Leadership and Strategic Management

Leadership is both research area and practical skills of an individual to guide a team, group of people or an organisation as a whole to fulfil organizational goal or objectives. Strategic leadership means the ability to anticipate future, maintain flexibility, plan strategically and initiate others to work in that direction to achieve a change which lead to competitive advantages for an organizations. A strategy is general plan of action which includes the allocation of resources and other activities within the environment to achieve vision of organization. Vision is anticipation of future goals and sets the standards and framework for employees to motivate them and energies to achieve it.

Strategic Management of leaders includes ascertaining and formulation of plan of action on the basis of organizational goal and vision. A leader should understand the relationship between planning strategy, vision, mission and overall goal of organization. For a proper plan of action it should recognize the cultural and organizational values within the environment. It has been given a power to formulate the required strategies and implement it through his team and motivate the individual to complete their tasks and contribute to accomplish the mission of the organization. The responsibility of leader increases with the increase of power. The leadership provides individual authority and responsibility with immense power. To achieve competitive advantages for an organization the leaders need to identify the culture values and environmental conditions which is associated with the adaptability of strategies and to implement it through the individuals.

Leadership Power and Politics

The leadership gives a power to take proper decision and apply principals of management on every single individual which has been part of his team but just to have a power doesn’t mean the goal of organization achieved, only power to give orders and take decision nowadays is not enough as each individual has different mind-set and different cultural values. Although leadership is commonly a form of power but it’s not democracy of power over people rather it is power with people, it should be give and take relationships between the leaders and his team member. Leadership doesn’t require manipulation and domination to influence individual. A good leader is always an individual who seeks the consent of its team and to act in best interest of the organization to achieve its objective effectively.

It is generally assumed that the group leaders cope up with all the differences when it comes to influence its group member and to motivate to achieve the result in any way. Although, this view of leadership ignores the existence of many other factors which may influence group dynamic such as communication patterns or hierarchy of power and authority among  team members as well as group norms and behaviour of the individuals within the group functionality in different situations. It is not guaranteed from this that all leaders are in complete cooperation and individuals are in total control of their group achievements.

Organizational culture plays important role in leadership as both internal and external culture affects it, internal integration includes it culture that guides the individual about day to day working environment and relationship between employees should be maintained and how the distribution of authority and power is allocated. External culture relates to the values on the basis of which the individual responds to customer and how rapidly the work and problem are effectively solved against the competitor. The leader gains immense power in the process of strategic management from planning to implement and until the desired goal achieved. But organizations also are political structures which gives opportunities platform for people to develop careers therefore each individual have their own motives and interests. The development of careers, particularly at top managerial level and leaders of team, depends on accumulation of power as the driving force for transforming the individual interest in to activities and motivate them to achieve it through our leadership objectives. The leadership has immense power but it should be apply in a political manner to motivate the individual to achieve its personal interest through accomplishment of organizational objectives.

Ethical values are also important part in leadership. Ethical values in organization are developed and basically strengthened through the implication of value based leadership and the relationship between the group leaders and its member should be interrelated and should share relationship based on certain ethical values and interpersonal bond of one team. The leader should not always use its power to just achieve its leadership objective but it should always consider the individual interest and their motives should be fulfilled. At the end of the whole process of the strategic management end result of achievement of organizational objective and accomplishment of goals are generally taken into consideration, no one is interested if ethical values is considered or not.