If you’re starting to lead people and projects, you’ll want to make a bigger impact. But one thing new leaders often hear from managers is “you need to think more strategically”. What can you do with that kind of feedback?

Sometimes the manager will give specific examples. That’s helpful. Sometimes they may suggest reading books on systems thinking or strategy. That’s well-meaning, but less helpful. Some managers may not give any tips. That can be frustrating. But even in that case, the feedback suggests something positive:

• Your manager at least cares enough to tell you about it. (Or possibly is making excuses for not putting you forward — but that doesn’t happen as often as people think.)
• Your manager sees in you some potential to join the dots — to take available information and build some mental model of the way things work.

Let’s assume your manager means well, and would like to see you develop. What can you do with this feedback?

The obvious thing is to ask your manager for some more concrete examples. But perhaps your next 1:1 isn’t for a while. Or perhaps the manager is testing you a little — seeing what you can figure out for yourself. What can you do in the meantime?

Big picture thinking isn’t one skill

Firstly, there is no one skill of “big picture thinking”. I like the way that author/product leader Jackie Bavaro responds on Reddit to someone who asks how to develop it:

“Big picture thinking” is a confusing phrase because it sounds like an abstract skill when it’s usually more about experience and context.

Big picture thinking really means the ability to connect your work with those who use it, and your wider organization. It’s about making connections, joining mental dots. Some people are better at it than others. But no-one comes into an organization already possessing “big picture thinking” about that organization. They build their sense of the bigger picture learning over time. Learning the details of how the organization works, and how it keeps itself going. Like learning any system.

If you work well with software systems, design systems, or machines, you should be positive about your ability to learn a bigger picture about your organization.

Still, don’t try to learn it all at once.

The relevant big picture isn’t your whole organization

Secondly, don’t feel you have to learn everything about the business. The most relevant big picture for you is:

1. The value that your team’s work has for the people who use it.
2. The value that your team’s work brings back to your organization, and that your manager’s manager can attribute back to your team.

This is always a good place to start, although the kinds of value depend on what business you’re in, and whether your team serves paying customers directly. For example, if you’re building software for other companies:

1. The value for its users might be in how much time it saves them. Or in how well they can serve their own customers.
2. The value brought back and recognized? The degree of your company’s commercial success that your manager’s manager¹ can judge is due to your team’s work.

Or, if your team provides HR services internally:

1. The value for its users is the help that it provides in all aspects of navigating careers, work, and employees.
2. The value brought back and recognized might be the size of the gap created if your team were not providing those services. The processes and people impacted, and eventually the monetary cost of the impact.

These are not easy things to figure out, especially the second kind of value. This “big picture” is plenty big enough. But at least it shows you where to start. 

For example, you don’t need to worry about everyone on the whole org chart at the moment. This smaller, more relevant “big picture” excludes other teams that you don’t work with directly, or that don’t control your destiny. So as you build a mental map, you might not need to include, say, central IT yet. (Unless your team is central IT, of course.)

Start with the users

To build this picture, start with #1. In whatever ways you have available, find out more about how your team’s “customers” — external or internal — use your work. Try to hear from customers directly. See if you can visit them. Join meetings with them. Look at their feedback, in whatever form it takes — support tickets or ratings, or even word of mouth, for example on forums.

And don’t just look at the customer as a user of your product — look at how your product fits into the rest of their job or life. Try to understand what they do before they use it and directly afterward.

Some people make whole careers from listening to customers, but you can gain a lot from just listening a bit more. And if you think that it’s completely obvious how people use your product (for example if you’re producing milkshakes!) There could still be more to learn. Look up Clayton Christensen’s milkshake story for how the humble dairy beverage might play a surprising role in its “users’” lives.

Then start thinking about recognized value brought back to your organization

To calculate the value of a team’s work is hard. It may feel beyond your pay grade. Does it help to know that however high you go in your organization, people still find it hard to calculate the exact value? And part of their time is spent debating it vigorously?

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start thinking about this. It’s the only way to form any useful big picture.

The way you do it really depends on your situation. Not only the nature of your work, and what the product is. But the way that money flows in your organization. You need to know a little bit of how that relates to your team.

For example, you’re the team building B2B software. What’s the business aim of the features you’re working on? Not an aim expressed as “usability” or “functionality”. But an aim related to how the value for your customer helps your own organization. Will the new features keep existing customers loyal? Will they attract new customers? Will they provide more value so that customers pay more? All of these?

These are good topics to talk with your own managers about, and to bring up with leadership in general when you get the chance. They might not know all the answers, but you’ll hear some good viewpoints. That should give you more ways to think about what your team does.

Another thing you can do is to imagine the gap if your team were not doing what it does. This could work especially well if your “customers” are other people within your organization. They’re not paying you directly, and it can be really hard to estimate your value. But a way to start is to think about what those customers would have to do instead if they did not have your services.

Good things come from seeing bigger

Something that often happens when you understand your customers more: you feel more purpose. You see how your work helps people, and you’ll get ideas on how to help them more. You probably had ideas already, but now your ideas will be more grounded in what your users actually value.

But will those ideas work for your managers too? That’s where understanding the value for your organization comes in. When you understand more of how that value happens, and how people measure it, you’ll shape your ideas to work in the business landscape. That’s what most managers really mean by “big picture thinking”. Do you look beyond your team’s immediate work, to how they will be able to build more value for your organization? That’s what counts.

I’ll be writing more about ideas that fit or don’t fit the bigger picture. Sign up if you’d like to get the upcoming posts by email.

1. Why not just your manager? If you’re going to help their efforts succeed, you also need a view on what their manager cares about and sees. From Stephen Bungay’s very useful book “Art of Action”:
   
   I have to understand both what my boss and their boss in turn are trying to achieve. Everybody understands the intentions of everybody else two levels up in the hierarchy. This practice has been arrived at by trial and error. Experience suggests that understanding the immediate intention one level up is not enough to give full alignment if things change, and that understanding the intention three levels up is of little additional help. Two levels up is like Goldilocks’ porridge: it is just right. It puts people in the position of being able to answer the question: “What would my boss want me to do if they were here now and knew what I know?” ↩︎