Building Strategic Leadership

A recent article in the Times of India quoted from the DDI ‘Global Leadership Forecast 2011’ - India Inc leaders are ill-equipped to handle the challenges that organizations face in the new business environment. The article went on to describe the high expectations organizations have from their leaders, especially around speed to performance, which meant that there is just no time for leaders to take development slow and easy.

Leadership is the major driver behind every successful organization. Effective leaders know how to create a vision of what their organization can become; commit people to action, and help them realize their real potential. Yet for too many organizations, results from these well-crafted visions are few and far between. The business world needs a stronger focus on execution - execution of initiatives and the consistent delivery of results.

Some causal factors for strategic execution failure are: the inability to understand the organizations strategy, no personal responsibility to fulfil the strategy, impassive attitude towards strategic success or uninspiring overarching strategic goals. Additionally, leaders and managers often fail to align and direct the efforts of their work units towards the strategic objective or inspire enterprise wide collaboration.

Companies and managers that are successful at execution, create operating plans that are coordinated across departments and levels, expect and encourage top performance from everyone, hold people accountable for results, make high-quality decisions by ensuring that the right people are talking about the right things at the right time, and facilitate individual change readiness.

The Project Management Academy together with Dr. Aaron J Shenhar and his team at the Technological Leadership Institute has designed a program to help leaders and managers become successful at executing the business strategy.

Our 3-day workshop on “The SPL Experience”, (Strategic Project Leadership®) combines the strategic, business related aspects of projects, the operational needs of getting the job done and the leadership side of inspiring and motivating their teams.