Leadership Is an Integral Part

¶ … Leadership is an integral part of the strategic management process. The author of this article seems to have a strong grasp of this fundamental point, despite some weaknesses in the article. The author is correct in contending that no matter where the leadership comes from -- natural or expertise -- the leader must be trained. They must represent the ethics and objectives of the organization. Organizations rely on leaders to help them guide and implement strategy. The leaders, therefore, must also be led themselves. Training is fundamental to this process. Leaders must receive direction on how to lead, and where to lead.

Leadership is not merely about strength or charisma. The most important thing to remember about leadership is that direction is critical. The discussion about ethical leadership hits upon some key points, but fails to take the example to its natural conclusion. Leaders in a company do a lot, but they do not do everything. Many ethical lapses come from lower-level employees, and they make these errors specifically because of poor leadership. High profile ethical lapses at the leadership level have guided the issue away from the fundamental truth -- leaders influence the ethics of the entire organization. Not only do they adhere to strong ethical principles in their own actions, but they must also impart their ethical standards on the rest of the organization.

The article hints at the nature of leadership within the organizational structure. Leaders at all levels must be in tune with the company's missions, yes, but it is not solely their responsibility to ensure this. Leadership in effective companies is not the collective action of many leaders acting independently, it is a company-wide structure. Each level of leaders must effectively lead the lower levels. The workgroup leader must take direction from another leader, a chain that goes to the top of the organization. This requires not only training, but also communication. True leadership is not only about making sound decisions, it is also about communicating goals, ethics, values and plans. The more effective and the more consistent the communication, the stronger the leadership will be at all levels of the organization.

2) Followership. Heather Smith's article on followership brings an interesting perspective to the issue of leadership. When the structure of a typical organization is considered, we can see that leaders must inherently be followers. The role of a leader is to communicate the strategies and objectives of the organization to those expected to execute those strategies and reach those objectives. However, in doing this, the leader is taking direction from above.

Thus, it is a fallacy that the roles of leader and follower are considered mutually exclusive. They are not. Indeed, one must do both in order to help the organization attain its goals. It is imperative that prospective leaders understand what their role within the organization is. The role of any manager is to help the company achieve its objectives. A firm with dozens of "leaders" doing their own thing will no achieve its objectives. Rather, firms need their leaders to work together, in traditional leader-follower relationships, in order to achieve their objectives.

The author, however, places too much emphasis on following. One of the key tenets of leadership is to be creative, to add value to the organization. A manager cannot add value if they are merely acting as a robot, dutifully executing orders from above. Indeed, this is not true leadership at all. At each level, the manager must carefully balance the degree to which they should follow with the degree to which they should lead. The organizational structure should permit this. Autocratic firms develop poor leaders because they stifle initiative. Leaders should be free to lead, and to choose the best balance of leading and following.

3) Strategic Approach. Timothy Bullock's discussion of the Capital Care Group case outlines some of the basics of the strategic management process. However, some of the points are made without sufficiently strong understanding of the issues. The strategic management concepts presented are merely a framework -- they are a loose outline of a singular approach. Strategic management does at times flow from the company's mission statement. But it should not be guided by that statement. The mission statement is too often treated as though it is etched in stone. Yet, mission statements are never sufficiently specific to guide action. Moreover, they should be flexible. The author discusses the value of environmental analysis. Yet, mission statements should reflect the outcome of that analysis. The company's mission may have been logical and valid when it was written, but shifts in the environment could make any mission statement outmoded over time. One of the reasons why strategic is dynamic rather than static is because the company's mission and objectives are dynamic. Firms without dynamic objectives are left behind when the operating environment undergoes a shift.