In an earlier post (Is Your Organization Strategy-Fueled or Strategy-Starved?), I introduced a set of simple diagnostic questions to help gauge a firm’s relative maturity around leadership and strategy. In my own experience with this informal tool, most executives and managers end up self-rating their organizations closer to Strategy-Starved than Strategy-Fueled.  Classic symptoms include lack of shared view on strategy, weak or non-existent strategy creation and refresh processes, and an organizational preoccupation with the urgent unimportant at the expense of tackling the big issues confronting the firm.

Alternatively, organizations with healthy internal strategy processes and a clear orientation on market and competitor forces tend to be led by individuals that share the characteristics and approaches of what I describe as the Strategy-Fueled Leader.  Understanding the philosophical underpinnings and key motivations of this powerful leader will help you in adapting and developing your own Strategy-Fueled leadership style. 

The Strategy-Fueled Leader is someone you want to work for and someone that you want to become.  Working for one of these individuals is like existing in an alternate professional universe.  If you are fortunate enough to connect with this type of leader early in your career, you are in for a remarkable education that will shape you for the rest of your professional (and even personal) life.   Catch one later in life, and expect to find yourself reborn professionally, with a renewed sense of focus and purpose.  If you are not fortunate enough to find one as a mentor, its up to you to make a difference in your organization by developing the habits, approaches and thinking of this powerful leader. 

Key to understanding what it means to be a Strategy-Fueled Leader is understanding what makes this individual tick.  In my experience, this individual operates in 4 distinct dimensions and lives according to 6 fundamental principles, all backed by a clear understanding of the true role of a leader. 

The Four Dimensions of the Strategy-Fueled Leader

  • Strategy-Fueled leaders are driven to achieve, not necessarily for monetary gain or for power, but because they measure their self-worth by their ability to identify and solve big challenges.
  • This leader recognizes his or her role in creating a group/team capable of exponentially outperforming any individual effort, and they spend a great deal of time creating the environment necessary for collaboration to succeed.
  • These individuals operate with a clear sense of Vision and they recognize that they are responsible for refining this vision over time.
  • The Strategy-Fueled Leader operates with a keen sense of time as both an ally and an enemy, and he uses time as a powerful tool to motivate and drive others to achieve.

The 6 Precepts of the Strategy-Fueled Leader

1. The external environment and market forces provide context for day-to-day decision-making as well as long-range planning.  This "context" provides every member of a firm with an understanding of their own mission and serves to create a link between their activities and the organization’s goals.

2. A firm’s leaders are responsible for creating the culture and institutions for facilitating the transfer of market insights into knowledge of and actions from the broader organization.

3. An organization must speak with a strategy-laden vocabulary and leverage external insights and internal self-awareness to adjust and adapt to changing market forces.  Realizing this type of environment is the responsibility of the leaders collectively and as individuals.

4. An organization’s leaders are responsible for realizing an environment that encourages action-focused debate at all levels, across all functions and up and down the leadership chain.

5. Measurement with context and implication is constant. 

6. Actions without strategic merit are avoided.

The bottom-line:

Taken together, the four dimensional leader operating according to these six fundamental principles and backed by a mature perspective on the true role of a leader (see my article, The Leader’s Charter), is a force for change at the top, in the middle or anywhere in any organization.  The ability of an individual to develop a Strategy-Fueled style–rich in external orientation and focused on helping create the environment for others to contribute can have a significant impact on his or her career and their organization’s fortunes.  Are you prepared to become a Strategy-Fueled Leader?