Are you a tactical or strategic thinker? Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Rich Horwath, founder and CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, uncovers three core behaviors of a strategic thinker.

3 core behaviors of strategic thinkers

1. Acumen

Acumen refers to a person's "ability to understand a situation, generate new ideas to move from the current to desired future state, and solve challenges to create new value," Horwath writes.

Acumen is comprised of three things:

1.  Context awareness, which informs how you see the big picture and helps you allocate resources properly
2. Insight, which refers to how you're able to generate lessons from your context awareness
3. Innovation, which occurs when you channel context awareness and insights to create new value

In order to evaluate you level of acumen, Horwath recommends asking yourself three questions:

1. Do I regularly assess my business' current situation, both from the internal and external perspectives?
2. Do I share valuable insights with my team?
3. When problem-solving, do I stick to what's tried and true or do I look for something new?

2. Allocation

According to Horwath, strategic thinkers will set goals, distribute their resources, recognize the potential risk of making certain decisions, and develop advantage by offering superior value. The primary driver of this effectiveness is where you invest your resources and requires three components:

1. The ability to focus resources, which can often be spread too thinly, impacting your goals and objectives
2. Decision making in which you analyze the pros and cons of every alternative, as well as the acceptable level of risk
3. Developing a competitive advantage through your superior value to customers

To assess whether you're an effective allocator, Horwath recommends asking three questions:

1. Do I proactively move resources from underperforming areas to ones with more potential?
2. Do I spend time on activities that align with my goals?
3. How do I measure myself against the competition?

3. Action

Preparing a strategy is just the first step, but how you implement that strategy is what determines your success. It requires the ability to collaborate with others, execute strategies, and optimize your own personal performance, Horwath writes.

Verbal, visual, and written communication skills are key to a successful collaboration, Horwath writes, as is the ability to listen without judgment because it allows to you have an open mind that's receptive to new and different ideas.

Executing strategies involves applying resources in a disciplined way in order to achieve your goals and requires focus as well as discipline to fight against interruptions or other distractions.

Optimizing your personal performance involves how you steward your time, energy, and mindset in pursuit of your goals, and requires flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, as well as mental agility to overcome challenges.

In order to assess your action skills, Horwath recommends asking three questions:

1. When it comes time to implement a strategy, how prepared am I to act?
2. Do I ask others what their goals are at the beginning of a conversation?
3. Do I get easily distracted by other obstacles?

"When we define strategic as possessing insight that leads to advantage, we can then begin to assess our own strategic fitness level," Horwath writes. "Acumen, allocation, and action — the ability to think, plan, and do — are what separate strategic thinkers from the rest, and they are behaviors that can be learned and applied to create superior value. While beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, strategic is in the behavior." (Horwath, Harvard Business Review, 11/8)