Strategic
Leadership:
Strategic leadership can be
defined as utilization of strategy in the management . It is the
potential to influence organizational members and to execute organizational excellence. Strategic leaders create organizational structure, allocate resources
and define strategic vision. Strategic leaders work in an ambiguous
environment on very difficult issues that influence and are influenced by
occasions and organizations external to their own.
Strategic leadership requires
the potential to foresee and comprehend the work environment. It requires
objectivity and potential to look at the broader picture.
If you find yourself resisting
being strategic, because it sounds like a fast track to irrelevance, or vaguely
like an excuse to slack off, you're not alone. Every leader's temptation is to
deal with what's directly in front, because it always seems more urgent and
concrete. Unfortunately, if you do that, you put your company at risk. While
you concentrate on steering around potholes, you'll miss windfall
opportunities, not to mention any signals that the road you're on is leading
off a cliff.
This is a tough job, make no
mistake. "We need strategic leaders!” is a pretty constant refrain at
every company, large and small. One reason the job is so tough: No one really
understands what it entails. It's hard to be a strategic leader if you don't
know what strategic leaders are supposed to do.
All successful strategic leaders
has mastered below six skills.
1.Anticipate
:
Lego management missed the electronic
revolution in toys and gaming. Strategic leaders, in contrast, are constantly
vigilant, honing their ability to anticipate by scanning the environment for
signals of change.
We worked with a CEO named
Mike who had built his reputation as a turn- around wizard in heavy
manufacturing businesses. He was terrific at reacting to crises and fixing
them. After he’d worked his magic in one particular crisis, Mike’s company
enjoyed a bump in growth, fueled in part by an up cycle. But after the cycle
had peaked, demand abruptly softened, catching Mike off guard. More of the same
in a down market wasn't going to work. Mike needed to consider various
scenarios and gather better information from diverse sources in order to
anticipate where his industry was headed.
Most organizations and leaders
are poor at detecting ambiguous threats and opportunities on the periphery of
their business. Coors executives, famously, were late seeing the trend toward
low-carb beers We showed Mike and his team members how to pick up weak signals
from both inside and outside the organization.
They worked to develop broader
networks and to take the perspective of customers, competitors, and partners.
More alert to opportunities outside the core business, Mike and the team
diversified their product portfolio and acquired a company in an adjacent
market where demand was higher and less susceptible to boom-and- bust cycles.
To improve your ability to
anticipate:
ü Talk
to your customers, suppliers, and other partners to understand their
challenges.
ü Conduct
market research and business simulations to understand competitors’ perspectives,
gauge their likely reactions to new initiatives or products, and predict
potential disruptive offerings.
ü use
scenario planning to imagine various futures and prepare for the unexpected.
ü look
at a fast-growing rival and examine actions it has taken that puzzle you.
ü list
customers you have lost recently and try to figure out why.
ü attend
conferences and events in other industries or functions.
2.Challenge :
Strategic thinkers question
the status quo. They challenge their own and others’ assumptions and encourage
divergent points of view. Only after careful reflection and examination of a
problem through many lenses do they take decisive action. This requires
patience, courage, and an open mind. Consider Bob, a division president in an
energy company we worked with, who was set in his ways and avoided risky or messy situations. When
faced with a tough problem, for example, how to consolidate business units to
streamline costs , he would gather all available in- formation and retreat
alone into his office. His solutions, although well thought out, were
predictable and rarely innovative. In the consolidation case he focused
entirely on two similar and under performing businesses rather than considering
a bolder reorganization that would streamline activities across the entire
division. When he needed outside advice, he turned to a few seasoned
consultants in one trusted firm who suggested tried-and-true solutions instead
of questioning basic industry assumptions.
Through coaching, we helped
Bob learn how to invite different (even opposing) views to challenge his own
thinking and that of his advisers. This was un- comfortable for him at first,
but then he began to see that he could generate fresh solutions to stale
problems and improve his strategic decision making. For the organizational
streamlining he even assigned a colleague to play devil’s advocate, an approach
that yielded a hybrid solution: Certain emerging market teams were allowed to
keep their local HR and finance support for a transitional period while tap-
ping the fully centralized model for IT and legal support.
To
improve your ability to challenge:
ü Focus
on the root causes of a problem rather than the symptoms. Apply the “five whys”
of “sakichi Toyoda”, Toyota’s founder. (“Product returns increased 5% this
month.” “Why?” “Because the product intermittently malfunctions.” “Why?” and so
on.)
ü list
long-standing assumptions about an aspect of your business (“High switching
costs prevent our customers from defecting”) and ask a diverse group if they
hold true.
ü Encourage
debate by holding “safe zone” meetings where open dialogue and conflict are
expected and welcomed.
ü Create
a rotating position for the express purpose of questioning the status quo.
ü Include
naysayers in a decision process to surface challenges early.
ü Capture
input from people not directly affected by a decision who may have a good
perspective on the repercussions.
3.interpret
Leaders who challenge in the
right way invariably elicit complex and conflicting information.
That’s why the
best ones are also able to interpret. Instead of reflexively seeing or hearing
what you expect, you should synthesize all the input you have. You’ll need to
recognize patterns, push through ambiguity, and seek new insights. Finland’s
former president J. K. Paasikivi was fond of saying that wisdom begins by
recognizing the facts and then “recognizing,” or rethinking, them to expose
their hidden implications.
Some years ago Liz, a U.S.
food company CMO, was developing a marketing plan for the company’s low- carb
cake line. At the time, the Atkins diet was popular, and every food company had
a low-carb strategy. But Liz noticed that none of the consumers she listened to
were avoiding the company’s snacks because they were on a low-carb diet.
Rather, a fast-growing segment—people with diabetes—shunned them because they
contained sugar. Liz thought her company might achieve.
Higher sales if it began to
serve diabetics rather than fickle dieters. Her ability to connect the dots
ultimately led to a profit- able change in product mix from low-carb to sugar-free
cakes.
To
improve your ability to interpret:
ü When
analyzing ambiguous data, list at least three possible explanations for what
you’re observing and invite perspectives from diverse stakeholders.
ü Force
yourself to zoom in on the details and out to see the big picture.
ü actively
look for missing information and evidence that disconfirms your hypothesis.
ü supplement
observation with quantitative analysis.
ü step
away—go for a walk, look at art, put on nontraditional music, play ping-pong—to
promote an open mind
4.Decide
:
In uncertain times, decision
makers may have to make tough calls with incomplete information, and often they
must do so quickly. But strategic thinkers insist on multiple options at the
outset and don’t get prematurely locked into simplistic go/no-go choices. They
don’t shoot from the hip but follow a disciplined process that balances rigor
with speed, considers the trade-offs involved, and takes both short- and
long-term goals into account. In the end, strategic leaders must have the
courage of their convictions—informed by a robust decision process.
Janet, an execution-oriented
division president in a technology business, liked to make decisions quickly
and keep the process simple. This worked well when the competitive landscape
was familiar and the choices straightforward.
Unfortunately for her, the industry
was shifting rapidly as nontraditional competitors from Korea began seizing
market share with lower- priced products. Janet’s instinct was to make a
strategic acquisition in a low-cost geography—a yes- or-no proposition—to
preserve the company’s competitive pricing position and market share. As the
plan’s champion, she pushed for a rapid green light, but because capital was
short, the CEO and the CFO resisted. Surprised by this, she gathered the
principals involved in the decision and challenged them to come up with other options.
The team elected to take a methodical approach and explored the possibility of
a joint venture or a strategic alliance. On the basis of that analysis, Janet
ultimately pursued an acquisition—but of a different company in a more
strategic market.
To
improve your ability to decide:
ü Reframe
binary decisions by explicitly asking your team, “What other options do we
have?”
ü Divide
big decisions into pieces to understand component parts and better see
unintended consequences.
ü Tailor
your decision criteria to long-term versus short-term projects.
ü let
others know where you are in your decision process. are you still seeking
divergent ideas and debate, or are you moving toward closure and choice?
ü Determine
who needs to be directly involved and who can influence the success of your
decision.
ü Consider
pilots or experiments instead of big bets, and make staged commitments
5.Align :
Strategic leaders must be
adept at finding common ground and achieving buy-in among stakeholders who have
disparate views and agendas. This requires active outreach. Success depends on
proactive communication, trust building, and frequent engagement.
One executive we worked with,
a chemical company president in charge of the Chinese market was tireless in
trying to expand his business. But he had difficulty getting support from
colleagues elsewhere in the world. Frustrated that they didn't share his
enthusiasm for opportunities in China, he plowed forward alone, further
alienating them. A survey revealed that his colleagues didn't fully understand
his strategy and thus hesitated to back him.
With our help, the president
turned the situation around. He began to have regular face-to-face meetings
with his fellow leaders in which he detailed his growth plans and solicited
feedback, participation, and differing points of view. Gradually they began to
see the benefits for their own functions and lines of business. With greater
collaboration, sales increased, and the president came to see his colleagues as
strategic partners rather than obstacles
To
improve your ability to align:
ü Communicate
early and often to combat the two most common complaints in organizations: “no
one ever asked me” and “no one ever told me.”
ü Identify
key internal and external stakeholders, mapping their positions on your
initiative and pinpointing any misalignment of interests. look for hidden
agendas and coalitions.
ü Use
structured and facilitated conversations to expose areas of misunderstanding or
resistance.
ü Reach
out to resisters directly to understand their concerns and then address them.
ü Be
vigilant in monitoring stakeholders’ positions during the roll-out of your initiative or strategy.
ü Recognize
and otherwise reward colleagues who support team alignment.
Strategic leaders are the
focal point for organizational learning. They promote a culture of inquiry, and
they search for the lessons in both successful and unsuccessful outcomes. They
study failures—their own and their teams’—in an open, constructive way to find
the hidden lessons.
A team of 40 senior leaders
from a pharmaceutical company, including the CEO, took our Strategic Aptitude
Self- Assessment and discovered that learning was their weakest collective area
of leadership. At all levels of the company, it emerged, the tendency was to
punish rather than learn from mistakes, which meant that leaders often went to
great lengths to cover up their own.
The CEO realized that the
culture had to change if the company was to become more innovative. Under his
leadership, the team launched three initiatives:
1. A program
to publicize stories about projects that initially failed but ultimately led to
creative solutions.
2. A
program to engage cross-divisional teams in novel experiments to solve customer
problems—and then report the results regardless of outcome.
3. An
innovation tournament to generate new ideas from across the organization.
Meanwhile, the CEO himself became more open in acknowledging his
For example, he described to a group of high
potentials how his delay in selling a stalled legacy business unit had prevented
the enterprise from acquiring a diagnostics company that would have expanded
its market share. The lesson, he explained, was that he should more readily cut
losses on under performing investments. In time the company culture shifted
toward more shared learning and bolder innovation.
To
improve your ability to learn:
ü Institute
after-action reviews, document lessons learned from major decisions or
milestones (including the termination of a failing project), and broadly
communicate the resulting insights.
ü Reward
managers who try something laud- able but fail in terms of outcomes.
ü Conduct
annual learning audits to see where decisions and team interactions may have
fallen short.
ü Identify
initiatives that are not producing as expected and examine the root causes.
ü Create
a culture in which inquiry is valued and mistakes are viewed as learning
opportunities.
Becoming a strategic leader
means identifying weaknesses in the six skills discussed above and correcting
them. Strength in one skill cannot easily compensate for a deficit in another,
so it is important to methodically optimize all six abilities.
A few main traits /
characteristics / features / qualities of effective strategic leaders that
do lead to superior performance are as follows:
Loyalty- Powerful
and effective leaders demonstrate their loyalty to their vision by their
words and actions.
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Keeping
them updated- Efficient and effective leaders keep
themselves updated about what is happening within their organization. They
have various formal and informal sources of information in the organization.
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Judicious
use of power- Strategic leaders makes a very wise use
of their power. They must play the power game skillfully and try to develop
consent for their ideas rather than forcing their ideas upon others. They
must push their ideas gradually.
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Have
wider perspective/outlook- Strategic leaders just
don’t have skills in their narrow specialty but they have a little knowledge
about a lot of things.
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Motivation- Strategic
leaders must have a zeal for work that goes beyond money and power and also
they should have an inclination to achieve goals with energy and
determination.
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Compassion- Strategic
leaders must understand the views and feelings of their subordinates, and
make decisions after considering them.
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Self-control- Strategic
leaders must have the potential to control distracting/disturbing moods and
desires, i.e., they must think before acting.
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Social
skills- Strategic leaders must be friendly and social.
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Self-awareness- Strategic
leaders must have the potential to understand their own moods and emotions,
as well as their impact on others.
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Readiness
to delegate and authorize- Effective leaders are proficient
at delegation. They are well aware of the fact that delegation will avoid overloading
of responsibilities on the leaders. They also recognize the fact that
authorizing the subordinates to make decisions will motivate them a lot.
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Articulacy- Strong
leaders are articulate enough to communicate the vision(vision of where the
organization should head) to the organizational members in terms that boost
those members.
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Constancy/ Reliability- Strategic
leaders constantly convey their vision until it becomes a component of
organizational culture.
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To conclude, Strategic leaders
can create vision, express vision, passionately possess vision and persistently
drive it to accomplishment.