Leadership is defined as many things including individual leadership, team leadership and most other types of leadership roles. Strategic leadership is more than a type of leadership, it’s an amalgamation of all the other types of leadership, with an emphasis on achieving goals and desired outcomes as well as how to get there. Strategic leadership requires skills needed to become a strategic leader,
The main objectives of strategic leadership are to streamline processes, boost strategic productivity, promote innovation and cultivate an environment that encourages employees to be productive, independent and to push forward their own ideas. Strategic leaders sometimes make use of reward or incentive programs to encourage employees and help them reach their goals.
What is strategic leadership?
So what is strategic leadership. It is a practice in which executives, using different styles of management, develop a vision for their organization that enables it to adapt to or remain competitive in a changing economic and technological climate. Strategic leadership is a type of leadership in which leaders influence those around them to embrace a collective vision for the success of their organization. These leaders can work confidently in ambiguous situations, approaching them with creativity, vision and focus on long-term success and providing their team with a clear sense of direction and collaboration to work together toward a common goal.
Strategic leadership principles
Strategic leaders possess the unique ability to figure out the best strategies and methodologies to help their organization remain sustainably competitive in the market. Sustainability requires adaptation, whether it’s the available technology, the changing climate, fluctuating economy or other affecting factors, and organizations without strategic leaders are at risk of failure in the face of these factors.
For an organization to remain relevant in the changing world, its leaders need to have the ability to efficiently use available resources to provide services and create strategies that will enable the organization to move forward successfully.
Strategic leadership process
Leaders must first understand their organization’s mission to be strategic. This means fully grasping why the company exists, who its customers are and how exactly it can provide value for them.
Then strategic leaders need to create a vision of what that mission will look like at a specified time in the future.
Finally, leaders must craft a strategy to put that vision into action. The strategy should map out the steps a company needs to take or the changes it needs to make to get from its current state to its desired state.
Strategic leadership skills
Strategic leaders possess a lengthy repertoire of skills and abilities. Some include:
Active listening
Active listening plays a large part for strategic leadership, It allows you to receive your team’s input and make them confident about collaboration. It requires giving the speaker full attention.
Anticipate
Collect information from a wide range of sources both inside and outside your company’s industry or function to predict competitors’ moves and reactions to new initiatives or products.
Challenge
View and reframe a problem from multiple angles to understand its underlying causes.
Interpret
Exhibit curiosity and openness when testing several working hypotheses and involve others before coming to any conclusions.
Decide
Weigh long-term investments for growth with short-term pressure for results as well as the risks and tradeoffs for customers and other stakeholders, when making decisions.
Communication skills
The ability to clearly articulate what needs to be done will help to bring the team to a single understanding of the strategy. Successful leaders also make themselves accessible to their team at all times to respond to questions or hear concerns and ideas.
Learn
Convey stories of success and failure to advocate learning. Course-correct decisions after they have been made if there is refuting evidence.
Other types of leadership
Most large-scale organizations have three defined leadership classifications: strategic, organizational and production or action oriented. Strategic leadership consists of the top-level executives responsible for the broad, long-term strategic direction of an organization.
Organizational leadership
s made up of the midlevel leaders responsible for implementing near- and midterm goals and for developing the plans and processes used by the lower levels.
Production leadership
Production leadership is completed by the low-level leaders who have little discretion about the decisions they make and the procedures they use. It can still improvise in their positions, but they rarely invent because consistency is an important part of meeting their individual goals.
Operational leadership
Whereas strategic leadership involves creating an organization’s overall vision and the means to achieve it, operational leadership ensures that organizational processes are executed properly. Operational leaders monitor performance, deal with constraints, ensure that employees understand what needs to be done.
Becoming a strategic leader means identifying weaknesses in the skills and correcting them.
