STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP SKILLS

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.

The main objective of strategic leadership is strategic productivity. Another aim of strategic leadership is to develop an environment in which employees forecast the organization’s needs in context of their own job. Strategic leaders encourage the employees in an organization to follow their own ideas. Strategic leaders make greater use of reward and incentive system for encouraging productive and quality employees to show much better performance for their organization. Functional strategic leadership is about inventiveness, perception, and planning to assist an individual in realizing his objectives and goals.

  

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.

6.learn :

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.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	Compassion- Strategic leaders must understand the views and feelings of their subordinates, and make decisions after considering them.
	Self-control- Strategic leaders must have the potential to control distracting/disturbing moods and desires, i.e., they must think before acting.
	Social skills- Strategic leaders must be friendly and social.
	Self-awareness- Strategic leaders must have the potential to understand their own moods and emotions, as well as their impact on others.
	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.
	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.
	Constancy/ Reliability- Strategic leaders constantly convey their vision until it becomes a component of organizational culture.

To conclude, Strategic leaders can create vision, express vision, passionately possess vision and persistently drive it to accomplishment.