Strategic Leadership Whether New Blueprint, Pathway or Paradigm Does It Get You There?

Back on 2/7/08 Businesspundit wrote post on A Blueprint For Strategic Leadership

Strategy+Business has an excellent article about building an organization in ways that allow executives to flourish.

The challenge of leadership is not what it used to be. For the past few decades - at least since the genre-defining book Leadership by historian James MacGregor Burns was published in 1978 - writers on business and society have understood that the quality of a leader's character makes all the difference.

But for all the sophistication of the experts, for all the books published on the subject, there is still no definitive consensus on the most effective style of leadership.

One of my favorite books, "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done," preaches that the job of a leader is to get the right people in the right places. Organizational design is often overlooked, but I think it is an important factor in any successful business.

Another perspective by Linda Bryant of the Nashville Business Journal, lends support to that idea that getting the right people to the right place is important, but through education -

Management today less about telling, more about teaching.
Maintaining a highly-motivated, productive workforce is something every small business wants, but it can be an elusive goal.

"A lot of organizations struggle with it," says Mark Marshall, an instructor in the University of Phoenix program and vice president and director of professional services at Lee Hecht Harrison, a national leadership consulting firm with offices in Nashville. "Much of the solution comes down to the employee understanding how they fit into an organization," Marshall says. "You need to make sure people know how they fit in and how they contribute to the overall success of the company."

These two perspectives seem to be different sides of the same coin. Leaders can be responsible for complex and often large organizations requiring multiple forms of talent to operate. Today's leader must inspire others to follow his or her vision. The people making up that multitude of talent may know their own individual field, but look to others to communicate and implement a larger vision. Putting it all together to reach one common goal is a talent of leadership. A new way of looking at this is InnoExecution.