Organizational & Strategic Leadership

Guided Discovery.

Photo by Osama Elsayed on Unsplash

Suggested Reading

• ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession

  • Pages 9-1 through 10-8 based on printed document (PDF pages 107-122)

  • Applying the US Army’s ten competencies of leadership to organizational and strategic leaders

• Link to ADP 6-22 on the US Army Publishing Directorate

• This week’s Study: Write

• All excerpts below are from ADP 6-22 unless otherwise noted

Introduction

9-5. Given the increased size of their organizations, organizational leaders influence indirectly more often than directly. Soldiers and subordinate leaders look to their organizational leaders to set achievable standards, to provide clear intent, and to provide the necessary resources. Decisions and actions by organizational leaders have greater consequences for more people over a longer time than those of direct leaders. Since the connections between action and effect are sometimes more remote and difficult to see, organizational leaders spend more time than direct leaders coordinating, thinking, and reflecting about what they are doing and how they are doing it.

9-6. While organizational leaders primarily exert direct influence through their chain of command and staff, they extend influence beyond their chain of command and organization by other means. These other means include persuasion, empowerment, motivation, negotiation, conflict resolution, bargaining, advocacy, and diplomacy.

9-7. Today’s operations present Army leaders, particularly organizational leaders, with nonlinear, dynamic, and ambiguous conditions. These varied, information-intense conditions challenge leaders to synchronize efforts beyond the traditional military chain of command. Likely mission complexities demand the full integration and cooperation of unified action partners to accomplish missions.

How do you extend your reach?
Which leadership level are you actually operating at - direct, operational or strategic?
How do you measure leadership effectiveness when you cannot directly observe outcomes?

This Week’s Reading, Abridged

9-9. The Army’s organizational leaders play a critical part in maintaining focus on fighting the enemy and not the plan.

9-10. Organizational leaders position themselves with the necessary means to maintain contact with critical elements and headquarters. Proximity to operations provides organizational commanders with the required awareness to apply quick creative thinking in collaboration with subordinate leaders. Proximity facilitates adjustments for deficiencies in planning and shortens reaction time when applying sound tactical and operational solutions to changing realities.

9-11. Organizational leaders prioritize what changes their organization will pursue and guide their organizations through several steps to ensure their initiatives for change last. The steps of the leading change process are—

• Assess the need for change (anticipate problems or identify opportunities).

• Build a guiding coalition.

• Create and communicate a compelling vision.

• Determine how to implement vision (design plan, gather resources).

• Empower others to act.

• Facilitate learning (promote new skill development).

• Goal reinforcement (identify and reinforce evidence of progress).

• Hone the change process through monitoring and reinvesting.

• Institutionalize change (modify policies or procedures).

9-13. Communicating openly and clearly with superiors is important for organizational leaders.

How do you position yourself to maximize your reach?
What percentage of your leadership time is reactive versus proactive? Is the ratio optimal?
At what point does your current role demand you abandon quarterly thinking?

9-20. The demands on leaders vary at different levels. While leader competencies stay the same across levels, moving from direct to the organizational level requires a shift in approach. What may occupy a great deal of a leader’s time at a lower level (for example, face-to-face supervision of Soldiers) involves less time at higher levels. Certain technical skills vital to a direct leader will be of less importance to an organizational leader who must spend time on system-wide issues. Leaders need to accustom themselves to rely on less direct means of direction, control, and monitoring to aid their transition in the scope and breadth of responsibilities.

9-22. Self-aware organizational leaders who know their organizations generally achieve high quality results and do not shy away from asking close subordinates to give informal feedback as part of an open, transparent assessment and feedback effort.

9-27. By circulating among subordinate units, organizational leaders can assess subordinates’ understanding of intent, preparation, execution, and assure successful command and control. Organizational leaders learn about units in the task organization and personally motivate Soldiers by their presence. Organizational leaders work with subordinate units to create shared understanding. Together they identify options of greatest value and manage high-risk actions.

9-32. Building a high-performing staff begins with putting the right people in the right positions. Organizational leaders make time to evaluate the staff and develop them to full capability. They avoid micromanaging the staff while trusting and empowering them to think creatively and provide truthful answers and feasible options.

9-35. Organizational leaders are more likely than direct leaders to provide guidance and make decisions with incomplete information. Part of the organizational leaders’ analysis must determine which decisions to make themselves or push to lower levels.

9-36. During operations, organizational leaders integrate and synchronize available resources. They assign missions and empower their subordinates to execute within the given intent. Effective organizational leaders must be resourcing experts, which requires significant education and self-study.

9-37. Organizational leaders are stewards of their people’s time and energy, as well as their own.

9-40. While a single leader in isolation can make good decisions, the organizational leader needs a creative staff to make quality decisions during continuous operations of long duration.

If extending reach means relying on others' judgment, what control are you afraid to give up?
How close to the action is too close before it is micromanaging?
Which resource do you manage better—time, people, or budget—and why?

10-1. Strategic leaders represent a finely balanced combination of high-level thinkers, accomplished Soldiers, and military experts. … They often personally spearhead change. Their policies guide lifecycles and talent management of all Army personnel. They guide the design and employment of technological advances and establish programs that care for Army families.

10-2. Strategic leadership … focuses on influencing Army culture, securing and prioritizing resources, and shaping and supporting organizational and direct level leaders. These goals are realized through directives, policies, programs, systems, and consensus building.

10-3. At the strategic level, senior Army leaders address ends, ways, and means to accomplish global missions.

10-5. Strategic leaders must think in multiple timelines to anticipate change and be agile to manage change. Strategic leaders extend influence in conditions where they interact with other high-level leaders and influential figures over whom they have minimal formal authority or no authority at all.

10-6. They operate in intricate networks of overlapping and sometimes competing constituencies.

10-9. While direct and organizational leaders have a more near- and mid-term focus, strategic leaders must concentrate on the future. They spend much of their time looking toward long-term goals and positioning for long-term success as they contend with mid-term and immediate issues.

10-10. To create powerful organizations and institutions capable of adaptation, strategic leaders and their staffs develop networks of knowledgeable individuals who can positively develop their own organizations. … Strategic leaders adeptly read other people while disciplining their own actions and reactions. Strategic leaders influence external events by providing quality leadership, timely and relevant information, and access to the right people and agencies.

How do you decide which stakeholder voices to prioritize when they conflict?
Does your personal need for certainty limit your leadership effectiveness?
How many of your direct reports could step into your role successfully?

10-12. A truly effective strategic leader understands the organization from multiple perspectives, transcending from an inside perspective to understanding the views of outsiders. Strategic leaders are able to move beyond their own experiential biases to view the environment and their mission objectively. Through formal and informal networks, strategic leaders actively seek information relevant to their organizations as well as subject matter experts who can help.

10-13. Strategic leaders need an acute sense of timing—knowing when to accept risk and proceed vigorously or when to proceed incrementally, testing the waters as they go. Their insight on issues is strong, and they can skillfully sort relevant from irrelevant connections.

10-15. Strategic leaders seek to keep their vision consistent with external conditions, alliance goals, and national strategy. They incorporate new ideas, technologies, and capabilities. From a mix of ideas, facts, conjecture, and personal experience, they create an image of their organizations and the means to achieve desired results.

10-16. The ability to provide clear vision is vital to the strategic leader. The strategic leader’s vision provides the ultimate sense of purpose, direction, and motivation. This vision is the starting point for developing goals and plans, measuring accomplishment, and checking organizational values. For a vision to be effective, the strategic leader must personally commit to it, gain commitment from the organization as a whole, and persistently pursue the goals and objectives that will spread the vision throughout the organization.

10-17. Strategic leaders rely on writing and public speaking to reinforce their central messages.

10-18. Strategic leaders must often rely on negotiation skills to obtain the cooperation and support necessary to accomplish a mission. To resolve conflicting views, strategic leaders visualize several possible end states while maintaining a clear idea of the best end state from the national command’s perspective. Strategic leaders must use tact to justify standing firm on nonnegotiable points while still communicating respect for other participants.

10-19. A successful negotiator must be particularly skilled in active listening.

What biases limit your reach?
When does a need to understand detail actually undermine strategic effectiveness?
Negotiation and consensus building or vision and culture: which approach dominates your current leadership toolkit?

10-20. To reach acceptable consensus in negotiations, strategic leaders often circulate proposals early so that further negotiations can focus on critical issues and solutions.

10-21. Outside Army boundaries, strategic leaders have roles as integrator, alliance builder, negotiator, and arbitrator. … They focus on the health of the relationships necessary to achieve the end state. Interpersonal contact sets the tone for professional relations: strategic leaders must be tactful.

10-25. Strategic leaders best address complexity by embracing it. This means they expand their frame of reference to fit a situation rather than reducing a situation to fit their preconceptions.

10-26. Resiliency is the product of work-life balance, effective time management, family and peer support systems, along with access to executive health programs and education about stressors.

10-27. Words have international consequences at the strategic level. … One prominent difference between strategic leaders and leaders at other levels is the greater emphasis on symbolic communication. Strategic leaders must carefully consider the enduring nature of all their communications. Strategic leaders’ words, decisions, and actions often have consequences beyond their immediate intent.

10-28. To achieve desired outcomes, strategic leaders commit to a few powerful and consistent messages that they repeat in different settings. They devise and follow a communications plan outlining how to address each audience. When preparing to address an audience, they determine its composition and agenda beforehand so they know how best to reach its members.

10-40. More than a matter of following formats and structured sessions, mentoring by strategic leaders means giving the right people an intellectual boost so that they make the leap to successfully operating and creatively thinking at the highest levels.

10-42. Because they must be able to compensate for their own weaknesses, strategic leaders cannot afford to have staffs that blindly agree with everything they say. Strategic leaders encourage staffs to participate in open and candid dialogue with them, discuss alternative points of view, and explore all facts, assumptions, and implications.

Inspire through presence or through vision. Which approach feels more authentic to you?
How has your communication strategy evolved with your leadership scope?
How do you extend your reach?

Questions for Individual Reflection

1. Which influence method do you over-rely on: persuasion, empowerment, motivation, or negotiation? What does that reveal about your leadership gaps?

2. If delegation requires convincing subordinates they are empowered, why do most executives struggle to let go of decision-making authority?

3. Why do some executives resist the transition from direct to indirect influence, even when it is required to scale their impact?

4. Strategic leaders are held accountable for decisions made by people they never meet. How might this change your approach to organizational design?

5. How would your leadership style change if you had to influence the senior leaders in your organization rather than report to them?

Professional Discussion Prompts

1. What is the equivalent to unified action partners for your organization and how effectively do you leverage them?

2. How do you balance executing current strategy while building future capability?

3. How do your immediate decisions support or undermine your 20-year vision?

4. When organizational leaders delegate authority, they empower subordinates within commander's intent. When strategic leaders delegate, they create autonomous institutions. Is there a level of delegation that makes you uncomfortable?

5. How would your current decisions change if you were evaluated in ten years?

Personal Discussion Prompts

1. What does your family actually think about your leadership style at home?

2. Who in your personal life challenges your thinking most effectively?

3. How does tolerating ambiguity in professional decisions apply to major personal choices you've made?

4. Strategic leaders subordinate personal recognition to institutional success. Are there personal needs for acknowledgment which you find hard to let go?

5. When extending influence means being judged by standards you did not set, by people you will not meet, how does this change your relationship with criticism?

Exercises

1. Indirect Influence Mapping

   1. Exercise:

      1. Individuals map their current influence networks beyond direct reports.

      2. Create action plans for strengthening weak network connections.

      3. Present influence strategies that do not rely on positional authority.

   2. Debrief:

      1. What gaps in your influence network create strategic vulnerabilities for your organization?

      2. How do you build trust with stakeholders who have competing priorities?

      3. When is indirect influence more powerful than direct authority?

2. Time Horizon Reality Check

   1. Exercise:

      1. Individually, assess what percentage of personal leadership attention goes to quarterly, annual, five-year, and decade-plus outcomes.

      2. Share decisions where short-term pressures compromised long-term positioning.

      3. Examine whether their current role demands strategic thinking or operational excellence.

   2. Debrief:

      1. What would change in your leadership approach if you were evaluated in ten years instead of quarterly?

      2. How do you resist organizational pressure to focus on immediate results?

      3. Which long-term investments are you avoiding because they are politically difficult today?

Feel free to borrow this with pride and use with your teams, professionally or personally. If you do, please let me know how it went and tips for improvement: matt @ borrowingwithpride.com