Becoming a Strategic Leader Your Role in Your Organization’s Enduring Success

Abstract

We’ve worked together for eight years at the Center for Creative Leadership, and the focus of our work has been developing the strategic leadership of individual executives and their teams. Dur ing that time we have worked personally with nearly a thousand different managers and executives—sometimes with heterogeneous groups from different companies, and sometimes with groups from the same company. Most often, that work has been in the context of a program called Developing the Strategic Leader (DSL). We’ve had the op portunity to work with the DSL executives as they’ve struggled to become better strategic leaders. Weathering this challenge alongside them has deepened our own understanding about how to become more strategic. In a general sense, this book reflects our attempt to put some of the lessons of that program and what we have learned through our work in it into a more explicit and accessible format. One thing we have gained from this work is greater clarity about the challenges managers and executives face in becoming more effective strategic leaders. Our understanding has come in part from what executives themselves tell us about their challenges, which typically fall into the following broad categories: influencing others more effectively, particularly upwardly and outwardly; think ing strategically; achieving a better balance in handling short-term and long-term pressures; moving from a functional or departmen tal perspective to a broader organizational perspective; and actually creating or influencing organizational strategy.