Strategic planning leadership

The current competitive environment is technology-driven, customer oriented, more unpredictable, unstable and more complex. The strategies of strategic leadership or transformational leadership as termed by Leithwood (1992)—involve generating trust and collective action that empower participants, and through them others, by facilitating their mission and vision, renewing their commitment, and restructuring systems for goal accomplishment. Strategic planning leader can be well versed with the strategic planning tools,techniques,comonents ,and methodology, SWOT analysis, formulating and implementing business-level strategies, Porter's generic strategies, and the miles and snow typology, corporate-level strategies, diversification managing diversification, and BCG Matrix. A leader should respond spontaneously to the business opportunities and challenges.

Strategic Planning Leadership can be differentiated from leadership on two basic aspects. They are:

Strategic leadership theory relates to the study of people at the top of the organization while leadership theory relates to the study of people at any level of the organization.

Leadership theory focuses on the behavior and relationship between leaders and followers.

Strategic planning Leadership theory covers huge scope as it examines from the context of interactions in terms of strategic and symbolic activities. Strategic leadership can be defined as the leader's ability to anticipate vision, maintain flexibility, and think strategically and to work with the members of the team to initiate changes, which will create an optimistic future for the organization. It is the ability of the leader to influence others to voluntarily make day-to-day decisions, which enhance the long-term feasibility of the organization simultaneously maintaining the short-term financial stability.

A strategic leader would lead the organization into the future as per the changes simultaneously. Some leaders reach this target through the separate groups of people with responsibilities to manage long-term perspectives of the firm and to manage the day-to-day aspects of the company. The attitude and skills required for the above two tasks are different and hence it would be easy process to identify the different kind of for the two tasks. In the above backdrop, startegic leader plays a vital role on investing people and enhancement of their knowledge and skills.

Strategic leadership assumes that the leader understands the emergent competitive environment and is able to create strategic directions for the organizational excellence. And also have the ability to create, nurture and sustain organizational competencies to translate and implement the strategic directions into substantial organizational outcomes. The strategic leader needs to be as the imaginative leader as per the changing trends. Visionary leadership focuses on the long-term strategies and long-term viability of the organization. A strategic planning leader needs to balance between the future and the present.

Key practices of Strategic Leadership are:

Determining the Firm's Purpose or Vision

Exploiting and Maintaining Core Competencies

Developing Human Capital

Sustaining an Effective Organizational Culture

Emphasizing Ethical Practices

Establishing Balanced Organizational Controls

Strategic Intelligence

Finally, leaders should always generate their own personal strategic plan before creating for an organization. A leader should feel comfortable with designed plan and process. He should be flexible as per the changing trends and need have clear destination of the strategic plan.

Next Article

Banner Ads