Dux erat ille ducum (He was leader of leaders)
OVID (43 BC– AD 17/18), HEROIDES
A STRATEGIC LEADER is essentially the leader of an organization. An effective strategic leader is one who delivers the goods in terms of what an organization naturally expects from its leadership in times of change.
There is an underlying unity in strategic leadership, whatever field you are in and however structured or unstructured your work in it may be. Walter Bagehot, a nineteenth-century banker, economist and journalist famous for his insights into economics and political questions, understood this well:
The summits of the various kinds of business are, like the tops of mountains, much more alike than the parts below – the bare principles are much the same; it is only the rich variegated details of the lower strata that so contrast with one another.
But it needs travelling to know that the summits are the same. Those who live on one mountain believe that their mountain is wholly unlike all others.
A Chinese proverb expresses this truth more succinctly:
There are many paths to the top of the mountain
But the view is always the same.
Therefore you can draw lessons and insights from many sources in order to grow as a strategic leader. In order to do so, however, you do need a wide span of relevance. By that I mean that we naturally look for examples or case studies in our own field, such as business or education, and think that these ones alone are relevant to our situation. But you should be able to see relevance to your situation in the examples of, say, an orchestral conductor or a Greek general. It is the same principle, incidentally, that lies behind creative thinking: The sparks of meaning jump between two or more apparently unconnected things to produce new ideas. It is also fun to think like this.
Military origins of strategic leadership
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, which explains the spelling of the English word ‘hegemony’ – meaning the leadership of one nation over others – which is derived from it.
The issue emerges clearly in a conversation that Socrates – according to Xenophon – once had with a soldier called Nicomachides.
‘Why’, retorted Nicomachides, ‘merchants also are capable of making money, but that doesn’t make them fit to command an army!’
‘But’, replied Socrates, ‘Antisthenes also is eager for victory, and that is a good point in a general. Whenever he has been choir master, you know, his choir has always won.’
‘No doubt’, conceded Nicomachides, ‘but there is no analogy between the handling of a choir and of an army.’
‘But you see,’ said Socrates, ‘though Antisthenes knows nothing about music or choir training, he showed himself capable of finding the best experts in these activities. And therefore if he finds and prefers the best men in warfare as in choir training, it is likely that he will be victorious in that too; and probably he will be more ready to spend money on winning a battle with the whole state than on winning a choral competition with his tribe.’
‘Do you mean to say, Socrates, that the man who succeeds with a chorus will also succeed with an army?’
‘I mean that, whatever a man directs, if he knows what he wants and can get it he will be a good director, whether he directs a chorus, an estate, a city or an army.’
‘Really, Socrates,’ cried Nicomachides, ‘I should never have thought to hear you say that a good businessman would make a good general!’
By his familiar method of patient cross-examination, Socrates then proceeded to secure agreement from Nicomachides that successful businessmen and generals perform much the same functions. Then Socrates proceeded to identify six of these functions or skills:
• Selecting the right person for the job;
• Punishing the bad and rewarding the good;
• Winning the goodwill of those under them;
• Attracting allies and helpers;
• Keeping what they have gained;
• Being strenuous and industrious in their own work.
‘All these are common to both’, Nicomachides eventually agreed, but added, ‘but fighting is not.’
‘But surely both are bound to find enemies?’ said Socrates.
‘Oh yes, they are.’
‘Then is it not important for both to get the better of them?’
‘Undoubtedly, but you don’t say how business capacity will help when it comes to fighting.’
‘That is just where it will be most helpful,’ Socrates concluded. ‘For the good businessman, through his knowledge that nothing profits or pays like a victory in the field, and nothing is so utterly unprofitable and entails such heavy loss as a defeat, will be eager to seek and avoid what leads to defeat, will be prompt to engage the enemy if he sees he is strong enough to win, and, above all, will avoid an engagement when he is not ready.’
Levels of leadership
An army of a thousand is easy to find, but how difficult to find a general.
CHINESE PROVERB
Leadership is discernible on three broad levels: team, operational and strategic. These constitute a natural hierarchy in all working organizations, although in practice the levels tend to overlap and may be subdivided in a variety of ways.
Fortunately the same generic role of leader – the Three-Circles model and key general functions – applies at all levels. What changes with level, of course, is the complexity factor – complexity, incidentally, in all three circles, as the environment is constantly changing. Leading an organization is therefore both similar to and very different from a small work group. Thus, each level carries with it a more complex set of functional responsibilities.
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Strategic |
The leader of a whole organization, with a number of operational leaders under one’s personal direction. |
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Operational |
The leader of one of the main parts of the organization, with more than one team leader under their control. It is already a case of being a leader of leaders. |
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Team |
The leader of a team of up to twenty people with clearly specified tasks to achieve. |
A simple recipe for organizational success is to have excellent – well, at least effective – leaders occupying these roles and working together in harmony as a team. That is simple enough to say: I am not implying that it is easy either to achieve or to maintain that state of affairs under the pressures of life today. But what is your alternative?
Incidentally, you should always aspire to be a team and operational leader in spirit if not in office when you become a strategic leader. For instance, you should naturally create teamwork in the top group, which will include the senior operational leaders, so that it spreads out and infuses the whole organization.
Moreover, strategic leadership includes overall accountability for the operation of the organization – in the business context that means delivering the right goods or services, whatever they may be, at the right time and at the right price: for, as the proverb says, an acre of performance is worth a world of promise.
The functions of strategic leadership
The core role at any level refracts into broad functions derived from the Three-Circles model that we explored in Chapters 4 and 5. With the three meta-functions – Achieving the Task, Building the Team and Developing the Individual – in mind, then, there seems to me to be seven generic functions of strategic leadership. In my books Effective Strategic Leadership (2002) and Strategic Leadership (2010) I describe and illustrate these functions in full but here is a brief outline of them:
• Providing direction
Knowing where the organization needs to be going. The three signposts here are purpose, why or for what general end does the organization exist; vision, what ought it to look like in, say, three to five years’ time; and values, the moral compass. You steer by values as if they are stars, but you never reach them – they are not destinations.
• Getting strategy and policy right
Strategy is the route to the longer-term destinations; it is concerned with what is important as opposed to urgent in the context of that longer-term state towards which the organization should be aiming. Strategy here encompasses both strategic thinking and strategic planning. Policies are general decisions that help others lower down to save time in decision-making.
• Making it happen
The operational or executive function of strategic leadership, which includes getting out of the office to inspect what is happening, monitoring progress and reviewing performance against agreed targets in the strategic plan. Remember, results speak louder than words.
• Organizing and reorganizing as necessary
Ensuring that the relation of the whole to the parts of the organization is optimum for the task in hand.
• Releasing the corporate spirit
Encouraging and enthusing people at every level and, where possible, releasing the latent spiritual energy in people. The symptom of success here is high morale at every level and in every branch.
• Relating the organization to other organizations and to society as a whole
Finding allies or partners among other organizations, sometimes by mergers and takeovers, and creating a spirit of cooperative teamwork with them; promoting excellent relations between the organization and the local, regional, national and/or international communities.
• Choosing today’s and developing tomorrow’s leaders
Selecting the best operational and team leaders is a critically important function. The strategic leader should also ‘own’ a strategic plan (evolved with the head of human resources and the top leadership team) for improving leadership capability throughout the organization. Have a passion for developing leaders!
As I mentioned, the role and responsibilities are fundamentally the same at all levels of leadership and in all fields of work. What changes at the different levels is the degree of complexity that the leader faces. That complexity not only affects the nature of the task – the transition from what the military call tactics to the level of strategy. People seem more complex the older and more ‘political’ they get, and that new political dimension – both in its positive and negative senses – can probe and test any strategic leader’s powers of leadership.
There is an end-product of real leadership: the high-performance team. Whether you are leading a team at the front-line level, or a significant part of an organization, or the organization as a whole, the evidence of your effectiveness lies in the quality of the team that you build, maintain and lead by example. In that context, here are the key success criteria:
Remember that your key responsibility is to build a high-performance leadership team – strategic, operational and team leaders – in your organization.
The eight hallmarks of a high-performance team
Clear, realistic and challenging o bjectives
The team is focused on what has to be done – broken down into stretching but feasible goals, both team and individual. Everyone knows what is expected of them.
Shared sense of purpose
This doesn’t mean that the team can recite the mission statement in unison! Purpose here is energy plus direction – what engineers call a vector. It should animate and invigorate the whole team. All share a sense of ownership and responsibility for team success.
Best use of resources
A high-performance team means that resources are allocated for strategic reasons for the good of the whole. They are not seen as the private property of any part of the organization. Resources include people and their time, not just money and material.
Progress review
The willingness to monitor their own progress and to generate improvements characterizes excellent teams. These improvements encompass process – how we work together – as well as tasks – what we do together.
Building on experience
A blame culture mars any team. Errors will be made, but the greatest error of all is to do nothing so as to avoid making any! A wise team learns from failure, realizing that success teaches us nothing and continual success may breed arrogance.
Mutual trust and support
A good team trusts its members to pursue their part in the common task. Appreciation is expressed and recognition given. People play to each other’s strengths and cover each other’s weaknesses. The level of mutual support is high. The atmosphere is one of openness and trust.
Communication
People listen to one another and build on one another’s contributions. They communicate openly, freely and with skill (clear, concise, simple and tactful). Issues, problems and weaknesses are not sidestepped. Differences of opinion are respected. Team members know when to be very supportive and sensitive, and when to challenge and be intellectually tough.
Riding out the storms
In times of turbulent change it is never going to be all plain sailing. When unavoidable storms and crises arise, an excellent team rises to the challenge and demonstrates its sterling worth. It has resilience.
* * * * * * *
Heading such a high-performance team in any field feels like a privilege and it imbibes in all but the most egoistic among us a sense of humility.
Group Captain Leonard Cheshire (1917–92), for example, who was awarded the Victoria Cross – Britain’s highest award for gallantry – for his leadership of bomber squadrons in the Second World War and who then went on to found the Cheshire Foundation Homes for the severely disabled, captured this spirit in a sentence:
Leaders there have to be, and these may appear to rise above their fellow men, but in their hearts they know only too well that what has been attributed to them is in fact the achievement of the team to which they belong.
In working with such a high-performance team – however small or large it may be – the true leader sees themselves as no more than equal partners in the common enterprise, as what the ancient Romans called a primus inter pares: first among equals.
Leaders, like orchestral conductors, are there to enable all the voices or instruments to be heard to their best effect in harmony. Their role as leaders within their specific fields is to identify, develop and use all the talents of their people in a creative symphony of service to the common good.
A leader is best,
When people are hardly aware of his existence,
Not so good when people praise his government,
Less good when people stand in fear,
Worst, when people are contemptuous.
Fail to honour people, and they will fail to honour you.
But a good leader, who speaks little,
When his task is accomplished, his work done,
The people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’
LAO TZU, SEVENTH CENTURY BCE