Business-Specific Individual Development

Understanding the business better Financial acumen.

Capital, cash flow, and EBIT [earnings before interest and taxes] constraints.

What do these participants' comments say about strategic leadership? In the first place, remember that we did not actually ask them to define or describe strategic leadership; rather we asked them to identify where there were organizational or individual shortfalls in it. They were describing the piece that was missing, not the full pie.

Nonetheless, some patterns in the responses stand out and are worth mentioning here. For one thing, there was a degree of parallelism between challenges to strategic leadership at the organizational and individual levels. For example, deficits in strategic thinking were often noted as a challenge for the entire organization in situations concerning lack of focus or alignment around a common vision. At the same time, deficits in the individual participant's strategic thinking were often noted as well, such as the need to think outside the box more. To most managers, strategic thinking usually connotes planning with longer rather than shorter time horizons and also orchestrating how different functions in an organization will interact coherently together (getting out of their silos). Some organizations do this better than others, and some individuals do this better than others.