The Leadership Skill No One Teaches: How to Create Space for Strategic Thinking (When You're Drowning in Tactical Work)
- Merve Kagitci Hokamp
- Oct 30
- 6 min read
A few months ago, a founder I coach said something I hear almost every week:
"I feel like I'm juggling twenty balls, and none of them can drop."
She runs a fast-growing startup.
Her calendar is a wall of back-to-back meetings.
She's managing a team, closing deals, mentoring, hiring, fundraising, fixing ops issues.
If this sounds familiar to you, you are not alone.
Whether you're a founder, an executive, or a people manager, the reality is the same: You're constantly pulled between strategy and delivery, vision and execution, people and performance.
And here's the problem (and the reality):
Strategic thinking doesn't happen by accident. It happens by design.
The Tactical Trap
Most leaders start as high performers. You were promoted because you were good at doing the work. Or you decided to build your own thing because you had a great idea you could implement and bring to life.
Then the job changed — but no one told you how.
Now you're expected to drive growth and build culture.
Be visionary and operationally flawless.
Empower your team and stay in control.
You end up doing both. And that's when things unravel.
Urgent always wins over important. Firefighting replaces focus. You spend your week solving the same five problems in slightly different formats.
That's not leadership — that's survival.
I fell into this trap hard during my first year managing a team at Google.
I was busy. Productive, even.
My calendar was full. My team came to me with every problem.
But a senior leader pulled me aside and said: "You're solving a lot of problems. But are you solving the right problems?"
I wasn't. I was so deep in the weeds that I'd lost sight of where we were actually going.
The Cost of Overcapacity
Here's the paradox:
The more capable you are, the more the system leans on you.
You become the person everyone turns to — until you can't turn anywhere yourself.
You're indispensable for all the wrong reasons. Your company starts running through you, not because of you.
While you might be overfunctioning and doing a lot, accomplishing a lot, there is a cost to you being everywhere, doing everything. By saying 'Yes' to doing all the things, you might be saying 'No' to the big picture:
You miss opportunities because you're not looking ahead
Your team stays stuck because you're not clearing the path
You burn out because you're working harder but not strategically so
Your career plateaus because you're not operating at the level you're capable of
You take on more to progress, as opposed to having more space to think big
It's not sustainable — not for you, not for your team, not for your organization.
From Chaos to Clarity: The Frameworks That Actually Work
Leadership requires leverage. That means building systems and routines that work when you're not in the room.
After years of coaching leaders through this exact challenge, I've identified the frameworks and management theories that create real transformation:
1. Eisenhower's Urgent-Important Matrix
Stop letting urgency dictate your day. This framework helps you categorize work into four quadrants:
Important + Urgent: Do now (true crises)
Important + Not Urgent: Schedule it (strategic work lives here)
Urgent + Not Important: Delegate it
Neither: Eliminate it
Most leaders spend 80% of their time in quadrants 1 and 3. Strategic leaders live in quadrant 2.
2. Delegate-Automate-Eliminate
For every task on your plate, ask:
Can someone else do this? → Delegate
Can a system do this? → Automate
Does this actually need to happen? → Eliminate
If you're still reviewing every deck and approving every decision, you're not leading — you're bottlenecking.
3. Strategic vs. Operational Work (Gerber's E-Myth Framework)
Michael Gerber's E-Myth teaches the critical distinction between working in your business vs. working on it.
Operational: Executing tasks, solving immediate problems, responding to emails
Strategic: Setting direction, identifying patterns, building systems, developing people
Great leaders know which hat they're wearing—and intentionally shift between them.
4. Time Audit + Calendar Design
You can't manage what you don't measure. Look at your last two weeks of meetings:
Did you need to be there?
Was this strategic or just status updates?
Could someone else have attended?
Cut or delegate 30% of your meetings. Use that time for strategic blocks — 2-hour windows labeled "Focus Time" that are non-negotiable.
5. Start-Stop-Continue Framework
A simple but powerful reflection tool for course-correcting:
Start: What should I begin doing that I'm not?
Stop: What's draining energy without adding value?
Continue: What's working that I should protect?
Use this weekly to stay intentional about where your energy goes.
6. Building Reflection Rhythms
Strategic thinking isn't just forward-looking — it's reflective. Without reflection, you're repeating the same week 52 times.
Weekly: What went well? What didn't? What would I do differently?
Monthly: Are we making progress on what matters? What needs to shift?
Quarterly: Are we solving the same problems repeatedly? What systemic changes do we need?
What This Looks Like in Practice
I worked with a VP recently who was drowning.
60-hour weeks. Constant firefighting. Zero strategic headspace.
She worked on redesigning her plate using these frameworks:
✅ Blocked Tuesday and Thursday mornings for strategic work (Eisenhower's quadrant 2)
✅ Delegated decision rights for anything under $25K (leverage through systems)
✅ Cut her meeting load by 25% through ruthless calendar audits
✅ Created a weekly Start-Stop-Continue reflection ritual
Within two months, she identified a major process inefficiency costing her team about 20 hours a week. She redesigned the workflow, freed up her team, and suddenly had space for actual growth initiatives.
Her words: "I finally feel like a leader again, not just a firefighter."
The Bottom Line
Strategic thinking is a skill. And like any skill, it requires practice, frameworks, and deliberate design.
You won't accidentally become a strategic thinker by working harder. You become one by working differently.
By using proven management frameworks.
By designing your calendar around what matters.
By building systems that free you from the tactical.
By creating space for the kind of thinking that moves the needle.
Because your team doesn't need you to answer every Slack message.
They need you to see around corners.
To spot opportunities.
To clear obstacles they can't see yet.
That's leadership. And it requires space.
Momentum: Your Playbook for Strategic Leadership
This is exactly what we work on inside Momentum Leadership Mastery — moving from overwhelm to clarity using battle-tested frameworks and leadership blueprints.
Inside the program, you'll master:
Eisenhower Matrix, RACI Model, Delegate-Automate-Eliminate for decision systems
Strategic vs. Operational Thinking frameworks
Time audit and calendar design strategies
Start-Stop-Continue and weekly reflection rhythms
Lencioni's Team Dysfunctions, Radical Candor, Multipliers Framework for team leadership
OKR systems, SBI Feedback Model, Positive Intelligence for performance management
Momentum is a blend of self-paced videos, real-life case studies, practical applications and challenges, leadership worksheets, templates, and frameworks you can implement immediately.
It’s built on frameworks used inside some of the world’s best organizations — Google, Amazon, McKinsey, L’Oréal, Visa — combined with years of real coaching experience across industries and cultures.
It gives you structure when you need it and flexibility when you don’t. You can move at your own pace, revisit modules, and apply what you learn right away.
It’s for leaders who want both rigor and realism — a clear, step-by-step approach to leading better without burning out.
Hi! I'm Merve. 👋 I help leaders build high performing teams, amplify their business impact, and advance their careers.
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