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Strategic leadership is a practice in which executives, using different styles of management, develop a vision for their organization that enables it to adapt to or remain competitive in a changing economic and technological climate.

Strategic leaders are able to use this vision to motivate employees and departments, fostering among them a sense of unity and direction in order to implement change within their organization.

Most large-scale organizations have three defined leadership classifications: strategic, organizational and production/action-orientated. Strategic leadership consists of the top-level executives responsible for the broad, long-term strategic direction of an organization.

According to Harvard Business Review, strategic leadership competencies include these  essential skills:

  • Anticipate: Collect information from a wide range of sources both inside and outside your company’s industry or function to predict competitors’ moves and reactions to new initiatives or products.
  • Challenge: View and reframe a problem from multiple angles to understand its underlying causes.
  • Interpret: Exhibit curiosity and openness when testing several working hypotheses and involve others before coming to any conclusions.
  • Decide: Weigh long-term investments for growth with short-term pressure for results, as well as the risks and trade-offs for customers and other stakeholders, when making decisions.
  • Align: Examine stakeholders’ incentives and tolerance for change and identify conflicting interests.
  • Learn: Convey stories of success and failure to advocate learning. Course-correct decisions after they have been made if there is refuting evidence.

Strategic leaders often have personality traits in common such as they can challenge the prevailing view without provoking outrage or cynicism. They can also act on the big and small pictures at the same time, and change course if their chosen path turns out to be incorrect.

Strategic leaders also tend to 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.

Want to learn more? Tonex offers Strategic Leadership Training, a 2-day course that covers the fundamentals, principals, and skills necessary for principal and senior management roles. Through the Strategic Leadership Training course, participants learn to drive through the implementation of strategies instead of letting others take control of their decisions.

Additionally, Tonex offers dozens of different courses in a dozen categories in Leadership training. There are over 50 leadership courses in our Business Skills category alone. 

Other Training categories include:

For more information, questions, comments, contact us.

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