Mastering Strategic Leadership: A Guide to Unlocking Organizational Success
- What is Strategic Leadership?
- Key Attributes of Strategic Leaders
- Overcoming Obstacles: Strategic Leaders Have a Plan
- The Role of Strategic Leaders in Organizational Success
- Strategies for Developing Strategic Leadership Skills
- Leading Change and Managing Transformation
- Building a High-Performance Culture
- Developing Future Leaders
- Measuring and Evaluating Strategic Leadership Effectiveness
- Effective Strategy Execution Requires Visionary Leadership
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline—carrying it out.
According to a recent Global Leadership Development study from Harvard Business Publishing, 50% of HR and Learning and Development (L&D) leaders ranked the ability to connect employees to the organization’s purpose as the most important leadership capability for meeting their business needs in 2024.
But in order for leaders to engage employees and align their teams’ efforts around those big-picture initiatives, they need to possess both a strong strategic vision and a plan for turning that vision into a reality.
Not every leader within your organization will or needs to possess this high level of strategic insight, as tactical leaders certainly have their place. However, it’s essential that those in the proverbial driver’s seat—whether they’re in the C-suite or are leading a department—have a strong sense of strategic leadership to shape the organization’s vision, communicate it effectively, and support teams in achieving breakthrough results.
Let’s take a closer look at what strategic leadership involves, the traits embodied by strategic leaders, and how to develop those skills in your leadership teams, as well as the integral role these leaders play in your organization’s strategy execution.
What is Strategic Leadership?
Strategic leadership is where vision and strategy come together. It’s centered on the ability to envision and articulate a compelling direction for an organization, formulate a plan of action to achieve that ideal future state, and mobilize and align various resources and teams toward its realization.
Effective strategic leaders need to be proactive and anticipate the future so they can make critical decisions, adapt to change, foster innovation, and empower others to act in alignment with their organization’s broad objectives. Strategic leaders inspire, motivate, and guide an organization, enabling it to navigate complex challenges, capitalize on opportunities, and sustain long-term success.
Key Attributes of Strategic Leaders
With those needs in mind, let’s distill the most important traits possessed by leaders who can effectively translate their organization’s mission into strategy execution.
Creating a Vision
After establishing a foundation of trust, the next most important role of a strategic leader is vision—thinking of an organization not only in terms of what it looks like today, but what they want it to look like in the future. These leaders find success in building this vision with their teams, so that everyone can see that future together. Then, this view of the future must be documented so that it can be communicated across the board to provide clarity on all sides.
Leaders have to craft specific strategies that allow their organization or team to achieve their vision, and these strategies are best devised in congruence with the teams that will be in charge of executing that strategy. This comes down to more than providing encouragement to teams after the fact; leaders need to devise the strategy and tactics with their reports so that the plan has focus, structure, and buy-in. But no matter what, establishing a strong vision that everyone can see comes first.
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Decisiveness and Accountability
If, at any stage, the team does not agree on strategy, a leader needs to act decisively and take ownership of making the final call. However, teams still need to be on-board and accountable to effective strategy execution. Clear goals must also be set to achieve the vision.
This forms the basis of accountability. Once the goals have been articulated and a shared vision has been communicated to everyone on the team, the day-to-day, month-to-month, and quarter-to-quarter grind of operations can commence.
Accountability goes both ways. Leaders need to be accountable for what they say they will do. They must also expect accountability from their teams and establish systems to promote it. Strategic leaders are unlikely to find success solely relying on a top-down, carrot-and-stick, command-and-control approach.
Successful strategic leaders inspire their teams, sharing the vision broadly and defining what success looks like. This view of success will build excitement among team members as they go on that journey, but it will also create the clarity required so that teams can find their way to their destination—even in the face of obstacles or when the whirlwind of everyday business operations takes over.
When it comes to accountability, leaders must lead by example. Leaders build more credibility with their managers and teams when they’re seen as being capable of making difficult decisions and accepting responsibility, no matter the outcome. This is why the foundation of trust must be present even before the vision is put forward.
Learn more about how Leading at the Speed of Trust® improves strategy execution and builds a stronger culture.
Emotional Intelligence
Another key attribute of strategic leadership is emotional intelligence. In some organizations, personality may be regarded as a substitute for strategic leadership. Charisma can certainly create excitement, but charisma without empathy and a workable plan won’t get leaders very far.
Strategic leadership requires equal amounts of empathy and humility. Let’s say an institution has a growth-by-acquisition strategy. There might not be a lot of people involved in arranging and finalizing a deal. But you can be sure there are a lot of people involved in the ultimate integration. A strategic leader in that situation has to understand the impact of that disruption on the team members most affected by the acquisition or merger. The leader must create mechanisms that allow information to flow back and forth between those team members and themselves—thereby articulating the vision to the team members undergoing the most change. These team members need to understand why the changes are happening and the essential role they themselves play in the organization’s success.
Without effective communication that recognizes the emotional impact on front-line team members, there will be no buy-in. Strategic leaders need to possess the emotional intelligence (EQ), like empathy and humility, to understand their teams’ fears and provide them with the information they need to do their jobs effectively. They also need to recognize that leaders aren’t the only crucial components of a merger or acquisition; their teams are paramount to the deal’s success, too.
Even when strategic leaders are navigating other circumstances—like big changes in the market, a rebranding, or a new product launch, for example—they need to employ their emotional intelligence in order to execute the vision effectively and encourage engagement among their teams.
Adaptability and Resilience
Still another key attribute of a strategic leader is resilience. It’s an essential quality for a leader, who also needs to be able to support and promote resilience within their organization. This includes anticipating obstacles and helping the team to persist to success.
Again, recall the example of an acquisition: Team members may be anxious about everything from their job security to customer concerns. Providing clarity early and coaching to those who must manage in ambiguity can go a long way.
Team members will always have their own human reactions to change and pressure. A leader can bring the clarity and support that will enable the team to remain motivated. The leader in this case is like the backbone, providing both a supporting structure and a means of flexibility as new conditions emerge to create integrated movement in as painless a way as possible.
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Overcoming Obstacles: Strategic Leaders Have a Plan
A plan gives both leaders and teams a path forward in times of change.
Obstacles are inevitable. In the FranklinCovey Change Model, they exist in the Zone of Adoption, where team members struggle against the inevitable blocks to progress. These blocks can be unanticipated timeline or budget shifts, a lack of self-belief, or a team culture that doesn’t encourage or allow people to ask for help. It’s here where the goals being implemented run into the reality of everyday operations. New strategies almost always require significant change. Even if your team is on- board, they’ll still wrestle with issues during deployment.
Obstacles can be bucketed into three distinct categories; each category represents an opportunity to instill resilience.
- Hurdles: This is all about mindset—winning the battle that’s in their heads. Say a team member is struggling with how to integrate a recent acquisition. Remind them of the last time it was done. This team member may grasp the vision, but not the confidence to execute it. Find something in their recent past that lets them see they can clear that hurdle.
- Quicksand: This refers to when employees get stuck and feel like they can’t get out on their own. Maybe the old platform they relied on seemed like it was still working, and they don’t understand why it was dropped for a new one. This is where they need to feel psychologically safe to speak their truth. A strategic leader needs to encourage the team to support each other in the change. Acknowledging that others might need support allows those feeling stuck to make it known, rather than sinking slowly without saying a word.
- Brick Walls: These are the challenges that may take a leader’s influence and budget. Note that people on a team may see every obstacle as a brick wall, rather than using their own resourcefulness and initiative to keep moving forward. Strategic leaders build resilience by making it clear that they are the option of last resort, after having already tried working through a block on their own and with the support of the team. A word of warning: This can feel heartless if not deployed correctly. But when done right, it creates a sense of autonomy and control among team members they’d never experience if you solved every problem for them.
The Role of Strategic Leaders in Organizational Success
Possibly the best yardstick for measuring the success of a strategic leader is what happens when they’re not present. The job of a strategic leader is to get the flywheel going so it can spin independent of the leader.
Strategic leaders put the big pieces in place. They illuminate the path ahead and say: “This is where we are, this is where we’re going, and this is how we’re going to get there in the next one to three years.” They establish a baseline of expectations and then create and reinforce accountability.
The point of creating a compelling vision is to inspire collective action. To develop a view of the future that is at once ambitious and yet measurable, that will inspire others to be creative and innovate in ways that the strategic leader could not have even anticipated.
Strategies for Developing Strategic Leadership Skills
To develop strategic leadership skills, emerging leaders need to be supported in a proper rhythm of continuous learning and self-improvement. Timing is important. There’s no sense training someone on how to prepare for their first international assignment—managing cultural roadblocks, language barriers, and time zones—if the actual assignment doesn’t happen for another three years.
Learning and development is about changing patterns of behavior. But if there’s no follow-up or support, emerging leaders who are simply thrust back into the whirlwind of their daily obligations will fall back on the very behaviors they or their leaders seek to change.
Consider this example: Executives and top leaders at some organizations arrange training sessions for their entire teams on ways to improve culture and ultimately results—without participating themselves. Far more impressive is when leadership says, “We’re going first,” and partakes in as much training as they’re asking of their employees. This creates a common language and ongoing energy from what was learned in training. When executives don’t participate, the emerging strategic leaders might even get mixed signals from higher ups, if the way work happens is different than the training would have suggested.
One nearly universal training need for new leaders, one which will enable them to gain traction toward strategic objectives, is how to properly conduct 1-on-1s with their team with an end-goal in mind. Their experience with 1-on-1s might surface the anxiety some people get walking into a test. Many of these face-to-face meetings merely involve reporting results and then being asked by a leader, at the very end, if there’s anything else they can do for them. A more robust, inquisitive mindset can help surface information that can impact results in the future or identify emerging trends at the organization or potential competitors.
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Leading Change and Managing Transformation
All leaders know that results require both strategy and execution. Unfortunately, we overvalue strategy and underestimate the challenges of execution.
A compelling vision is one thing. The ability to see it through is quite another.
Strategic leaders must excel at creating a sense of urgency around strategy execution. For many employees, the default daily focus is a project list or assembly line that never stops. Defining the larger strategy is not on them; that’s the responsibility of leadership.
Strategic leaders understand that the people around them are, by default, hardwired to respond to urgency. Strategic leaders can create urgency around important objectives, so that the march towards the vision can withstand the whirlwind of everyday urgencies. This can include actions like leveraging scorekeeping and creating a regular rhythm of accountability for every team in an organization to get them focused on the goals that matter most. By making progress measurable, teams and individuals often can see not only where they stand, but where they stack up against their peers and competitors.
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The most natural application of this idea is in sales. A company’s three-year vision may involve a shifting emphasis to important growth areas. The larger strategy and its supporting goals may be to grow sales of a new product line by 20% a quarter. That becomes the measurable aim, while adding a reporting cadence will create transparency every week, month, quarter, and year. The mandate to report on this shift is what leads to a sense of urgency among team members. Otherwise, sales teams might default to prioritizing sales of older products they’ve grown used to selling. The scoreboard concept can be applied, in some fashion, to most teams at nearly every type of organization.
Too many leaders talk about strategy once a year, if at all. To lead real change, strategy has to be a part of conversations that happen every week, if not every day. The cadence must be designed to create the urgency to force the required change.
Building a High-Performance Culture
According to Harvard Business School Online, 90% of employees who work at companies that have a strong sense of purpose say they’re more motivated, loyal, and inspired.
Creating a high-performance culture isn’t just a matter of establishing a vision. It’s not merely about setting goals that have measurable outcomes. As with a flywheel, it’s about creating a culture that propels itself toward the vision with its own positive energy.
While a company’s culture has a lot of contributing factors, developing a healthy one primarily revolves around encouraging inquiry and creativity, and what should happen when those two characteristics occur simultaneously: innovation. Strategic leaders need to build cultures where good ideas surface naturally, as team members who share the vision bring their creativity to the job. Innovation becomes organic, rather than having to be presented only through formal channels.
This can only happen when strategic leaders let go of the reins a bit. As much as an organization’s success depends on a few people making big decisions, the actual execution of those decisions has to be a team effort driven by people who feel empowered to take smart risks at every level.
Many strategic plans are useless because they don’t address how big goals translate to frontline activity—the choices team members make every day about how to best use their time. That’s the ultimate strategy: To create an environment where people use their time strategically, deliberately, and purposefully to create the most value possible in support of the organization’s most important goals.
Developing Future Leaders
The ability to create a culture of innovation and high-performance is directly related to how an organization identifies and develops its future leaders. Doing so goes beyond creating formal mentoring, coaching, or leadership development programs, although all can be a critical part of the process.
Here are some steps to consider when developing your next leaders:
Allow future leaders to identify themselves. Create forums in which you actively surface new ideas. This can help refresh the business with new thinking, but it will also help you to identify those who regularly propose smart initiatives.
Create forums for collaboration across functions. Connecting teams in new ways allows them to understand the larger context of the work they do while helping you identify those team members who make the most of those collaborations.
Create formal training opportunities. FranklinCovey’s principle-backed content, expert consultants, and innovative technology will help your leaders develop their vision and strategy, communicate it in ways that breathe life into their teams, making them ready to execute the plan.
Learn more about what the FranklinCovey All Access Pass® can do for your organization’s culture, leadership, individual effectiveness, and strategy execution.
Measuring and Evaluating Strategic Leadership Effectiveness
Evaluating effectiveness begins and ends with metrics. Strategic leaders are all about winning—and you can’t win if you aren’t keeping score! Leaders cannot rely merely on words; they need to establish a winnable game for their teams. Every organization has its own ways of measuring success, and these need to be calibrated to specifically and continually measure the progress of the precise goals set by strategic leaders.
Measuring progress will allow an early warning system when things go off track. Sometimes it’s a matter of effort, which can be fixed. Or in other cases, the plan needs to change. Humility to recognize any errors in the strategy or any changes that need to be put in place will be critical to remaining adaptable and getting back on track.
Effective Strategy Execution Requires Visionary Leadership
Strategic leadership is more than just a charismatic personality. It’s more than just a single goal.
Rather, it’s a shared and compelling vision that changes the day-to-day ambitions and behaviors of every single member of an organization. It is an agreed-upon marker of team success that engages everyone.
Organizations can survive without strategic leadership. Many do every day. But to thrive, to truly create that forward motion and market-beating energy, there must be shared vision, a viable strategy, and widespread accountability. This is where to focus if you want your team to feel like they’re playing a winnable game, to feel truly inspired and engaged.
To further enhance your leadership skills and more deeply understand mastering strategic leadership, learn more with our free guide, Execute Your Strategic Goals and Create Breakthrough Results.