Businesses are built on strategy. You might have all the wealth and resources in the world but may fail at developing a successful business completely. Some people have acquired strategy. Understanding loss and profits and buying and selling come easily to them. While others have to learn them from the excellent strategy institute and business schools. One thing that is unchanged, no matter how you learn it, is the strategy.
We always talk about strategic leadership and management in the context of corporate jargons in professional business strategy. For many, both are one and the same thing and often replaceable.
Ask a business leader and you will get a completely different outlook on the professional strategies, the two concepts can be. We are helping you clear the doubts about the two. Read on.
Strategy management has the foundation of its objectives in the fact that corporate policies have to be aligned with the strategic priorities. It is the analysis of factors which are associated with the competitors and customers as well as the organization. For the complete study of the concept, the competitors and the customers are classified as the external environment and the organizational set-up as the internal environment. The practices and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) have to be optimized for the workplace and its employees.
The organizations are set-up with a reason. The businesses have to develop with good ROI (Return on Investments) in the long run to withstand the grind of the competition. To fully integrate the forces into achieving profits year-on-year require mettle. The organization’s direction has to be understood for the future, the directives have to prepared, the SOPs explained, the planning made foolproof. Usually, the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of the company plans these all out with the CHRO (Chief Human Resources Officer) and CLO (Chief Learning Officer) of the company.
There are other pillars of support too to keep it fluid and complex. For example, the content and the process. The strategy formation is called the content which includes the policies, laws, rules, and regulations governing the office premises and environment. The strategy implementation is called the process. An excellent command of the conceptual and analytical thought processes will bring about the formation and implementation of the strategies.
Talking about strategic leadership, it is more of successfully lading a bunch of strategic people and continuously motivating them to perform better. The management of people is a great opportunity and a challenge to improve the productivity of the employees. The attributes of human resources, talent management, employee engagement, and employee retention policies come in here. The leaders have to align the employee’s aspirations, dreams, and professional objectives to the future prospects of the organization.
On the surface, strategic leadership and management as a professional business strategy look similar. They are different. But one professional business strategy can’t be implemented at the cost of other. Both have to run simultaneously like the railway tracks, without which the bogey of business will derail.
The Contours of Strategic Leadership and Management
