Nine Greatest Ideas for Strategic Leadership Skills

Idea 53: The art of being manager-in-chief

Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Originally strategy (strategia in Greek) meant strategic leadership: the art of being a commander-in-chief.

Strategy is in fact made up of two ancient Greek words. The first part comes from stratos, which means an army spread out as in camp, and thus a large body of people.

The second part, -egy, comes from the Greek verb ‘to lead’. There is a rough breathing mark in the Greek giving an h sound that explains the spelling of the English word hegemony, meaning the leadership of one nation over others, which is derived from it.

It was Athens, rivalled only by Sparta, which claimed the hegemony of the Greek city states. Around 500 BCE a senior commander in the Athenian army came to be called a strategos, leader of the army. The English word we use to translate this word is general, It literally means something (or someone) that is applicable to the whole. So a military general is the person who is accountable for the whole army as well as its parts.

Therefore the role of a strategic leader is to do for the whole what other leaders should accomplish for the parts.

The art of being a commander-in-chief includes not just formulating strategy (in our modern sense) but also good administration, good communication, the training and equipping of the soldiers under one's command. It is a leadership word. Here it entails both commandership and managership.

Most of the functions and qualities of strategic leadership are transferable from one field to another. The early Greek writer Xenophon gave us some examples: selecting people, punishing and rewarding, building alliances and being hard working.

According to Xenophon, some qualities of a strategic leader are natural and some are acquired. Chief among these qualities is the ability to win the goodwill of those under you.

Idea 54: Seven functions of strategic leadership

If you wish to know a man, give him authority.

Bulgarian proverb

Leadership can be compared to light. As Isaac Newton demonstrated, light can be refracted into three primary colours: red, green and blue. If you put these three colours into the three circles model (in place of task, team and individual), the intersection triangle in the middle is light.

Using a prism, Newton was then able to refract light into the seven conventional colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. You can think of these colours as representing the seven main functions into which the generic role of leader breaks down.

Working from some first principles of organizations, the generic role of strategic leadership refracts into the following seven colours or functions, in no particular order of importance:

• Giving direction for the organization as a whole.
• Strategic thinking and strategic planning.
• Making it happen.
• Relating the parts to the whole.
• Building key partnerships and other social relationships.
• Releasing the corporate spirit.
• Choosing and developing leaders for today and tomorrow.

Idea 55: Giving direction

Without a vision the people perish.

Book of Proverbs

The art of strategic leadership is to locate the right direction and to steer the ship that way and not another. It is simple but not easy. There should be three sources for generating a sense of direction.

Purpose

The overarching, general or integrating task of the group or organization.

Your defined purpose answers the why questions: ‘Why are we in business?’ ‘Why are we doing this?’ It can also signify the content of value or meaning in what you are doing.

Human nature craves meaning, and so if your purpose connects with personal and moral values you will not find it difficult to generate a sense of purpose in your team – and here purpose means energy. Your team organization will be under way, like a ship at sea.

Values

‘We had our personal differences,’ said Winston Churchill, talking about French President de Gaulle, ‘but we navigated by the same stars.’

Values are the stars you navigate by in life. You will never reach a star – it is not a destination like the port of Rotterdam. But a single star or a constellation can give you direction.

In the plural, values signify the principles or moral standards of a person, group or organization, what is considered to be valuable and important. The assumption is that these are the basic beliefs and convictions that govern behaviour.

Vision

Purpose is not the same as vision. A vision is a mental picture of what you want the team or the organization to look like or be in, say, three years' time.

Where an organization or a team, a nation or a community has a common vision of its future being – the desired state or condition it holds up before itself even in the dark days – it will also have as a by-product a sense of direction. It will know the difference between moving in one direction rather than another, between progress and regress.

Where there is a vision in this sense you do not have to drive people forwards: the music of the vision draws them in a certain direction.

Idea 56: Strategic thinking and strategic planning

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

Sun Tzu, 4th century BCE

Strategic thinking is thinking about the longer term, the more important ends in any situation, and the pathways that may or may not lead to them.

Three characteristics of strategic thinking are:

• Importance – The starting point is to be able to distinguish between the important, the less important and the unimportant. If something is important it is marked by or possesses weight or consequence. The urgent is not always important; the important is not always urgent.
• Longer term – How long is long? That all depends. But strategic implies a longer-term perspective rather than a short-term view. Indeed, to think strategically may mean trading short-term gain for long-term advantage.
• Multifactor –You need to take all the factors or elements relevant to the overall end into account, not just one–however important that may be.

Strategic thinking has to result in a strategic plan that clears the desk for action, otherwise it degenerates into strategic daydreaming. The process of strategic planning is a two-way and highly interactive one between you and the operational leaders who head up the ‘strategic business units’ (as they were first called by General Electric) or their equivalents.

What is critical is the ‘one-liners’ from the top: simple directives to particular parts of the organization or, in a federal set-up, to organizations within the group that point the ‘part’ to an achievable mission that is coherent with, and contributing towards, the overall strategy.

Idea 57: Making it happen

Last night I thought over a thousand plans, but this morning I went my old way.

Chinese proverb

These days many strategic leaders, in both private and public sectors of organizational life, are called chief executive, a shortened form of the American title chief executive officer (CEO). To execute means to put into effect, to perform, to carry out what exists in plan or intent – in short, to make it happen.

A log of wood may lie in the river for years but it never becomes a crocodile, says a trenchant African proverb. Many managers are promoted to the role of strategic leader but lack leadership ability: they are logs, not crocodiles.

This particular functional area of strategic leadership – execution – is a real weakness for them. With help from others they can agree purpose, values and vision; they can even draw up impressive and detailed strategic plans; but it does not happen.

The vision remains a dream; the strategic plan stays merely a piece of paper. Eventually people come to realize that what they hear from their chief executive is the sound of a hollow log, but by then it may be too late. Like the dawn, opportunity does not wait for a sleeping organization.

No one would have doubted his ability to reign, had he never been emperor.

Roman historian Tacitus (56–117 CE),
writing about Emperor Galba

Contrast such a useless chief executive with an effective strategic leader. They know that a key part of their role is to oversee the implementation of the strategic plan. It is not their job to conduct the actual business of achieving the common task – that is the responsibility of operational and team leaders.

A wise general will visit his field commanders, overseeing the implementation of the agreed strategic plan. But you should remember to leave tactics to your operational and team leaders. Don't interfere unnecessarily, especially if things are going broadly to plan.

‘How is it that you spend so much time out of your office?’ I once asked the President of Toyota. ‘ In my home country’ I explained, ‘chief executives tend to be more or less invisible, like badgers. They inhabit the executive suite of corporate headquarters, sitting behind their desks dealing with paperwork all day or attending meetings. It is as if their business is meetings. They tell me that they haven't got time to get out of head office. Why do you do it so differently?’

‘The reason is really very simple’, the President replied with a smile. ‘We do not make Toyota cars in my office!’

Idea 58: Relating the parts to the whole

Ubi ordo deficit nulla virtus sufficit (no high quality avails where the rule of order fails).

Latin proverb

One major issue in all organizations is getting the right balance between the whole and the parts. Therefore the fourth generic function of a strategic leader is to create harmony: to bring together the ‘discordant elements’ into ‘one society’.

Alfred P Sloan who, along with Pierre Du Pont, had an immense influence on corporate organization in the United States, saw that as the key issue for working out his relations with the management team. Writing in My Years with General Motors (1964), he expressed it thus:

Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization, or ‘decentralization with coordinated control’.

For ‘centralization’ here read whole and for ‘decentralization’ read part. Sloan's solution, as he hinted in his last phrase, is both–and: decentralize as much as you can but maintain some essential control from the centre.

That sounds simple, although in practice it is not easy to achieve. No formula exists, whatever the popular pundits or gurus on organizational behaviour may say. As a strategic leader you may have to be able to think it out for yourself and make some flexible adjustments as life changes. As Sloan continued:

There is no hard and fast rule for sorting out the various responsibilities and the best way to assign them. The balance which is struck… varies according to what is being decided, the circumstances of the time, past experience, and the temperaments and skills of the executive involved.

You do not want to make changes in basic structure too often, for no organization (like the individual person) can stand too much change all at once. Remember the old adage order – counter-order – disorder.

If you make a major organizational change and get it wrong, you are stuck with the consequences for the next five years; longer, maybe, if it is a very big organization. So it is important to get it right.

Provided that you take the three circles model as your guide, you can undertake this structural survey without too much difficulty, especially if you set up a small but representative steering group to work with you. The key is to ask yourselves the right questions. Some suggestions are outlined in the diagram overleaf.

Whether you start at the top and work downwards or vice versa, it is important to be systematic about it. You are trying to see how the pieces of the jigsaw fit together in the best way possible, given the realities of the situation.

As a chief executive you need a political sense to bring about the necessary changes with the minimum disruption, but if you do not tackle the agenda you are no leader.

Idea 59: Building partnerships

Among the transferable skills of a strategic leader that Socrates identified is attracting allies and helpers. Here I shall call it building partnerships – the fifth generic function of strategic leadership.

The principal necessary condition for a successful alliance or partnership, then, is a shared common aim. Of course, the attainment of the end in view needs to be strongly in the interests of both parties, however they define their interests. If the potential contributions of the partners to the common end are complementary, like those of team members in a real team, so much the better.

Whenever you enter into partnerships or work in mixed teams of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders', use the three circles model to clarify:

• What is our common task?
• How can we best work together as a team?
• How can each individual (part or organization) give of their best?

Always take seriously the interests of your partner or ally. Make sure that they are getting their share of benefit from the mutual enterprise. Make it a win–win story.

Idea 60: Releasing the corporate spirit

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.

John Buchan (1875–1940), British novelist and politician

A critical factor about teams or organizations is what the French call their esprit de corps. The phrase means a feeling of devotion to and pride in the group one belongs to. It also suggests a group or corporate synergy that is more than the sum of its parts. If you can summon this up and channel it, you can do great things.

Your task – as John Buchan says at the head of this chapter – is not to put greatness into people, as if you were filling up a car with petrol. See it differently: the greatness is there already. You are there to elicit it, not for your own ends or interests, but in pursuit of a common purpose that has real value. That should be your vision of people; that is how you should see your organization.

Great generals of the past have shown the way for today's strategic leaders. They created a sense of partnership with their soldiers by the habit of talking to them. Apart from sharing the dangers and hardships of their soldiers, they therefore also shared with them the aim and the strategy for achieving it, thus taking the soldiers into their confidence.

‘Out of this habit’, General Eisenhower once said, ‘grows mutual confidence, a feeling of partnership that is the essence of esprit de corps.’ It always works – why not try it yourself?

I made the soldiers partners with me in the battle. I always told them what I was going to do and what I wanted them to do. I think the soldiers felt that they mattered, that they belonged.

Field Marshall Lord Montgomery

Idea 61: Developing today's and tomorrow's leaders

There is nobody who cannot improve their powers of leadership by a little thought and practice.

Field Marshal Lord Slim

The seventh function of strategic leadership is to select and train leaders at strategic, operational and team leadership levels. Again, you should take ownership of that challenge – and it will be no surprise to you that here as elsewhere you should lead from the front.

We do know how to train team leaders, based on the three circles model, though that hard-won know-how is grossly underused. That is the foundation.

Practice and reflection form the way in which those individuals with an aptitude for leadership at operational and strategic levels prepared themselves – or are prepared – for these roles.

Some chief executives make the mistake of regarding only themselves and their fellow directors as leaders and the rest as managers. With the help of this book, you won't fall into that common fallacy. Looking even beyond the all-important team leaders, it is possible to see all of your employees as leaders in their own way. That makes you into a ‘leader of leaded’.

Few organizations are really geared to developing to the full the leadership potential within them. Sometimes this may be due to the fact that they place little or no premium on it, assuming either that it is not important or that the conventional management training will provide it.

Only the best organizations show real and sustained commitment to selecting and developing their business leaders. Why? Because those organizations know from experience that effective leadership at all levels is essential for their continued success.

Seize opportunities for talking to your managers about leadership, not in an academic sense but about what it means to you personally and why you think it is important. On a one-to-one basis with your operational leaders, do not hesitate to offer them advice drawn from your own practical wisdom.