264 Strategic Leadership
of leadership, it offers structure and systems of responsibility to its symbolic and
collegial forms. Without an integrated system of decision making within which to
function, these other approaches can remain ineffectual. Collegiality offers the
form but not the content of decisions required to respond to change, so strategic
leadership alters its forms while respecting its norms. At times the intricate
protocols of governance become intractable or an elegant excuse for inaction.
Symbolic thinking draws heavily on the indispensable power and meaning of
institutional stories and culture, but it cannot by itself systematize or enact what
it believes. It often tends to resist change by holding up images of a golden past
that will never return.
Strategic leadership draws the other forms of leadership into a system that
creates a true interpenetration of the approaches, a powerful integration of pur-
pose and action. It moves beyond a serial or sequential application of different
leadership methods that would deal with some issues in one way and others
in another, moving from case to case with skills and insights that lack coher-
ence. Mixing styles without an inner logic can lead to one method becoming
dominant, distorting the other approaches to fit its perception of reality. Leaders
often live comfortably for long periods with distorted interpretations of their
organizations, squelching information that challenges their primary frame of
reference. Their sense of personal effectiveness as leaders often becomes tied
to their dominant models of perception. Changing models, and allowing new
insights and new learning to take hold, becomes a threat to personal and profes-
sional self-worth.
The Integration of Leadership
Strategic leadership, on the other hand, seeks a genuine synthesis of the differ-
ent frames of leadership. It draws together all the hard realities of an institution’s
choices and circumstances around a sense-making narrative and sense-giving vision
of the purposes that it serves, with the organization as the agent of that vision. The
various frames then function as subsystems within a systematic method that uses,
modifies, and transforms them to implement an integrative strategy. As we have
seen throughout the course of our inquiry, strategic leadership creates the mecha-
nisms of governance, forms of authority and administrative systems it requires to
do its work. It systematically unites power with purpose, vision with action, shared
values with shared governance, and narratives of identity with administrative sys-
tems. As an integrative frame of meaning, strategic leadership allows us to see what
is there in varying degrees but is often hidden—a complex but real integration and
interpenetration of an institution’s systems of decision making.
Learning Strategic Leadership
One of the reasons that strategic leadership is a process with broad application is
that it functions as an applied discipline. This means that its various components