I recently came across an interview with Simon Sinek where he made an interesting observation about leadership.
He distinguished between strategists and tacticians.
His point wasn’t that one is better than the other. Organizations need both.
But he made a more provocative observation:
Strategic thinkers tend to know when they are bad at tactics. Tactical thinkers don’t always recognize when they are bad at strategy.
That caught my attention.
Because we often talk about becoming “more strategic” as if strategy were simply the next level of being good at execution.
You’re a good salesperson. You become a sales manager.
You’re a good sales manager. You become a sales director.
You’re a good sales director. Eventually, you’re expected to define the sales strategy.
But being excellent at executing something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re excellent at deciding what should be executed in the first place.
And that’s where the distinction between tactical and strategic thinking becomes important.
First: What Is the Difference Between Strategy and Tactics?
The words are often used interchangeably.
They shouldn’t be.
At its simplest:
Strategy is about choices and direction.
Tactics are about execution.
Strategy asks:
Where are we going, why are we going there, and how are we going to win?
Tactics ask:
How are we actually going to make this happen?
Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, argues that strategy isn’t simply ambition, targets or a collection of goals.
“Grow revenue by 30%” is a goal.
It isn’t a strategy.
Roger Martin and former P&G CEO A.G. Lafley make a similar distinction in Playing to Win. Their strategy framework revolves around a series of choices:
- What is our winning aspiration?
- Where will we play?
- How will we win?
- What capabilities do we need?
- What systems must support those choices?
Once those choices have been made, tactics translate them into action.
Tactical vs Strategic Thinking
| Tactical thinking | Strategic thinking |
| How do we do this? How do we execute better? What needs to happen today? How do we solve this problem? What resources do we need? How can we improve this process? How do we increase activity? What went wrong? Who owns this task? How do we deliver the plan? | Should we do this? Where should we compete? What needs to be true tomorrow? Are we solving the right problem? Where should we allocate our resources? Should this process exist at all? Which activities actually create value? What does this tell us about the system? What capabilities do we need to build? What assumptions is the plan based on? |
Neither column is better.
You need both.
Strategy without tactics becomes PowerPoint. Tactics without strategy becomes activity.
What Does a Tactical Leader Look Like?
Good tactical leaders are incredibly valuable.
They make things happen.
They tend to be strong at:
- Execution
- Organization
- Prioritization
- Problem-solving
- Process
- Accountability
- Project management
- Removing blockers
- Managing deadlines
- Measuring performance
- Turning plans into action
Give a strong tactical leader a difficult objective and their brain immediately starts working on:
How are we going to get this done?
That’s a fantastic capability.
The problem appears when every problem is treated as an execution problem.
Sometimes you shouldn’t improve the process.
You should stop the process.
Sometimes you don’t need more activity.
You need different activity.
Sometimes you shouldn’t ask:
How can we do this better?
You should ask:
Why are we doing this at all?
What Does a Strategic Leader Look Like?
Strategic thinkers tend to operate at a different altitude.
They are interested in patterns, systems, choices, trade-offs and the future.
Research published in Harvard Business Review identified six important abilities associated with strategic leadership:
Anticipate → Challenge → Interpret → Decide → Align → Learn
Strategic leaders tend to ask questions such as:
- What is changing around us?
- What are we not seeing?
- Which assumptions might be wrong?
- What happens if we continue doing this for three years?
- Where should we concentrate our resources?
- What should we stop doing?
- What could competitors do next?
- What does the customer actually value?
- What capabilities will we need tomorrow?
- Are we solving the right problem?
Their instinct isn’t immediately:
How do we fix this?
It’s often:
What is really happening here?
That’s a subtle but important difference.
Same Problem. Two Different Leaders.
Let’s make this concrete.
Imagine you’re running a B2B sales organization.
You’ve missed your quarterly target by 20%.
The Tactical Sales Leader
A tactical leader might immediately ask:
- How many calls are reps making?
- How many meetings are being booked?
- Which reps are behind target?
- What’s our conversion rate?
- Where are deals getting stuck?
- Which opportunities can we accelerate?
- Can we increase prospecting?
- What can we close before the end of the month?
- Which reps need coaching?
These are perfectly legitimate questions.
In fact, someone needs to ask them.
The Strategic Sales Leader
A strategic leader might approach exactly the same problem differently:
- Are we targeting the right customers?
- Has our ideal customer profile changed?
- Are we solving an important enough problem?
- Has our competitive environment changed?
- Is our positioning still relevant?
- Are customers buying differently?
- Is our pricing appropriate?
- Are we allocating resources to the right markets and segments?
- Is this actually a sales problem?
- What assumptions in our go-to-market strategy are no longer true?
The tactical leader is trying to improve the machine.
The strategic leader is asking whether we have the right machine.
You need both.
Why Great Tactical Leaders Can Struggle With Strategy
Imagine someone who has spent ten years being rewarded for execution.
They solve problems.
They know the details.
They answer questions.
They hit deadlines.
They manage people.
They deliver projects.
They hit targets.
And because they’re good at those things, they get promoted.
Eventually, they reach a position where their organization needs something different from them.
Now they’re expected to:
- Tolerate ambiguity
- Think several years ahead
- Identify patterns
- Understand systems
- Challenge assumptions
- Allocate resources
- Make difficult trade-offs
- Anticipate change
- Make decisions without having all the information
The skills that got them promoted haven’t suddenly become useless.
They’re still extremely valuable.
But the job has changed.
And that’s potentially where many leaders get stuck.
They continue doing more of what made them successful:
More meetings.
More KPIs.
More dashboards.
More processes.
More follow-ups.
More activity.
When what the organization actually needs from them is more thinking.
Can Tactical Success Actually Become a Trap?
There’s an uncomfortable possibility here.
The better you become at solving problems, the more tempting it becomes to solve every problem.
But leadership increasingly requires deciding:
Which problems actually deserve solving?
That requires a different mental muscle.
Simon Sinek takes this argument further.
His observation is that strategists often recognize that they’re bad at details and execution.
They therefore look for people who are good at those things.
The strategist says:
I’m not good at this. I need someone who is.
The tactician, according to Sinek, is more likely to assume:
I’m good at execution. I can probably do strategy too.
Why?
There isn’t, as far as I can find, solid research demonstrating that tactical leaders specifically are less self-aware than strategic leaders.
So we should be careful about presenting Sinek’s observation as scientific fact.
But there are some interesting clues in psychological research.
The Self-Awareness Problem
One possible explanation comes from metacognition: our ability to evaluate our own thinking and performance.
The famous research by David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that people performing poorly in certain domains could also struggle to recognize the extent of their poor performance.
The important idea isn’t the internet version of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” where supposedly stupid people think they’re geniuses.
The original finding is more interesting.
Sometimes the knowledge required to perform something well overlaps with the knowledge required to recognize whether you’re performing it well.
Apply that cautiously to strategy.
If someone doesn’t yet understand strategic thinking deeply, they may also have difficulty recognizing weaknesses in their strategic thinking.
But that’s a hypothesis.
It doesn’t prove that tactical leaders are systematically less self-aware.
Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Question
The question shouldn’t necessarily be:
Are you a tactical leader or a strategic leader?
That makes the two sound like fixed personality types.
A better question might be:
At what altitude do you naturally operate — and can you recognize when you need to change altitude?
Because strategic thinking appears to be something people can develop.
Research into strategic thinking repeatedly identifies capabilities such as:
- Systems thinking
- Reflection
- Reframing
- Critical thinking
- Creativity
- Understanding context
- Considering multiple time horizons
- Challenging assumptions
- Learning
- Adaptability
Those are skills.
And skills can be practiced.
You may naturally prefer one altitude.
But that doesn’t mean you’re permanently stuck there.
How to Become More Strategic
If you’re naturally tactical, start by changing the questions you ask.
When a problem appears, resist immediately asking:
How do we fix this?
Start with:
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
1. Look at the System
What else is contributing to this problem?
What happens before it?
What happens after it?
What incentives, processes or decisions are creating it?
2. Extend Your Time Horizon
Ask:
What happens if we continue doing this for another three years?
Short-term solutions sometimes create long-term problems.
3. Challenge Your Assumptions
Ask:
What are we assuming to be true?
Then:
What if it isn’t?
4. Look for Alternative Explanations
Your first explanation isn’t necessarily the right one.
A sales performance problem could actually be a positioning problem.
A marketing problem could actually be a product problem.
A people problem could actually be an incentive problem.
5. Think About Second-Order Effects
Don’t only ask:
What happens if we make this decision?
Ask:
And then what?
6. Think in Trade-Offs
Strategy requires saying no.
Every resource allocated somewhere is a resource unavailable somewhere else.
Ask:
If we choose this, what are we deliberately choosing not to do?
7. Create Thinking Time
This sounds obvious.
It isn’t.
You cannot expect yourself to think strategically if your entire week consists of operational meetings, emails, messages, customer escalations and firefighting.
Thinking requires space.
How Can Strategic Leaders Become More Tactical?
Strategists have their own weaknesses.
A strategic thinker can produce beautiful frameworks, ambitious visions and sophisticated presentations that never translate into reality.
Their discipline is different.
They need to repeatedly ask:
- What specifically needs to happen?
- Who owns it?
- By when?
- What resources are required?
- How will we measure progress?
- What could prevent execution?
- What are the leading indicators?
- How frequently will we review this?
- What does this strategy require people to actually do differently?
A useful sequence is:
Vision → Choices → Priorities → Actions → Owners → Metrics → Cadence
If you can’t translate the strategy into that chain, you’re probably not finished.
6 Books to Develop Both Sides
If You Want to Become More Strategic
1. Good Strategy/Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt
Probably my first recommendation.
Rumelt does an excellent job of separating actual strategy from goals, ambitions and corporate jargon.
2. Playing to Win — A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin
A practical framework for understanding strategy as a set of interconnected choices:
Where will we play?
How will we win?
What capabilities will that require?
3. Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows
This pushes you beyond looking at individual events and encourages you to understand relationships, feedback loops and systems.
If You Want to Become More Tactical
1. High Output Management — Andrew Grove
One of the best books on turning management into an operating system: leverage, meetings, performance, processes and execution.
2. The Checklist Manifesto — Atul Gawande
A fascinating exploration of how relatively simple processes and checklists can help people execute reliably in extraordinarily complex environments.
3. The Goal — Eliyahu Goldratt
Particularly useful for learning to identify constraints instead of trying to improve everything simultaneously.
Maybe You Don’t Need to Be Great at Both
This might be the most important lesson I took from Sinek’s observation.
We often assume leadership development means fixing every weakness.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Perhaps great leadership is partly about developing enough range to understand both strategy and tactics — while having enough self-awareness to recognize where you are exceptional and where someone else will always be better.
A brilliant strategist paired with a brilliant operator can be an exceptional combination.
A brilliant strategist pretending to be an operator can create chaos.
And a brilliant operator pretending to be a strategist can create something equally dangerous:
An incredibly efficient organization heading in the wrong direction.
The objective therefore might not be to become 10/10 at both.
It might be to understand your natural altitude, develop enough ability to move between altitudes when necessary, and surround yourself with people who are exceptional where you aren’t.
So perhaps the most useful leadership question isn’t:
Am I strategic or tactical?
It’s:
Which one comes naturally to me — and who do I need around me to compensate for what doesn’t?
Sources & Further Reading
Simon Sinek — Gallup interview on strategists and tacticians
Gallup, Simon Sinek on Leadership and Strengths
Harvard Business Review — Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills
For the six strategic leadership capabilities: anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align and learn.
Harvard Business Review — How to Become a Better Strategic Thinker
For further reading on developing strategic-thinking capabilities.
David Dunning & Justin Kruger — Unskilled and Unaware of It
The original academic research behind what later became known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
