Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Three Tips for More Strategic Leadership

By Virgil R. Carter
Surprise—you don’t need a formal strategy role to help shape your organization’s strategic direction.  You can start by moving beyond frameworks and communicating in more engaging way.  “Becoming More Strategic:  Three Tips for Any Executive”, authored by Michael Birshan and Jayanti Kar and published in Strategy + Business, suggests any executive “can act to become more strategic” by following three deceptively simple tips.  “in our interviews and experience (these tips) represent foundational skills for any strategist and putting them into practice requires real work”.

Here’s the three tips:
·        Understand what strategy really means in your industry:  Because strategy is an on-going journey, leaders will need to focus on and think strategically in their particular industry context.

·        Become an expert at identifying potential disrupters:  Expanding the group of leaders engaged in strategic dialog helps boost the odds of identifying company or industry-disrupting changes that are just over the horizon.

·        Develop communications that can break through:  an adaptive strategy-development process places a premium on effective communications with all executives participating, supported by data that’s engaging and easy to manipulate.

The authors conclude by cautioning, “It’s not enough to increase the number and diversity of leaders engage in strategy.  Many of those leaders also must enhance their own strategic capabilities.  We hope these three tips help them get started.”

1 comment:

GordonG said...

Just a note to point out that the article referred to article was published in McKinsey Quarterly (as indicated in the link at the end of the post) rather than Strategy+Business as quoted in the first para.

Gordon