108 Strategic Leadership
actions. Inherently collaborative, strategic leadership engages participants in
group processes and makes decisions through an intentional and structured series
of deliberations.
As will become clear, the connections between strategy and leadership require
careful elaboration. In effect, each of the concepts includes criteria that will set
the terms for its relationship in strategic leadership. Since leadership engages
humans at deep levels of their experience and motivation, strategy will have to
begin there. The idea of integral strategy takes us to organizational self-definition
through narratives as the starting-point for strategy. Leadership petitions strategic
management to find its depths and broaden its vision. The idea of “integral” strat-
egy also tries to capture the notion that strategic leadership has to be persistently
reflective about its own models of thought and judgment. To be adequate to the
task, it also must look toward both its connections to legitimate systems of author-
ity and its linkages to methods of implementation.
The integration of strategy and leadership involves a series of explicit expecta-
tions from the side of strategy as well. The strategy process asks that leadership
commit itself to a set of orderly steps and procedures, and to diverse forms of
knowledge, analysis, and measurement. Strategy and leadership offer each other
disciplined ways of understanding problems and making decisions, and interrelated
processes that can mobilize the people and the resources of an organization.
The Prerequisites of Strategic Leadership
We have drawn together several streams of reflection on leadership, decision
making, and values in order to set the course for a process of strategic leadership.
One way to appropriate the fruits of this labor is by elucidating a set of prereq-
uisites or conditions that must be satisfied for strategic leadership to be an effec-
tive practice in the decision-making world of the academy. Given what we have
learned, what tests does strategic leadership have to satisfy? I offer here a series of
initial propositions that will be developed, illustrated, and discussed throughout
subsequent sections of the text. By offering these motifs here, I hope to provide
the reader with both a recapitulation of key findings to date and an outline of the
argument and proposed practices that will unfold throughout the text.
Strategic leadership is:
- Integral: It begins at the level of human agency, values, and paradigms.
- Sense making: It relies on narrative to make sense of experience and give mean-
ing to the future. - Motivational: It mobilizes energy and commitment.
- Applied: It takes form in decisions and choices.
- Collaborative: It uses collegial deliberative methods.
- Systemic: It connects separate decision-making systems within the organization.
- Data driven: It depends on good metrics and strategic indicators.