Effective Leadership:

Managerial Leadership

Strategic Leadership

Providing the Vision, Direction, the Purpose for Growth, and Context for the Corporate Success

"All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which great victory evolved."

– Sun Tzu

Objectives of Strategic Leadership

Strategic leadership provides the vision, direction, the purpose for growth, and context for the success of the corporation. It also initiates "outside-the-box" thinking to generate future growth. Strategic leadership is not about micromanaging business strategies. Rather, it provides the umbrella under which businesses devise appropriate strategies and create value.²

In short, strategic leadership answers two questions:

• What – by providing the vision and direction, creating the context for growth, and

• How – by sketching out a road map for the organization that will allow it to unleash its full potential; by crafting the corporation's portfolio, determining what businesses should be there, what the performance requirements of the business are, and what types of alliances make sense; and by defining the means (the culture, values, and way of working together) needed to achieve corporate goals.

Distinguishing Characteristic

The distinguishing characteristic of the strategic leadership level - as compared with team-level and operational-level leadership – is that it implies responsibility for achieving the right balance between the whole, i.e. organizational needs, and the parts, be they large (functions) or small (teams or individuals).

Strategic Thinking

In today's era of rapid change and unparalleled opportunity, the profitable and sustainable growth will go to the companies whose leaders can see possibilities beyond their traditional served markets. There are no generally applicable recipes for success in business as each business is unique. Effective strategic thinking can be stimulated however by adapting the framework for the process to the specific situation of your company... More

Strategic Achievement

The two interwoven parts of strategic achievement are formulation and implementation. While both parts are essential to achieving superior organizational performance, the implementing strategy is where most companies succeed or fail... More

Managing for Results

Strategic Innovation

Strategic Innovation is the creation of growth strategies, new product categories, services or business models that change the game and generate significant new value for customers and the corporation...  More

Setting the Right Direction

Left-brain dominant organizations that are devoted to short-term, bottom-line, hard-data orientations usually neglect strategic leadership development and therefore breed left-brain dominant executive who seldom find time to "communicate vision and direction, build teams, develop people, or plan meeting, except in a kind of crisis way.

No wonder many individuals and institutions are caught going in the wrong direction, being in the wrong jungle, or leaning against the wrong wall. Strategic leadership can eliminate such misdirection and make things right again."³

As a strategic leader responsible for the enterprise strategy development and implementation your prime responsibility is to ensure that your organization is going in the right direction. A strategic leader can provide vision and direction, motivate through love and passion, and build a complementary team based on mutual respect if he or she is "more effectiveness-minded than efficiency-minded, more concerned with direction and results than with methods, systems, and procedures."³

Leadership and Management

References:

1. Effective Strategic Leadership, John Adair

2. The Centerless Corporation, Bruce Pasternack and Albert J. Viscio

3. Principle-Centred Leadership, Stephen R. Covey

4. Making a Difference, Bruce Nixon