Strategic Leadership: Vision, Theories & Implementation Analysis

This essay provides an overview of strategic leadership, emphasizing its role in shaping organizational vision, aligning employees, and fostering commitment. It delves into the importance of strategic thinking, which involves assessing the company's current situation, setting goals, and understanding core values. The essay also discusses different types of visions (Investment, Imagination, Improvement, and Incubation) and their significance in providing clarity and inspiration. Furthermore, it explores the relationship between vision and reality, highlighting how strategic innovations arise from the tension between the two. The essay also touches upon Transformational Leadership and Servant Leadership as key theories related to Strategic Leadership, suggesting that a balanced approach combining both can be beneficial for a company. Ultimately, the essay concludes that effective strategic leadership is crucial for organizational success, requiring leaders to prioritize strategic thinking, reshape organizational structures, and consider the interests of all stakeholders.

Running head: STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
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Strategic Leadership is the potential of forming a vision for a company’s long-term as
well as short-term benefits. It seeks to manage, motivate and persuade the employees to share
that common vision and work accordingly by strategically implementing necessary changes
with respect to constantly evolving market trends. It is the duty of strategic leaders to device
policies that would enhance the organizational culture, thereby improving on the productivity
and profitability of the company. Strategic leadership aims at commonality of direction,
alignment as well as commitment from all the employees (Hughes, Beatty & Dinwoodie,
2014). Incidentally, strategic leadership has a broad scope and its impacts are felt even
beyond the boundaries of its operative control. It views the entire business process as a single
interconnected unified whole and formulates relevant strategies for its growth.
Strategic Leadership encompasses nuanced activities that are considered beneficial for
the company. A good strategy follows a logical cohesion in both thought as well as action. It
seeks to diagnose the existing shortcomings of the company and provide guidance for
betterment. The major outcomes of leadership strategies include the provision of ‘direction’,
‘alignment’ and ‘commitment’. These are integrated to the strategic skills in ‘thought’,
‘action’ and ‘influence’.
The thought or strategic thinking process involves a balanced theoretical approach
towards the existing and ensuing problems and constitutes the root of strategic leadership as it
leads to strategic decision making. It is through this thinking process that the visions
gradually evolves. However, strategic thinking cannot come without scanning across various
areas of the company’s business processes. It helps to assess the company’s current strategic
situation. Strategic thinking follows a particular pattern, whereby the goals are set that should
reach all the stakeholders. This involves the establishment of missions and visions (Goetsch,
& Davis, 2014). This is followed by the necessary steps that should be taken to achieve
success and how they should be taken. The process of strategic thinking ends with finding a

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yardstick and measuring the success of the company. The major issues that must be kept in
mind during strategic thinking are the target customers, the contribution of the company
towards the customers, and unique contrast with the market competitors.
The thinking process also involves an estimation of the core values that the company
stands for, and here lies the importance of strategic leadership. These values are capable of
generating specific idealized behaviours among the stakeholders as well as the customers.
They help to enhance communication within the organization, thereby improving the
organizational culture. These values also seek to bring forth and develop fresh and eligible
talents. They help the leader to assess individual as well as organizational performance. The
values help to avoid conflicts and establish good relationship with the customers.
As mentioned earlier, establishment and of a vision for the company is one of the
main features of strategic leadership. The vision represents the ultimate limit which the
company should aim to reach, whereby, all the core values are optimized (Grant, 2016). It is
the single long-term goal, which can be achieved by crossing small milestones. Converse to
the movement of action, the planning follows a reverse order, where, the planning process
finally narrows down to the initial steps that must be taken with the ultimate vision in mind.
The visions are broadly of four types which are both different as well as
interconnected at the same time – Investment, Imagination, Improvement and Incubation.
Strategists ensure that these four operates across every section of the company, both on the
personal as well as organizational levels (Pisano, 2015). The importance of vision lies in the
fact that it provides clarity and inspiration to the employees for their work.
The importance of strategic leadership also lies in the fact that it seeks to resolve the
creative tension between the vision and reality, when this reality does not follow the line of
vision (Senge, Hamilton & Kania, 2015). It is from this tension that strategic innovations
arise, which tries to strike a balance between truth and aspiration. These innovations lead to a

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reframing of the existing company policies such that they make sense in terms of their
application (Bolman & Deal, 2017).
Given the complexity of the entire system of work, decision makers often fail to see
certain key areas. There is a risk of viewing problems with respect to their past influences and
future impact on the entire organization. Hence strategic leadership is important as it looks to
improve the behavioural patterns of different areas of operation within the system, and in this
process, takes into account the complex interactions that exist between these areas. In context
of the working systems, strategic leaders look to hypothesize the major causal relationships
between the various levels of the organization, and validate the understanding of the
employees regarding those causal relationships (Bergh et al., 2016). The causal relationships
mainly include additive and subtractive relationship, for example, between product sales and
revenue earned. Strategic leaders tries to solve the existing discrepancies by reinforcing and
balancing the causal loops. Thus, they aim to implement a set of innovative techniques as
problem-solving tools within the system.
As a dynamic social system, strategic leadership predicts probable patterns of
improvement by viewing everyone as potential customers within the model of ‘Top’,
‘Middle’ and ‘Bottom’ (Kim, Sting & Loch, 2014). Leaders constantly seek to implement
strategies for the maintenance of health and well-being of the organization. This encompasses
various tactical and strategic questions which leaders should consider at every point of the
policy-making process. Many such questions should also be aligned to the description of a
problem, discussions with a remedial purpose, and the formulation of a design of relevant
action.
A good strategic leadership also takes into consideration external and internal
frameworks of analysis like PESTEL, SWOT and SOAR.

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Transformational Leadership and Servant Leadership are two of the key theories
which follow the propositions of Strategic Leadership. While the former focuses more on the
collective goals and the transformations required for the development of the organization as a
whole, the latter gives more priority to the team members and enhancement of individual
performance as a means of improving organizational performance. There are several points of
similarity and difference between the two. A well-judged amalgamation of the two in the
form of Transformational Servant Leadership (TSL) can be beneficial for a company (Van
Dierendonck et al., 2014). For that, a balance has to be established at the very beginning
regarding the establishment of priority. TSL leaders must strike a middle chord which gives
equal importance to both organizational and individual performance aimed at both short-term
as well as long-term goals. Individual employees should be treated as the asset for the
company and the core values should be inculcated in such a way that their autonomy does not
collide with the motivation to upheld the charisma of a commonly shared vision (Chen, Zhu
& Zhou, 2015). In case of a conflict, the TSL leaders should attempts a situational analysis to
find out its cause, and then implement remedial measures accordingly.
Therefore, it may be concluded by saying that effective use of strategic leadership can
be extremely beneficial for any company. The leaders should implement strategies
categorically towards the shaping and following of a common organizational vision. Thinking
or planning is the most crucial part of strategy formation, and leaders must deliver the
necessary time and energy to this process. This process involves a reshaping of the
organizational structure. Besides the optimization of the business and the significant
improvement in the company’s brand equity, interests of all the stakeholders assume
considerable importance in this respect. Integration of theories, moulded according to the
needs and type of the company, like the amalgamated use of Transformational Servant

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Leadership, in the formulation of strategies can help company leaders in building a better
prospect for the company.

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