone who wants to grow in his or her career wants to develop the ability to think strategically. You focus your actions towards becoming better at this. However, there are some actions that are not aligned with leadership and strategic management. These are the ones you need to keep in mind because they prove that you do not have the strategic ability.

1. Humiliating your team or employees – A strategic leader always knows the power of appreciation. He or she does not humiliate the team or belittle the employees, privately or in public, over things like loss of revenue, slow business growth, client crisis situations and so on. Instead, when any of these happen, you need to take charge and work on the resolution. If you end up humiliating your team, it shows a lack of strategic foresight.
2. Inability to prioritize work tasks for delegation and better time management – Do you do all the work tasks yourself instead of delegating some of those to your team? At times, do you also feel bogged down because of many things to finish and less time? This tends to happen when you are unable to delegate properly and prioritize correctly. Again, this is a clear absence of strategic ability, because you are not being able to go beyond the tactical tasks that do not need thinking.
3. Resistance to change – The world around us is changing. As a leader having a world view, an in-depth idea of the changes that are occurring and adapting to those is important for your survival. If you are resisting the change, chances are that you will miss the bus on how to use these changes for strategic career growth. So your actions should not be linked to resisting such change.
4. Lack of innovative and out-of-the-box thinking in decisions – Your team will look up to for fresh ideas and existing projects. They will be motivated when you come up with innovative and out-of-the-box actions which can drive their learning too. So do not restrict your thoughts or decisions to the approach from the past. Innovation is the key, for the next level of change, so embrace it.

Strategic thinking is a skill you can acquire, with self-training, learning from different sources and practising on a regular basis. All these steps can help you in managing your own career better, by adding such a valuable attribute.