Strategic Leadership Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Strategic Leadership - Essay Example This is the element of strategic leadership: a forward-thinking planning unit that accommodates current flexibility in design and operations to fulfill a future goal as it pertains to organizational success. This paper will highlight what strategic leadership means in today’s organizations as well as a discussion on the day-to-day relevance of strategic management as compared to organizational realities. The nature of strategic leadership Organisational leaders in a management role must consider systems integrity, maintain control over current operational function, and improve cultural and executive-level confidence in financial data when making decisions (Kittredge, 2009). Understanding how to move the organization forward means understanding what currently drives issues of production, staffing, human resources, marketing, and competitive position among competitors with similar product and service offerings in the external marketplace. Generally, this function is accomplished by performing external audits, such as Porter’s Five Forces Analysis or SWOT Analysis, to gain the understanding of consumer preferences as well as competitive activities designed to remove market share from the organization. In order to develop an effective future-based strategy, the current market position of the business and its internal operations and structure must be understood. Strategic leadership is then defined as first understanding product and customer profitability opportunities, how to develop effective marketing strategies, establish effective and compliance-based accounting strategies and also develop a total quality management system to guide current production or technologies designed to support the business. It is a form of management accounting that designs and evaluates performance against strategic analysis tools (Fung, 2006). Once these fundamentals of current business strategy are understood, a strategic leader then develops an appropriate mission or vision about how to achieve organizational goals over the long-term. Human capital is one of the most important elements of organizational success, thus a strategic leader understands the dynamics employee psychology and sociology in order to establish a culture of human loyalty toward achieving what has been spelled out in the mission or vision statement. A strategic leader, in order to achieve long-term goals, must understand what drives motivation in employee and management groups and then appeal to these needs in a variety of ways. Peacock (2008, p.44) identifies â€Å"just relying on yearly appraisals forces them to work in a pre-defined set of tasks without taking into account what they are capable of†. A strategic leader goes beyond simple performance analyses and works consistently to develop employees to be active contributors to meeting long-term goals as identified through new mission values and practices. Therefore, strategic leadership should be defined as not on ly achievement of future objectives toward organizational profitability, it should be seen as a transformational management style.