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Strategy and Leadership

What is strategy?
Strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a major or overall aim. Aims and objectives are one thing that perpetually engages the minds of leaders. In order to achieve those aims and objectives strategy is the tool conceived, planned, implemented and managed by leaders. Any various actions of leadership would be part of such leadership strategy. Aims and objectives are the derivatives of vision. Objectives differ from project to project and though there could be several projects being handled by an organization all will have to be generally inline with the vision. Thus a leader who is in command of several projects should be able to device one or several strategies to successfully align the project results with the whole vision of an organization. One of the core competencies of a leadership should be the ability to design, direct, review, correct and refine the strategy to achieve leadership mission.

How to design a leadership strategy?


Strategy pivots on analysis. Analysis is applied on the pieces of knowledge pertaining to a situation. The aim of analysis is to arrange disparate knowledge pieces into a constructive, relative, logical and pragmatic flow. The resultant data would form the basis of a plan. The plan is aligned to the vision and aimed at deriving strategic results.

Strategy design takes into consideration the various resources on hand in a way to strategically apply those resources for optimal outcome. There are numerous and numerous business incidents where companies went into losses owing to wronged marketing strategy, wronged corporate strategy or wronged project management. The reason for wronged strategy could have been owing to inadequacy in strategy design, or gaps of knowledge in the strategy design or absence of logical and pragmatic analysis of various contexts of strategy. A right strategy will see the vision the way we see the unhindered view of a highway. At the same time we need to think about the risks on highway that might interrupt our journey and the alternative recourse to reach our path. Thus strategy should inherently contain the risk management plan so that leadership strategy achieves the envisioned objectives of a project.

Strategy and Leadership Challenges: (i) Actors and Mindset:


While a leader plays a significant and pivotal role in designing strategy the team and followers who are the actors and performers of elements of strategy should have full faith in the leader and carry upon with their respective roles. Certain inimical mindset of one or more actors in the strategy might come as a surprising stumbling block in achieving the strategic goal. Here comes the role of leadership to apply its intuitive and proactive actions to obviate the repercussions out of such mindset reactions of the team.

(ii) Resources
Very obviously strategy is as good as a piece of paper unless it is supported by resources and required actions. Resource management itself is a strategy again as mostly projects encounter resource crunch at one or other point of project stage. It could be human resources, or material resources or time constraints. Dynamic, decisive and optimal mobilization of resources and application of the same would help in smooth implementation of strategy. We know how military missions handle abrupt resource crunch when the lives of core team members are lost. The leader emerges here as a multi-role player, stakes himself against every want, improvises dynamite out of nothing and confidently overcomes the gaps out of resource crunch. Though every time we may not face a war situation it is the dynamism of the leader that makes all the positive difference to strategy.

(iii) Review and correction


An evolved strategy is the right strategy in case of long term projects where certain, political, economic, socio cultural and technological influences may call for strategy review and execution and delivery of the project accordingly. Thus it becomes necessary for the leadership to keep track on the trends, possible influences and keep the strategy relevant from time to time without losing the focus on the vision.

Think strategic and act strategic:


Strategy is equally important for every type of leadership be it political, business, social or even individual. Strategy to lead self in the right direction is the first strategy that everyone would need. It is important that the youth and the students should inculcate and exhibit their strategic leadership qualities through excellence in academics, through acquisition of professional skills, participation in sports, cultural, social and futuristic activities. It always pays to think and act strategically to achieve our life goals.

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