Strategic Leadership

Here’s another subject skill/ability that many executive job postings require. It sure sounds like something you’d want to be good at doing. But what is it? One way to see it is like leading your group or organization with some greater, overarching goal or goals in mind. Maybe you want to reduce or prevent this type or that type of crime in a particular area or region. Or maybe it’s something more abstract. You want to foster more diversity and inclusion or you’re trying to change a culture. These are all big tasks and don’t happen overnight.

Visualize and Plan

If you’re fortunate enough to already have a vision then you can share it with senior staff to get their buy-in and and help in rolling it out to all levels as necessary. You need people to see and know that this type of goal/objective is long-term - there may be only small changes, if any, to day to day activities for some. Individual, team and unit goals should be structured and written with these organizational goals in mind. No one should be aiming for anything without it enhancing your strategic goals. You can also look at this as the “Why we do what we do”.

Obstacles

Simple, right? What could get in the way? How about day to day operational issues that happen to every organization. They never stop. It rolls up and you’re so busy putting out fires that there’s no time for strategy. This is where your leadership, knowledge and experience come into play. If you recognize that operational items are going to keep you and your staff from coming up with strategic goals then you have a couple of options. Dedicate resources to it or farm it out to contractors. It’s almost preferable this way because it allows you to manage your operations while you direct a small team to focus solely on strategizing. You and senior staff should touch base regularly to keep things on track and to show the top level support that is critical for this to work. If you’re not interested and driving it, it’s just another flavor of the week that we’ve all seen before. Good luck, and more on this to come later.