Becoming a strategic leader: your role in your organization's enduring success

Описание

Another thing we’ve gained from this work is an appreciation
of how the nature of strategic leadership in organizations is changing, which is reflected in the people who describe these challenges
to us. Specifically, we are finding that managers and executives at
many levels and across many functions are signing up to improve
their effectiveness as strategic leaders. For example, only about 8
percent of DSL participants represent the top leadership of their
organizations; 48 percent are executives, 39 percent are from uppermiddle management, and 5 percent are from middle management.
What does it mean to find such a broad spectrum of managers
and executives intent on developing their effectiveness as strategic
leaders? We believe it’s more than just proactive preparation for
future responsibilities. We believe it reflects something fundamental about how strategic leadership itself is changing—that strategic
leadership is now the responsibility of many people, not just those
at the top.
The challenges we discuss represent what managers and executives are struggling with now, not theoretical challenges they might
confront in the future. In that regard, the list presents to us a fairly
reasonable outline of what it means to be strategic. True, it is only
a rather sparse outline. An important part of what we have learned
over the years is how to help managers and executives add depth as
well as breadth to this outline, in ways tailored to their unique development needs and circumstances. We’ve also learned a lot about
what facilitates the development of strategic leadership, especially
how the understanding and practice of strategic leadership evolves
in an environment that plays host to an ongoing interplay of action, observation, and reflection.
Over time, we have also come to appreciate a certain connectedness between the kinds of experiences that facilitate the development
of strategic leadership and those that facilitate the ongoing development, implementation, and refinement of organizational strategy
itself. Both have everything to do with viewing strategy as a learning
process, an idea that is central to this book. Part of becoming an effecxii PREFACE
03_968676_flast.qxd 1/4/05 2:13 PM Page xii
TLFeBOOK

Детали