Comprehensive Approach to Strategic Management

¶ … strategic management: Leading across the Strategic Domain (Richardson, 1994) the author provides a comprehensive analysis of the progression of leadership theories over the last century, categorizing them into nine dominant leader types. These leader types span classical Taylorism to the more recent concepts of transformational leadership with strategic frameworks from Dr. Michael Porter's competitive strategy insights and research (Richardson, 1994). These nine leadership roles include the Classical Administrator, Design School Planner, Role Playing Manager, Political Contingency Responder, Competitive Positioner, Visionary Transformer, Self-Organizing Facilitator, Turnaround Strategist and Crisis-Avoider Strategist

(Richardson, 1994). Taken together these roles serve as the framework for what the author argues is the need for greater situational awareness and insight on the part of leaders as they navigate complex, challenging situations in guiding their organizations to its goals.

Analysis of the Strengths and Weaknesses of this Research

The author has done an exceptionally thorough amount of research to support the nine dominant leadership roles, and also has created a highly effective series of frameworks for showing the chronological and strategic configuration aspects of how these leadership concepts can be integrated with one another. These series of concepts fit well into the strategic continuum of leadership styles the author creates based on the insights gained from the research as well. All of these elements are well-integrated from a logical flow standpoint throughout the article. There is also the insight shown on the part of the author to include the caveat that all of these factors and leadership roles cannot be taken in isolation from each other; they need to be situationally driven from a leadership perspective. This is one of the strongest themes that recur through the analysis along with the need for tailoring leadership roles not only to the teams or departments managed but the situations as well.

Despite these favorable strengths of the published research, there are several shortcomings as well. Most noticeable is the complete lack of focus on Emotional Intelligence (EI) as a construct for unifying these leadership strategies and providing intuitive guidance as to when each one is best used. There is no EI-based integration framework to actually show how the agility of leadership needs to be actually achieved. Second, the Strategic Configuration as a Strategy Cylinder assumes a level of overall integration that is seamless. If there is one key take-away from the progression of research on leadership, it is that there are many disjointed and even conflicting factors in these theories. As a result, the cylinder concept appears idealistic at best; it doesn't reflect the chaotic and often situational nature of leadership in uncertain times.