Critical Examination of Strategic Leadership Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction

Leadership has been used to refer to a pattern of influence that an individual possesses. On the other hand, leadership refers to a group’s innovative ideas and creative achievements that are actually outside the bounds of formal institutions (Glanz 2005, p.1).

Accordingly, strategic leadership has evolved to become critical component in effective development and performance of organization and other key institutions (Glanz 2005, p.1). At the same time, Glanz perceives strategic leadership in the broader perspective that also involves other models of leadership.

Within this view, it can be said that strategic skills have become useful to managers that have been utilized to improve and realize better performance where collaboration initiatives are incorporated with other broader parts and transformation of organizations become the ultimate goal of strategic leadership (Glanz 2005, p.1).

On overall, strategic leaders are usually committed to improving their organizations on many levels, and leaders who demonstrate strategic leadership believe and facilitate the following.

1. Coordinate all functions and practices in their organizations so that everything is able to function in harmony towards realization of particular goal;
2. ensure that all individuals share common goals;
3. are able to assess the ability of the organization to respond to social, political, or even interpersonal crises (Glanz 2005, p.2).

Other notable functions of the strategic leaders include adjusting the organization’s mission to meet newly developing exigencies, and lastly, being innovative of varied possibilities for the future (Glanz 2005, p.2).

Schools of all types, in the new 21st century require strategic leadership. This is particularly necessary given the increasing competition that characterizes any given market (p.3). According to three authors Preedy, Glatter, and Wise (2003, p.3), schools, colleges, together with other educational organizations are carrying out their functions and roles in competitive environment in which they need to have the best staff members.

This call for competitive recruitment in order to align the school’s needs and goals given funding and resource capacity are attached to student’s number. Effective leadership is required in order to enable school realize success and sustained performance that in most cases is demonstrated in terms of students outcomes.

When a school is able to realize effective student performance the potential market for the school increase and on the other hand, when performance decline then negative public perception develops over the school.

Hence, the above circumstances have forced educational leaders to adopt strategies that are effective in managing the boundaries between the school and the environment. Moreover, the vision should be to adopt pro-active stance in creating an effective relationships with external stakeholders (Preedy, Glatter, and Wise 2003, p.3).

Guided by these introductory statements, this research paper aims at exploring the concept of strategic leadership with particular interests in exploring the characteristics of strategic leadership, the contextual factors, both internal and external that has the ability to affect strategic decisions, and lastly the tools available for the strategic analysis of key evidence specifically with regard to school.

This research methodology will largely involve review and analysis of relevant literatures, and in this case, secondary and where appropriate, primary literature will be used especially with regard to statistical data.

Characteristics of Strategic Leadership

Preedy, Glatter, and Wise (2003) observe that developing relationship between the school and external stakeholders require effective environmental scanning. The postulation of this statement is that strategic leaders are the ones who incorporate effective strategic environmental scanning aspects (p.3).

In carrying out environmental scanning strategic leaders, adopt necessary steps of identifying stakeholders’ needs and expectations, together with broader social, economic, and political trends that have opportunities for future development of the school (Preedy, Glatter, and Wise 2003, p.3).

At the same time, strategic leaders incorporate empirical studies on how their schools should incorporate and utilize environmental information and as a result, these leaders develop effective school systems that exhibit good processes for learning about and responding to changes in the environments (Preedy, Glatter, and Wise 2003, p.3).

Another aspect of strategic school leaders is that they should be effective at interpreting the wider environment in which they operate and carry their functions in. Effective interpretive requires strategic leaders to note that operational environment is not fixed but rather it is complex and always changing.

This scenario calls for strategic leaders to be more active in initiating ongoing learning by creation effective interactions with the environmental information and at the same time initiating individual and organizational capacities to interpret external events by identifying key trends that need to be responded to (Preedy, Glatter, and Wise 2003, p.3).

Other aspects have been identified that characterize strategic leadership in school context. For instance, these leaders exhibit exceptional capabilities in reducing dependence of the school to its environment and they achieve these through seeking alternative sources of funding.

Mike Freedman and Benjamin B Tregoe writing in a strategic book titled ‘The Art and Discipline of Strategic Leadership’ observe that most companies fail to realize their set objectives from multiple reasons but the major ones revolves around lack of incorporating key elements of strategy (Freedman and Tregoe 2004, p.2).

For instance, the authors observes that most organizations have excellent management teams that at same are dedicated in their work and also exhibit the best strategic intentions but occasionally fail when at least one critical aspect of the strategy process is missed (Freedman and Tregoe 2004, p.2).

On overall, strategy of any organization fails when observation and fulfillment of certain aspects fail in some of the following instances.

1. In formulating strategic vision based on facts, informed assumptions, and the best-possible what-if thinking;
2. in implementing and communicating the vision throughout the organization to clarify and align the role of every strategically critically player and process; and
3. in monitoring and updating the vision to ensure its continued strength, agility, and relevance (Freedman and Tregoe 2004, p.2).

Michael A. Hitt, Duane R. Ireland and Robert E. Hoskisson, writing in a book titled ‘Strategic management: competitiveness and globalization: concepts and cases’, observe that there exist certain and specific actions that characterize effective strategic leadership and many of the elements characterizing strategic leadership in most cases operate collaboratively (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.350).

For instance, the authors are of the view that managing school resources effectively requires the leader or manager “to develop human capital and establish strategic direction, fostering an effective culture, exploiting core competencies, using effective organizational control systems, and ethical practices” (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.350).

At the same time, most strategic and effective leaders create viable options when dealing with each of the key strategic leadership action situations as the foundation for making effective decisions.

Therefore, key elements that characterize strategic leadership according to the authors include the following: determining strategic direction by the leader, where the postulation is that, strategic leaders need to have adequate knowledge.

In addition, there exist diverse conditions that create both opportunities and threats, and it is upon this premise that strategic leaders need to determine and provide the appropriate direct an organization can chart in future or over a specified period of time (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.350).

With regard to determining strategic direction, strategic leadership has to deal with two strategic directions in two parts that include core ideology and an envisioned future.

With regard to core ideology, the strategic leadership has to motivate the staff to meet the organizational goals and objectives through encouraging them to focus on the main strategies earmarked for delivering value to all the firm’s stakeholders.

Envisioned future, in most cases, serves as a guide to many aspects of school’s strategy implementation process, including motivation, leadership, staff empowerment, and overall school design (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.350).

In actual cases, a leader instituting a strategic direction normally faces many challenges, while the work in general is not easy.

It is therefore always advisable for the leader to win the hearts and minds of school members while constantly “tackling unscalable heights and make them understand why change is necessary, passionately explaining what is in for the company and the employees” (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.351). Further, it is recommended that strategic leadership with regard to strategic direction needs to employ appropriate strengths that ensure continued positive performance.

Second, strategic leadership constitute effective management of the school resource portfolio. In general, school “resources are categorized into financial capital, human capital, social capital, and organizational capital, together with organizational culture” (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.351).

For instance, financial capital is vital to success and growth of the school and strategic leaders become aware of this. Nevertheless, in most cases, many of the strategic leaders recognize the equivalent importance of managing each remaining type of resource as well as managing the integration of resources.

Strategic leaders in most cases “manage school resource portfolio by organizing them into capabilities, structuring the firm to facilitate using those capabilities, and choosing strategies through which the capabilities are successfully leveraged to create value for customers” (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p. 351).

At the same time, strategic leaders are tasked with the role of ensuring competency of employees, as well as helping to retain the most successfully staff.

Next, strategic leadership has to do with exploitation and maintenance of core competencies. Core competences in many schools function as source of competitive advantage for a school over its competitors (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.351). Strategic leaders in many cases carry out verification of school competencies when implementing strategies.

At the same time, strategic leaders pursue school strategies through competitive agility and competitive speed where the leaders develop core competence capabilities which they develop over time as the school learn from their actions and enhance their knowledge about specific actions needed (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.351).

Furthermore, strategic leaders develop human capital and social capital whereby the leaders have adequate knowledge and skills of the school entire workforce (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.352). Strategic leadership identifies that there is need for effective training and development programs in order to enhance performance of the leaders for the benefit of the whole school.

The programs developed by strategic leaders generally link the success of the school needs, thus the leader gains and sustains competitive programs that benefit the school (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.352). At the same time, the programs developed by strategic leaders should “build knowledge and skills that inculcate a common set of core values and that they should provide systematic view of the organization thus promoting the organization’s vision and organizational cohesion” (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2009, p.352).

On his part, Richard L. Morill, in a book titled ‘Strategic leadership: integrating strategy and leadership in colleges and universities’, summarizes the key characteristics that a strategic leader needs to have. These include “being integral which should begin at the level of human urgency, values, and paradigms; have sense-making, that is relying largely on narrative to make sense of experience and give meaning to the future; being motivational, where the strategic leader is able to mobilize energy and commitment; putting into application decisions and choices that are strategic; encouraging collaboration; being systematic; and lastly, being data driven” (Morrill 2007, p. 108).

Contextual factors, internal and external that affect strategic decisions

Two sets of factors affect strategic making decision (SDM) process, which in most cases is external environmental factors and internal organizational factors (Papadakis and Barwise 1998, p.230). Both these factors affect the SDM process both directly and through the cognitions and actions of managers.

These factors along with leadership actions, together with SDM process characteristics in turn influence outcome in a school (Papadakis and Barwise 1998, p.230). The outcomes in most cases include process outcomes such as decision quality, decision speed, timeliness of the decision and school learning, as well as economic outcomes that may include profitability and revenue growth.

Internal factors

Internal factors that influence strategic decision-making process have to do with assessment of internal school environment, which may involve identifying the strengths, and weaknesses that might be important to strategic decision-making process. First, internal aspect that affects strategic decision-making process has to do with school mission.

On overall, school mission constitutes a statement why the school exists, and in most cases, mission statements fall into three groups. 1) To create shareholder value; 2) meet the needs and expectations of all the stakeholders such as the staff, employees, suppliers, parents, students and the larger community; and 3) inspiring where it tends to create school’s aspirations among school and its stakeholders (Sadler and Craig 2003, p.10).

The second internal aspect that affects strategic decision-making process has to do with school main policies. Generally, a school strategy depend and rests on policies that in most cases constitute guiding rules or principles that a school perceive to be integral to the success of the school.

Policies reflect practices or ways that a school conducts its activities, and hence, they are seen to be indispensable parts of the school’s formula in creating, achieving, and sustaining competitive advantage (Sadler and Craig 2003, p.10).

Another internal factor that affects strategic decision-making process has to do with school’s goals and objectives. Objectives in most cases are set to be achieved over a short, medium to long term. Objectives may be of different forms such as financial objectives, human resource objectives, enrolment objectives, school promotion objectives, and many more (Sadler and Craig 2003, p.11).

Strategic decision-making will largely be influenced by school’s objectives and goals. Strategic decision-making process has to be limited, for instance, within the financial objectives of the school, where at the same time with little or inadequate financial resources the strategic decision-making process may be hampered or stalled.

School culture is another internal factor that influences school strategic decision-making process. School culture constitutes values and beliefs, together with ideas about how the school is perceived by the members and other stakeholders (Hill and Jones 2009).

School culture constitutes aspects which members of a “school should pursue and the appropriate kinds or standards of behavior school members should use to achieve these goals” (Hill and Jones 2009, p.394).

Strategic decision-making process on large part will thrive from presence of well established “school values, norms, guidelines, or even school expectations” that in largely prescribe “the appropriate kind of behavior organization members express towards each other” (Hill and Jones 2009, p.394).

Further, Charles Hill and Gareth Jones suggest that when making strategic decisions leaders need to create adaptive culture, one that is innovative and encourages support for school strategic goals (Hill and Jones 2009, p.394). Adaptive cultures are able to introduce changes in the way the school operates that sometimes may include changes in the school structure.

Further, the author note that schools with adaptive cultures are more likely to survive and continue in the changing environment and in most cases through strategic decisions such school are able to realize increased performance than school that have inert cultures (Hill and Jones 2009, p.394).

External factors

T. R. Jain, Mukesh Trehan, and Ranju Trehan, in a book titled ‘Business Environment’ observe that, in general, operating environment for any kind of player or institution is complex and dynamic, a situation that is more complicated (Jain, Trehan and Trehan 2009, p.16). At the same time external environmental factors affect the school both in short-term and long-term (Jain, Trehan and Trehan 2009, p.16).

External factors that influence strategic decision-making process can be regarded as macro environment factors and these will have to do with demographic aspect, politico-legal aspects, and regulatory issues that affect the schools, the general economic issues affecting stakeholders, competition from other schools, and government policy that affect schools.

First, demographic aspects are important and influence strategic decisions in the sense that school strategies both existing and anticipated will greatly be influenced by population, age, religion, family size and nature, workforce composition.

Demographic aspects have the capability to influence the strategic decision making process in that, the school has to have enough and adequate knowledge of demographic shifts, which in turn forces the school to constantly modify the strategies adopted and employed.

According to Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha (2005) external environment can be divided into two: market or task environment, which include consumers, suppliers, labor market, competitors, and intermediaries (p.102).

The second type is the macro or general environment that constitutes legal-political environment, economic environment, socio-cultural environment, technological environment, and international environment (Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha 2005, p.102). Consumers constitute the group of people, institutions, organizations, and all other key elements organization depends on in order to purchase the organization’s products or services.

The decisions made in an organization have to touch on consumers. In other words, consumers are the ones that influence the decisions and strategies the organization undertake. Supplier, on the other hand is a group that ensures the organization has the input required to ensure consumer needs are made.

Therefore, the suppliers’ actions or the school’s strategies will largely affect the suppliers of the school (Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha 2005, p.102). Therefore, the strategic decision-making process is largely influenced by actions and decisions of the suppliers. Labor market on the other hand, is the avenue the school has to recruit its staff and employee to facilitate and pursue school goals and objectives.

In most cases, the structure of the labor market changes an aspect that affects organization’s strategic goals and objectives. When the labor market changes, then the organization has to restructure itself and generally restructuring involves modifying the strategies of the organization (Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha 2005, p.103).

Another external aspect is the competitors of the school. Competitors constitute other external schools and institutions, which the school has to put down strategies of encountering in the market place. As the market become uncertain and more competitors enter the market, schools finds it both challenging and necessary to initiate strategies that will place the organization at a better place or level to compete effectively in the market.

Competitor’s marketing strategies may be advanced and superior, they may be providing superior learning opportunities with greater and constant performance, and they may have established brands in the market, and may just have enhanced tools of leveraging market advantage than the concerned school (Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha 2005, p.103).

What becomes necessary and of much help is for the school to carry out environmental scanning which will enable the organization to take appropriate steps in strategic decision-making making with aim of improving or positioning the organization at an advantageous level.

Further, the macro-environment factors at the same time have the potential to influence strategic decision-making process. For instance, legal-political environment has the capacity to affect an organization’s strategies. Legal aspects such as tariffs, taxes, business permits, market competition laws, service standards laws, and quality assurance laws, all have the potential to affect and influence the strategic decisions a school makes.

Political environment and regime at the same time has the capability to influence how the school is able to set its strategies. For example, there are political regimes that will institute restrictive business and market measures, a situation that will force many schools to modify their strategies (Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha 2005, p.103).

Economic environment on the other hand has the potential to influence school strategies. As situation becomes tighter, organizations are forced to re-design their strategies in order to meet the stakeholders’ needs and desires (Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha 2005, p.103). Further, socio-cultural environment has the capacity to affect the strategies an organization makes.

Socio-cultural environment has to do with aspects such as demographics, culture, beliefs, religion, social status, age, and gender (Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha 2005, p.103). Organizations operate and carry out their functions in environments that exhibit different cultures, different religions, people of different ages, and so on.

Consequently, all these aspects will influence the strategic decision making process in the organization since their ignorance or inadequate incorporation will results into poor performance by the organization (Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha 2005, p.103).

Technological environment exhibits potentials of influencing an organization strategic decision-making process. Organizations such as schools operate in changing environments that are characterized by evolving technologies.

At the same time technology has become a source of competitiveness and schools that adopt and implement the most appropriate technology is seen to have better market and overall performance as compared to others (Goodman, Ladzani, Bates, Vries, and Botha 2005, p.103).

Tools available for the strategic analysis of key evidence

Organizations such as learning institutions that are able to articulate where they currently stand and operate, as well as where they want to go and vision they aspire to adopt, such organizations become success and goal-oriented that is built on strong strategic planning.

In order to chart a clear journey of success, learning institutions adopt particular and specific well-tested tools and techniques, which in turn are able to utilize in strategic planning (Courtney 2002, p.150). Schools are presented with both internal review tools and external review tools, which they can be able to use to carry out strategic analysis.

With regard to internal review tools and techniques, the following particular tools are common. First, there is mandate analysis, which constitutes a tool that was developed in 1995 by Bryson (Courtney 2002, p.150). In general, this tool largely provides support for policy or course of action. Mandates analysis constitute a process of exploring the written documents that exist in support of the mission of the school (Courtney 2002, p.150).

Mandate analysis for school may include research reports, mission and vision statements documents, and school’s objectives and goals documents, together with the school’s strategic goals documents.

In most cases, these documents can be used by a strategic leader or manager to explore and analyze the fundamental bases of the organization’s mission, to understand the extent the school set and pursue goals, and reflect on the distinctive competencies of the organization (Courtney 2002, p.150).

Another technique is that of stakeholders’ analysis, which again constitutes a powerful technique developed by John Bryson in 1995. Stakeholders in this case constitute all those who are affected by the activities of the school or who express great expectations in the school.

Stakeholders’ analysis in large measure gets concerned with internal analysis but has become to be associated also with external analysis of the organization (Courtney 2002, p.150). When the stakeholders’ analysis is carried out, the paramount intent is to identify the internal aspects of the organization and identify the implications of changes in the external environment.

The third technique has to do with portfolio analysis, which was developed by the Boston Consulting Group, and largely this technique involves making evaluation of programmes that a school undertakes at the moment, and elaborate on the future of the programmes in the school (Courtney 2002, p.151). Further, portfolio analysis operates to link the school’s current programs and the demand of the market or business environment.

On the other hand, external strategic analysis has been carried out using resource-based tools and techniques such SWOT analysis tools, PESTEL analysis tools, and Porter’s Five Forces analysis.

With regard to SWOT tools, strategic leader is able to carry out business environmental scanning by identifying school’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) from which it becomes possible to create and implement appropriate strategic decisions.

Furthermore, when adopted by the strategic leader for strategy analysis, the guiding wisdom in PESTEL analysis is for the leader to analyze and evaluate political factors that affect the business strategy.

In addition, the leader should analyze the economic factors influencing the strategy, social factors, technological factors that have the ability to affect the organization, and the environment issues that organization will have to put in mind before implanting the desired strategy.

This is in addition to the legal factors that the organization needs to factor in before implementing the strategy (Hill and Jones 2009, p.41). Lastly, Porter’s five forces constitute tools an organization is able to use in analyzing the competitive industry environment with aim of identifying opportunities and threats before initiating and pursuing certain strategies.

Porter’s Five Force Model comprises tools that analyze industry environment with regard to the risk of entry by potential competitors; the intensity of rivalry among established competitors within an industry; the bargaining power of buyers/stakeholders; the bargaining power of suppliers; and the closeness of substitutes to an industry’s products or services (Hill and Jones 2009, p.42).

Analysis and having adequate knowledge about these aspects enable an organization like school to pursue its strategy in a more appropriate way.

Conclusion

The 21st century constitutes a period that many organizations are undergoing transformation. Even the earlier conservative and change-averse organizations have discovered that they cannot continue to remain immune to change. Nevertheless, one aspect that is contributing to smooth transformation and success of these organizations has to do with strategic leadership.

In adopting one expressed definition of strategic leadership, Boal and Hooijberg (2006) note that, it is kind of leadership that is “marked and concerned with evolution of the organization as a whole, including changing aims and capabilities.”

As a result, “strategic leadership is in general associated with people at the top of the organization, and the concern becomes largely centered on internal organizational environments and the external context the business operates in” (Amos, Ristow, Ristow, and Pearse 2009, p.406).

Therefore, it can be said in summary that strategic leadership is key to transformation of an organization whereby an organization is able to equip itself very well to compete effectively in the market place. Further, strategic leadership to win and realize success for the organization, there is need for collaboration, cooperation, and necessary support from other key stakeholders.

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