258 Strategic Leadership
and enacts many of the characteristics of relational leadership by building trust
and commitment among members of the organization (cf. Kezar 2004).
THE DISCIPLINE OF STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
Although always somewhat artificial when they are separated from their natural
connections in practice, we can distinguish the components of strategic leadership
to understand it more fully. In doing so, we can also recapitulate and systematize
the findings and claims of the preceding sections of this work. I have argued that
strategic leadership is a collaborative and integrative process and discipline of
decision making that enables an organization to understand, define, and adopt
shared purposes, priorities, and goals that are based on the group’s identity and
vision. It involves the following elements and assumptions:
- Human agency and values. When strategy is prosecuted as a discipline of leader-
ship, it becomes an integral process of human agency. As a consequence, strategic
leadership requires the critical awareness, articulation, and enactment of values
as organizational patterns of identity and commitment. - Organizational culture and paradigms. In the process of discovering an insti-
tution’s identity, the discipline of strategic leadership brings to awareness the
culture of an institution as a system of beliefs, values, and practices. It seeks
to become explicitly conscious of organizational paradigms: the presuppositions
that guide decisions, the norms that orient action, and the assumptions that
shape beliefs. - Narrative and vision. To elicit the possibilities of leadership, strategy draws on
the power of the organizational story as a sense-making and sense-giving narra-
tive of identity and aspiration. The story and the vision articulate shared beliefs,
commitments, and goals that create a sense of mutual responsibility and common
purpose, reconciling structural tensions in the academic system and culture of
decision making. - Data and information. Strategic leadership is data driven and information rich.
It uses a variety of strategic indicators and methods of quantitative reasoning to
define an institution’s characteristics and display its contextual possibilities and
challenges. - Responsiveness and responsibility. Contextual responsibility is the defining
mind-set of strategic thinking and leadership. It continuously seeks informa-
tion about the trends in the wider social, political, economic, educational, and
technological contexts. Strategic leadership defines its purposes and priorities
through a paradigm of responsive interpretation of and responsible interaction
with the world as it is and will be. - Conceptual thinking. Strategic leadership requires a deep conceptual understanding
of the meaning of the changing environment, organizational purposes and values,
and the distinguishing elements, educational programs, and commitments of the
institution, many of which are in tension with one another. - Integrative thinking. Given all the forms and dimensions of knowledge and
understanding that it involves, strategic leadership is a quintessentially integrative