|
|
What is Strategic Leadership?
Strategic Leadership is more than just strategy and planning. It’s about handling the human element as well as the task issues and doing so in such a way that engages people instead of alienating them.  People in organizations particularly have a number of basic needs, one of which is some idea of certainty about the future. Effective strategic leaders provide that certainty by having a clear vision and workable strategies for bringing that future into reality. Leadership at the strategic level is about setting the direction for the organization as a whole, getting policy and strategy right and making things happen. It frequently involves organizing and reorganizing the way things operate in the organization and relating the organization to other organizations and society as a whole. A key development in many organizations is the idea of ‘developing tomorrow’s leaders’. The armed services have been doing this for centuries, for practical reasons, namely that leaders can get killed in battle and you need to be creating the next generation to take over if that happens. It’s only just recently that many commercial organisations have taken this on board. And there is an emotional side to strategic leadership. Effective strategic leaders, in the words of Prof. John Adair, need to ‘release the corporate spirit’. Military leaders throughout the ages have done this effectively. Maybe there is a lot more we can learn from history in terms of how to develop effective strategic leadership. Photo: Austarlian Defence Academy |