Steven J. Stowell
The Art of Strategic Leadership
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Copyright © 2016 by Steven J. Stowell, Ph.D. and Stephanie S. Mead, MBA.
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Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-119-21305-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-119-21307-9 (epdf)
ISBN 978-1-119-21306-2 (epub)
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Acknowledgments
Just like strategy, writing a book takes a team of people who catch the vision, believe in the idea, and know what winning means. We express our heartfelt gratitude to those individuals who took ownership for this project and worked tenaciously and collaboratively to help us articulate this important message. We genuinely believe it will make a difference to people working in organizations around the world. We want to especially thank Emily Hodgson-Soule and Howard Cohn for playing integral roles in this work. Your talents truly helped make this book possible. We also extend our sincere appreciation to Chris Stowell, Cyndi Keller, Debbie Stowell, Michelle Aamodt, and the entire CMOE team for working alongside us throughout this journey. And to our many clients who have allowed us to be their trusted partner over the years, we thank you, too. We couldn't have done any of this without you.
To our team of colleagues who helped interview, gather data, and work alongside strategic leaders in the field all over the world, this book represents the tremendous knowledge and insight you share with us every day: Eric Mead, Steve Nielsen, Bryan Yager, Rick Williams, Polly Scott, Tony Herrera, James Gehrke, Doug Trainor, and Dave Knapp.
And last but not least, words cannot express our thanks to you, our readers, for choosing to read this book and taking an interest in the art of strategic leadership.
Preface
It doesn't matter what position you hold in the organization – senior leader, mid-level manager, front-line manager, or leader of a group – your organization needs and wants you to be a strategic leader. When it comes to excelling as a leader, you cannot afford to stay in a strategic cocoon, insulated from a turbulent business environment, and neglect your responsibilities to think and act ahead of the curve. Markets, rivals, and the business environment all change too fast, are too complex, and are too competitive on a global scale for you not to be looking forward and leading your part of the business in a proactive way. Whether you lead sales, IT, quality, or another function in the business, you need to have a strong sense of direction, be aware of your strategic qualities, and have a deep concern for the future.
Leadership today is about more than just being operationally effective, solving existing problems, and guiding people through the normal work that needs to be done each day. Leadership is all about effectively executing short-term responsibilities while also shaping the future. The promise of a better future is what gets team members engaged and unleashes their motivation. When people are invited to be part of creating the future and can clearly see how they fit and why they matter, it causes them to do their best work. In these challenging and exciting times, organizations desperately need leaders – at all levels – who have a vision and a plan to help move their teams to a better place and contribute value to the organization in new and unexpected ways.
What You'll Find in This Book
In our other books on strategic leadership and applied strategic thinking, we introduced processes, steps, and the how to's of creating strategy for your piece of the business. In this book, we chose to look at another facet of strategic leadership: the personal attributes that strategic leaders possess. We made this choice because our research indicates that leaders are hungry to know the unique leadership qualities that are necessary to be a driver and shaper of the future. Leaders need these qualities to fulfill the expectations that their organizations have of them. We've discovered that too often, people aren't clear on what these leadership attributes are or what they look like. This book responds to that compelling and broad-based need. We will help you look at strategy not from a process-oriented or tool-based perspective, but from the inside out. All leaders must possess and use these core qualities in order to lead and transform their teams and organizations for long-term, sustained growth.
Many works on leadership refer to the need for organizations to build their strategic-leadership bench strength at all levels of the business, but they don't thoroughly investigate and define how strategic leaders think, feel, and act as they set direction and execute on strategic goals and targets. We fill that void in two ways:
1. By exploring the qualities and values that enable strategic leaders to look out, look up, and look around.
2. Getting to the heart of what great strategic leaders actually do and the inner characteristics that drive them to be proactive.
We know that strategy formulation requires a clearly defined vision, long-term goals, useful tools, and a plan to win. But without the guidance of an insightful leader who can drive the process, it is difficult to make any strategy a reality. Ultimately, strategic leadership is what makes the difference between success or failure.
This book doesn't contain everything you need to know about strategy. It isn't intended to provide you with all there is to know about leadership, either. Instead, it provides a clear picture and makes you more conscious of the unique qualities and characteristics that will help you become a better leader and an active contributor to the long-term success of your organization.