Leadership: What exactly is strategic leadership?

It’s fair to say that, for some, the topic of leadership has become cliché and jargon. Alicia McKay seeks to cut through the gibberish and focus our attention on what really matters when it comes to leading our people.

Leadership is a lot more than managing people or saying the right things. A favourite recent definition (amongst the smorgasbord of definitions out there) comes from Dr Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s Director-General of Health.

“Leadership is an invitation to collective action.” – Dr Ashley Bloomfield

In just seven words, Bloomfield sums up the essence of leadership: that it’s about more than you; that it’s about action; that it’s an invitation – because people have a choice.

When I work with people, we define it like this:

A leader is someone who makes good sh*t happen.

This definition strips leadership of title, status and platitude. You don’t need to be a chief executive, run a large team, or head up a country

to be a leader. You don’t need to have a large following or a senior position either. You don’t need to know everything. In fact, you’ll find it easier to learn if you’re aware that you don’t.

What you need is to care about doing worthwhile things – and do them.

Strategic leadership: step into the arena

In fiction, writers often talk about the difference between character-driven and plot-driven stories. In characterdriven writing, the focus is on the inner conflict of the people in the story – who they are, what they think, what decisions they make and how they evolve.

In plot-driven stories, the emphasis is on action and external conflict, where we follow the twists and turns of an outcome.

Much of today’s leadership theory is character-driven. They describe the kind of traits you need – assertive, confident, empathetic, and so on. Leaders undergo extensive profiling and testing so they can sum up their personality and style as a snappy acronym.

Less popular now are transactional approaches to leadership. Popular in the 80s and 90s, these leaned more toward the operational and management end of the spectrum, and were more ‘plot’ driven. They tended to be short-term, and focus on incentives, performance, projects and delivery.

A third and lesser-known fiction format is the ‘arena-driven story’. Here, the emphasis is more on context. In arena-driven stories, the environment is a critical antagonist for the main character. In stories like Castaway, Gilligan’s Island and Lost, the main character has to survive a challenging environment, which drives individual choices and overall results.

It is in the arena that we find strategic leadership.

In a changing environment, our challenges are less about personality or projects, and more about context.

What is an arena?

The Oxford Dictionary defines an arena as “a place or scene of activity, debate or conflict”.

Arenas represent places where decisions are made, where something is at stake, and where there are both constraints and aids. The arena is about more than a physical location or an institutional construct. It’s about the spaces – ideological, relational and tangible – where important ideas are up for debate. In today’s shifting environment, assume those spaces are everywhere, and that everything is up for debate.

In the arena, there is no right answer – just the best response at the time. When we’re making big decisions that really matter, we always face multiple objectives and competing values. This means we need to be making trade-offs constantly because pursuing one thing can make achieving another more difficult. Strategic leaders don’t resist trade-offs, they seek satisfying and intentional choices between the short and long term, internal and external progress, performance, people and politics.

This isn’t a sign of things being wrong or harder – it’s a leadership reality.

Strategic leaders enter the arena. They understand that they exist within context, culture, time and audience. They focus their energy on adapting to change, competition, debate and conflict. They focus on grappling with paradox, challenge and uncertainty and on responding to their shifting environment, mobilising their supporters and stepping towards a bigger vision.

The case for change

The world is messy and changing.

Leading through change hinges on our capacity to change the way we think, adapt and lead through the mess. The future of our organisations, economies and societies hangs in the balance.

We exist in and rise to our context. Like the nature versus nurture debate, while we have a natural inclination toward a certain behaviour, our leadership ability is not predetermined.

Our leadership has everything to do with the opportunities we’ve had to develop it and the experiences that preceded it. Let’s be clear: action is important. Decisive, determined action is an essential part of any hero’s journey. But it isn’t enough. Without purpose, our action is nothing but a busy distraction from our own feelings of being overwhelmed. With purpose, we get focused action that creates real, meaningful impact.

The classic leadership arc goes like this:

• we teach people to be technically proficient

• we train them to manage people

• we profile their personalities and hope this leads to self-awareness.

What we don’t teach are the skills we assume to be intuitive or

hardwired. Things like managing change, making good decisions, exercising judgement and being creative are left to chance, despite our acknowledgement that those skills are the most in-demand for our future leaders.

The 2015 New Zealand LDC report recognises that:

“While our leaders have the cognitive grunt required to think through the complex issues and determine the most viable path for them and their organisation, they aren’t quite as skilled in the capabilities that are needed to persuade or inspire others to follow.”

This is a global issue. According to Forbes, “statistics show that fewer than 10 per cent of leaders exhibit strategic skills” (2017).

Our leaders are not equipped with what they need to set direction, solve problems and drive performance. Because of this, our teams and organisations are left floundering, but overwhelmed, lacking confidence and wasting time and effort. Wellintentioned leaders operate well below their paygrade, spinning their wheels and eroding the confidence and autonomy of their teams, customers and communities.

Unless we change how we think about leadership and equip our leaders for reality, our results are unlikely to improve. Strategy implementation will continue to fail, performance and results will continue to drop off, and the leaders we invest in today will lose currency and relevance.

Beyond crisis

Strategic leadership is about your capacity to handle the unpredictable and thrive anyway. Whether you’re responding in a crisis or adapting to emerging shifts, the skills are the same just in different helpings. The key is in recognising the need for change – in our environment and in ourselves.

The COVID-19 response has been interesting. When I talk about leading through change, I’m not talking about crisis. Overall, we’re pretty good in a crisis. Hero mode kicks in, and we step up with adrenaline, decisiveness and focus. The challenge is about bringing those skills into the everyday.

Responding to shifts in technology, society, teams and the economy ask's that we make change leadership an everyday event, rather than an emergency tactic. In a crisis, we have a clear mandate. A burning platform for change makes it easier to mobilise people and resources and provides permission to experiment and make system changes.

In emerging change environments, though, things tend to move more slowly, which can make it harder to get people on board.

Unlocking strategic leadership

There is no magic bullet but there are key areas you can strengthen to unlock your strategic leadership. The trick is knowing what skills to build on and when to use them.

Who you are is about so much more than what you do it’s about how you think, what you see and how you act. Unlocking your potential for strategic leadership is about using the master key – flexibility – to deploy the right combination at the right time.

Tomorrow’s leaders:

• know how to make good decisions about now and the future

• manage their teams and organisations from a systems perspective

• drive meaningful strategic performance

• are intentional about their influence of themselves and their ideas.

Flexibility

The adaptive arena: responding to change

At its core, good leadership is about more than getting good sh*t done in spite of your environment – it’s about getting good shit done because of your environment. And the more senior you are, the more complex and challenging that environment is likely to be.

Flexibility is the ability to bend without breaking. It requires awareness, agency and resilience. You can build your flexibility, by focusing on:

• context (what you see) – becoming attuned to shifts in your environment and maintaining a clear sense of perspective

• character (who you are) – developing strong self-awareness and understanding of your purpose, values and defaults

• choice (what you do) – being intentional about the way you show up, developing good habits and responding appropriately in any situation

• capacity (what you know)– actively seeking opportunities for learning, growth and failure.

Decisions

The strategic arena: setting future direction

Tomorrow’s leaders think critically, make sense of context and know how to make choices to align and inspire their teams. Strategic leadership is

not about what we think but how. We can’t outsource our thinking if we want to understand the past, guide the present and plan for the future.

When we make good decisions, we do the right thing, for the right reason, at the right time, with the right people, with the right attitude. You can make better decisions, by:

• framing: setting a clear frame to best understand the problem you are solving and the information you need

• collaborating: creating a safe and productive space for decision making that captures ideas, generates and ideas and options and reaches conclusions

• acting: taking deliberate action that turns your ideas into reality.

Systems

The organisational arena: creating powerful environments

When we neglect our environment, relationships and dependencies, we build siloed teams and organisations that are less than the sum of their parts. Successful leaders see the big picture and focus on how things fit together. They think in systems and create an environment to support their most important goals. You need to:

• diagnose your environment, by uncovering defaults, asking better questions, understanding impacts and challenging assumptions

• design powerful systems using precision, alignment, collaboration and visualisation

• delegate to your systems, to reduce risk and build sustainability into your life and team by leading, resourcing and implementing systems change.

Performance

The operational arena: delivering results

When you master the ability to convert your thinking to reality and manage performance well, you unleash the ability to make a real difference.

Performance is all about results, the product of clarity, coherence and commitment. You should understand the four driving forces of genuine performance:

• planning – being clear on what 'the right thing' is and using that to define short- and medium-term indicators of success

• priorities – eliminating distraction and wasted energy in order to focus on the most important work

• quality – developing nonnegotiable 'bottom lines' that set the standard for delivery based on key risks, values and customer needs

• accountability – establishing the mechanisms to manage and track results and acting quickly to remedy errors.

Influence

The engagement arena: leveraging your impact

Good ideas don’t stand on their own. Political savvy isn’t slimy, it’s

a non-negotiable skill for strategic leaders who want to have impact at scale. When we equate influence with charm and charisma, we prevent people from genuinely connecting with our ideas. Strategic leaders know how to:

• anticipate – show respect by understanding what you need from others and what they need from you.

• mitigate – show empathy by identifying the needs, fears and desires of your disengaged stakeholders

• communicate – show authenticity by communicating in ways that truly reach people.

• engage – show passion by making your ideas meaningful and interesting.

• activate – show trust to build ownership and drive change

• substantiate – show integrity to build sustainable momentum.

As we move out of the emergency phase and into the real work, what are you doing to build adaptive strategic leadership in your teams and organisations?

Alicia McKay is a strategy, change and leadership expert, specialising in the public sector. She is co-host of What’s on Your Mind podcast and author of the acclaimed Guide to Getting Shit Done In The Public Sector and the forthcoming From Action to Impact: Tomorrow’s Leader’s Guide to Doing Good Shit. With an incredible track record leading critical conversations and building leadership capability, Alicia is at the forefront of challenges facing today’s teams and leaders. Running programmes in strategic leadership and business change, Alicia cuts through the complexity to focus on what really matters.