Ep 42: Operational vs. Strategic Thinking: Why you Need Both

Dec 6

Operational vs. Strategic Thinking: Why You Need Both

Effective Community Managers Require Two Types of Thinking

There are two types of thinking that are required in order to be an effective community manager. The problem is most business owners are only looking for one type of thinking until their business grows and they realize something is missing.

I was talking with a potential client the other day about what makes a great community director. Somebody who's really at a higher level overseeing the community and member success. And I was explaining to them why, especially in that role, you need both operational and strategic thinking, which can be a little challenging to find.

You want somebody that can think operationally and strategically. Both schools of thought are required to be an effective community manager.

Operational Thinking

The first type of thinking is operational. This is your routine functions and tasks. This is implementing systems and maintaining those systems. It's about leveraging existing content and resources in an effective way.

And the thought line here is like 1 + 2 = 3. We want to figure out how to be as effective and efficient as possible in everything that we do. This line of operational thinking is really good for maintaining communication schedules inside of your community because you have the processes in place to make sure the messaging is consistent. Having efficiency inside of the daily processes that are required to run a community, like letting people in and out of the community and getting communication out to the community and making sure that the community is effectively moderated and managed, is essential.

What is Operational Thinking Good For?

Operational thinking is good for organizing information. Great community managers need to be able to organize information so it is easily accessible so that you can help guide and point people to the best resources.

All of these are operational thinking tasks that are very important to make sure we are not just willy-nilly out here managing a community by being a good cheerleader. Operational thinking makes sure that we have effective systems in place that help people head in the right direction and that we're operating efficiently. This creates the space that we need to have more higher level conversations.

Strategic Thinking

The other type of thinking is strategic thinking. Strategic thinking is when you see the big picture. You're really thinking critically and problem solving. You're taking in factors that maybe are not logical or obvious and those are influencing the decisions that you make. You're also looking beyond the present and trying to really anticipate future opportunity, future needs, and future risk that you may encounter.

Strategic thinking is really important, especially when it comes to navigating conflict inside of the community. If you've heard me talk about conflict before, you know I talk all the time about how you need to be prepared for conflict. Well, that's a strategic thinking mindset. Strategic thinking is what allows us to look at what has happened before, look at what's happened in other communities, anticipate what may happen inside of our community, and then formulate a strategic plan for what we do in conflict arises.

In a community 1 + 2 ≠ 3 because we're dealing with people. Those plans often need to be modified and as we think critically when a problem arises.

What is Strategic Thinking Good For?

Strategic thinking can be good for determining survey questions or analyzing survey results. I talk a lot about the importance of getting to know your community and their needs, what they're enjoying, what they're not enjoying, and that comes with asking the right questions inside of a survey. Surveys are really helpful if you have a problem in your business that you're trying to solve, or a potential opportunity that you're trying to see if it's a right fit for your community.

That will require some strategic thinking to know what questions to ask and identify the information that will help you solve the problem. Once you have that data and information, you need to be able to effectively interpret that to determine how it applies to the situation at hand. All of that is very strategic thinking.

Strategic thinking also comes into play when we're talking about creating plans for how the community is going to help support inside of a launch. So let's say that you are doing a traditional challenge launch, and you know that there's supposed to be a Facebook group.

Our operational mind would go, “here's the checklist for creating a Facebook group.

We need to have guides, we need to have rules. Here's what we need to do. I'm going to post on these days.”

But a strategic thinker is going to go, “how can we use this Facebook group to support people in making progress in the challenge, not just progress in basic actions, but in their beliefs and in their mindset? How can that support the outcome that we want to see in that challenge?” And then they're going to craft the key objectives for the community.

So you can see how that strategic brain really comes into play from a community perspective.

Two Types of Cooks: Operational vs. Strategic

Seth Godin really explained this well when he said there are two kinds of cooks. He said, one is very skilled at following the recipe. It's quality control, consistency, and diligence. The other understands how the recipe works. They see patterns and opportunities and changes to the recipe to fit the problem to be solved.

I think of it like this. When I go to somebody's house and they have a family recipe that they always make. I tell them that I don't eat gluten. I don't do dairy. I don't eat red meat. I don't eat pork. They could panic, right? An operational thinker could nail that recipe if no other outside factors were at play. And we need those kinds of people.

In a community manager, we need somebody that's looking at being consistent and following the rhythms and making sure things get out on time and they're detailed and diligent. We need that operational thinking.

But then because we're dealing with people, there's always going to be wrenches thrown in. So when I come in with my laundry list of things that I can't eat, a good strategic thinker isn’t just going to throw the recipe out and go, “well, I guess I'm just ordering takeout.” They're going to go, “how can I modify what's already here so that I can accommodate for this individual and still maintain the integrity of the original recipe?”

They're really going to be thinking through that in order to problem solve. And again, we need both. We need both kinds of cooks inside of our community. We need people who are operational, and we need people who are strategic. And in a perfect world, we find the unicorn individual who has a little bit of both, right? Because we do need both for effective community management.

Community Training Program

That's why in my community training, Cultivate, I don't just train the team on how to manage a community and hand over my systems. I actually take the time to teach the thinking and the strategy that's behind every one of my systems so that your team can innovate and iterate as best fits your particular business. If you haven't gone through that training yet, I'm not sure what you're waiting for, I really want you to dive into it.

Just go to communitycultivated.com to learn more. It is really important when we have community managers who are typically just operational thinkers. They're just doing what you tell them to do. They're checking the boxes, they're making sure the needs are met in the community, and we want them to really elevate their thinking to be more strategic.

We need to help guide them in that way so that they can understand the thought behind the community strategy. You as the business owner may have that, but if not, that's what my program teaches. And that's how a community manager is able to adopt that strategic thinking mindset.

Training or Hiring a Community Manager

The next time you're looking to train or hire a community manager, you want to make sure that they are skilled in the operational thinking of maintaining and creating systems and processes that keep that community functioning efficiently, day in and day out.

But you also want them to have a strategic thinking ability so that they can problem solve, innovate, and think on their feet when problems arise that need to be solved, or when they need to think about how to leverage the community to support your overall business objectives.

Shana Lynn