Competencies for strategic leadership in organizations

Every business leader’s quest is to turn their organization into an engine of maximum performance potential, with the agility to weather uncertainty and success with equal measure. They wish they can transform their personal and technical skills into a leadership practice with the power to build an organization capable of ever-deepening insight and high performance. They want to have an adaptive, effective strategic leadership at all levels and functions of the organization.

The key to leadership that is strategic in nature is the context within which that leadership is occurring. Individuals and teams enact strategic leadership when they create the direction, alignment, and commitment needed to achieve the organization’s enduring performance potential. This is true whether the organization is for-profit or nonprofit, governmental or nongovernmental. Strategic leadership is increasingly the responsibility of many people, not just those at the top. More and more, we see that leaders at different levels in the organization are charged with contributing to strategy formulation and leading strategy execution. A central understanding for the person reading this article is that strategic leadership is about “becoming.” It is about a process of never-ending individual, team, and organizational learning.

The broad scope of strategic leadership means that it impacts areas outside the leader’s functional area and business unit and even outside the organization. This broad scope requires seeing the organization as an interdependent and interconnected system of multiple parts, where decisions in one area provoke actions in other areas. The scope of strategic leadership extends to where the organization reacts to trends and issues in the environment. Also, the nature and definition of work are changing very fast, and work has become more complex and more interdependent in most organizations. Furthermore, organizations and leaders are increasingly interdependent. Change has become so pervasive in our environment that it impacts virtually every organization everywhere and everyone in them. This situation has been described as a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Therefore, today’s strategic business leader must be able to think, act, and influence the environment.

An organization would not need a strategy if it did not have to compete; it could make do simply with a plan. However, strategy implies competing and outwitting competitors. A strategy is about being different from your competitors, finding your race to run, and winning it. It is impossible to formulate a strategy without engaging in strategic thinking. It follows that thinking strategically is such an important part of every leader’s job. Hence, strategic thinking is concerned with how to be different and identifying alternative possibilities of generating customer value that the organization could deliver. It is the process of finding alternative ways of competing and providing customer value. Coming up with the right strategy for a company that might increase stakeholder value, make it a stronger competitor, or finds a competitive arena it can dominate is done only through strategic thinking.

The ability to read an environment, devise an appropriate strategy and then put that strategy into action is an essential requirement for strategic leadership in any organization. Meeting that requirement is underpinned by four key competencies: intellect and confidence, empathy; energy; and humility.

First, there is a depth of intellect and confidence in your ability to deal with ambiguity. Leaders must be able to look at the chaos and find pathways through it. The strategic leader must keep long-term goals in mind while working to achieve short-term objectives. Having recognized the pathway, strategic leaders need to produce a plan that can be readily communicated and understood by people at all levels in the organization. If strategic leaders are to be effective communicators, they need empathy with their people. They need to understand what