Leadership Styles: Strategic Leadership

By Alexander Maasik, Writer and Communication Expert.

Strategic leadership style is one of many different approaches to leadership. It’s one of the best known and popular approaches that CEOs and visionaries use to get long-term results in companies and start-ups.

But it’s important to remember that while suitable in many situations, there are also others. Weekdone’s recent infographic on leadership styles shows that different people get good results with different styles. So, when leading, choose the one that you are most comfortable with.

Basics of strategic leadership.

According to Wikipedia, “Strategic Leadership is the ability of influencing others to voluntarily make decisions that enhance the prospects for the organization’s long-term success while maintaining long-term financial stability, “and “Strategic leadership balances a focused analytical perspective with the human dimension of strategy making.”

In simple terms, that means that stragtegic leaders are always thinking ahead. They are flexible and willing to change their plans if the situation or economic forecast chance. They also are more like guides than managers, empowering employees to make their decision themselves.

The statistics.

Unfortunately, most people are not that kind of leaders. Research among leaders shows that only about 10% of women and 7% of senior leaders have strategic leadership skills. The number goes up with age, show one can say, it’s something that comes with experience and maturity.

Strategy + Business writes that:

“These leaders tend to have several common personality traits: They can challenge the prevailing view without provoking outrage or cynicism; they can act on the big and small pictures at the same time, and change course if their chosen path turns out to be incorrect; and they lead with inquiry as well as advocacy, and with engagement as well as command, operating all the while from a deeply held humility and respect for others.”

Common traits.

HBR lists the 6 essential skills you’ll need to master to become a good strategic leader. These skills are:

• Ability to anticipate — a way to foresee changes, react to all every kind of business situations.
• Ability to challenge — good leaders know what they believe in and are willing to go against the status que and question everything.
• Ability to interpret — instead of reflexively seeing or hearing what you expect, you should synthesize all the input you have. You’ll need to recognize patterns, push through ambiguity, and seek new insights.
• Ability to decide — making decisions is often hard. As a strategic thinker, you need to take a lot of input, have multiple options and choose.
• Ability to align — you must sometimes find common ground, be a negotiator and communicate well.
• Ability to learn — learning new things and behaving accordingly is always a good mindset to have.

Some of these traits seem contradictory but that’s the thing with flexible leaders: you must know it all and use the right mindset at the right time. All these skills take a lot of work to develop but they are well worth it.

Strategic leadership is about doing the right thing and forcing other into doing the right thing at a situation to forward your long term goals.

Alexander Maasik is a communication specialist at Weekdone weekly employee-progress reports. He has a degree in journalism and public relations and a strong passion for internal communications and online collaboration.