Three building blocks of strategic leadership

Let me introduce three leaders I’ve met recently. Kate said strategic thinking was the easy part of her job. Louise said she thought she was thinking strategically about her business but that she craved some kind of structure to give her confidence that she was ‘doing it right’. Pete was struggling to even get started on doing the thinking he needed to do. He was so stressed and stretched that he couldn’t focus, and every time he sat down to think he got interrupted with emails and SLJ's (shi**y little jobs). 

These leaders were all facing different challenges, but something they all had in common was this – top of mind was how to get their strategy through to their people. How to stop them running off down rabbit holes, getting distracted by pet projects, and putting too much effort into work that wasn’t the highest priority or value. How to get them to interact with clients and make daily decisions that move the business forward rather than create re-work and wasted effort. If leadership is about getting others to produce outputs because they want to (President Eisenhower gets credit for that idea), then strategic leadership is about making sure people know to, and want to, produce outputs that move a business towards its goals. 

The challenges faced by Kate, Louise and Pete illustrate the three building blocks of strategic leadership – capacity, clarity and alignment. They are the make-or-break skills that must be cultivated by any strategic leader to allow them to continually and simultaneously decide where the business needs to go, and make sure it goes there. They are building blocks because they are important in that order. 

The personal capacity of a leader to think and act strategically is foundational. To some extent capacity is the hand we are dealt in terms of our natural cognitive abilities, but we can scaffold that with learned skills and habits. However, our brains are simply not wired to think of long-term consequences or to do hard, complex, rational, creative thinking when we are stressed, under pressure or worrying about our ability to perform. Systemic distractions, like our friend Pete was battling, also reduce our capacity. 

A foundation of capacity gives the best chance for clarity of strategic thought to be built. Clarity comes from a conscious thought process that is designed to generate actionable, creative insights amid complexity, change and uncertainty. 

Clarity comes before alignment, and is also necessary for it. A leader cannot lead others to execute a strategy if they are not crystal clear on it themselves, including how and why they got to the answer they did. Often when people are strong strategic thinkers, they are the ones with intuitive and integrative thinking skills that allow them to scan all of the relevant information and ‘see’ the answer with little effort (like Kate). What they don’t always do is the analysis which shows how they got there. Like the kid in the math class who can call out the answer as soon as the teacher writes the question on the board – they’re also the one getting forever hounded to show their working. A strategic leader needs to be able to show enough of their working and have enough structure around their thinking process that they can explain it to others, because not everyone thinks like them. Louise wanted this structure so she could be sure of it for herself, but finding it also meant she could explain it to her staff with confidence. 

Although Kate, Louise and Pete all had slightly different challenges, to some extent for all of them it came down to capacity, clarity and alignment. Alignment is the holy grail of strategy because it is what ultimately sees it realised in terms of action, but capacity and clarity are the necessary building blocks.

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