Introduction
Strategic leadership starts with strategic thinking. It is the ability of influencing others to voluntarily make decisions that enhance the prospects for the organization’s long-term success while maintaining long-term financial stability.
The ultimate success in moving into blue ocean leadership is the stage where the competition is carried out with self-management and its results.
Objectives
What do you understand by strategic thinking?
What is blue ocean leadership and how is it different from conventional leadership? How to develop it?
The following are discussed:
7.1 Strategic Thinking
Project management essentially translates strategy into reality through implementation of projects and programs aligned with strategic goals. Leaders with strategic thinking are forceful in their endeavors for advancement in the strategic direction.
A strategy is the plan and the set of actions to achieve some new result (or mission). In order to do this, a strategist must be comfortable with structuring uncertainty using the data available.
Leaders are required to enhance skills to look for changing circumstances beyond the present to proactively manage arising challenges.
Achieving the synergy for advancement in the strategic direction requires collaborative leadership. It has been discovered that it requires strong skills in four areas: playing the role of a connector, attracting diverse talent, modeling collaboration at the top, and showing a strong hand to keep teams from getting mired in debate. The good news is the research also suggests that these skills are learnable—and help executives to generate exceptional long-term performance.
Habits of True Strategic Thinkers
You’re the boss, but you still spend too much time on the day-to-day matters, distracting from real responsibilities. Here’s how to become the strategic leader your company needs.
Adaptive strategic leaders—the kind who thrive in today’s uncertain environment—do these things well, noted as follows:
The focus in most companies is on what’s directly ahead. Their leaders lack “peripheral vision.” This can leave your company vulnerable to rivals who detect and act on ambiguous signals. To anticipate well, you must:
“Conventional wisdom” opens you to fewer raised eyebrows and second guessing. But if you swallow every management fad and safe opinion at face value, your company loses all competitive advantage. Critical thinkers question everything. To master this skill, you must force yourself to:
Face the ambiguity; the temptation is to reach for a fast (and potentially wrong-headed) solution. A good strategic leader holds steady, synthesizing information from many sources before developing a viewpoint. You have to:
A leader may fall prey to “analysis paralysis.” You need to develop processes, use them, and arrive at a “good enough” position. You have to:
Total consensus is rare. A strategic leader must foster open dialogue, build trust, and engage key stakeholders, especially when views diverge. You need to:
The implementation of strategic decisions is the real challenge. Very often the strategic plan is kept in secret files and seldom put to action. A plan not implemented has no value. You need to:
Feedback is crucial and harder to come. You have to do what it takes to keep it coming. This is important for failure—as it provides valuable sources of organizational learning. You need to do:
Make Up Your Skill Sets
This is a daunting list of tasks; manage to fill in the gaps with necessary skills.
Strategic-thinking leaders manage the following:
Strategic thinking leads to competing with self-management and self-performance, which is an area of blue ocean.
7.2 Blue Ocean Leadership
The following text has been adapted from Kim and Mauborgne (2015):
Research has found that people have a natural aversion to idleness: They’ll go out of way to stay busy, even if they have to invent things to do. But being too busy can be counterproductive. Studies have also shown that we have a bias toward action: When faced with a problem, we prefer to act, even if it would be best to pause first or do nothing. Together, both of these behaviors show that choosing to be busy is the easy choice. Being productive, by contrast, is much more challenging. What helps remedy this dilemma? Take time to step back and reflect on a regular basis. Reflection helps us understand the actions we’re considering and choose the ones that will make us productive. Even 15 minutes of planning each morning can help. So, the next time you feel busy, stop and think about what you actually need to get done.
The above noted scenario is essentially a result of disengagement of team players from the work and their desired results. Keeping busy to look busy is a tendency of self-deceiving for short terms.
According to Gallup’s 2013 State of American Workplace report, 50% of employees merely put their time in, while the remaining 20% act out their discontent in counterproductive ways, negatively influencing their coworkers, missing days on the job, and driving customers away through poor service. Gallup estimates that the 20% group alone costs the US economy around half a trillion dollars each year.
What’s the reason for the widespread team members’ disengagement? According to Gallup, poor leadership is a key cause.
Blue Ocean Leadership is required to engage all team players in moving the organization forward by releasing their untapped talent and energy. It starts from matching each team member’s strength with the right task to help enhance engagement.
Blue ocean leadership (Figure 7.1) involves a four-step process developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne that allows leaders to gain a clear understanding of just what changes it would take to bring out the best in their people, while conserving their most precious resource: time.
The Four Steps of Blue Ocean Leadership
Unlike most research in the field of leadership that has largely drawn on psychology and cognitive science, Blue Ocean Leadership has been developed by Kim and Mauborgne to look upon the field of strategy to inform the practice of leadership in business. Key differences from conventional leadership approaches are as follows:
The Blue Ocean Leadership Grid
This is an analytic tool that challenges team members to think which acts and activities leaders should do less of because they hold members back and which acts and activities leaders should do more of because they inspire members to give their all (Figure 7.2).
Current activities from the leaders profiles, that may add value along with new activities. The team members believe “What acts and activities do leaders invest their time and intelligence” that would add a lot of value if leaders started doing them, are assigned to the four categories in the grid. Organizations may use the grids to develop new profiles of effective leadership.
Four Steps for Execution
Summary
Learn achieving synergy for advancement in a strategic direction, which requires strong leadership skills in four areas: playing the role of connector, attracting diverse talent, modeling collaboration at the top, and showing a strong hand to keep teams from getting mired in debate. It starts with strategic thinking.
Strategic leaders must have a good understanding of business environment and focus on manageable factors for making a forceful way to desired end results. This chapter provides an understanding of challenges at different levels of the project management framework for preparing leaders.
Blue Ocean Leadership needs to be focused on to manage and make way for managing the market trends and creating an ocean to stay ahead of all competitions.
References
Covey, S.R. n.d. “Calls These Principles the “Laws of The Universe.” https://www.quora.com/What-Principles-was-Stephen-Covey-speaking-of University Press.
Kim, W.C., and R. Mauborgne. Fall, 2015. “Blue Ocean Leadership,” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2004/10/blue-ocean-strategy
Schwartz, J., J. Bersin, B. Pelster, March 07, 2014, “Global Human Capital Trends 2014 Survey”, Deloitte University Press. https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/human-capital-trends/2014/human-capital-trends-2014-survey-top-10-findings.html