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Chapter 10

Strategic leadership is not as same as the general concept of leadership. we define

leadership as the whole process that a specific organization will change to the point that

the leader wanted. So, by considering this concept, leaders will focus on the doing the

right things. In this way, the strategic leader should be responsible for two tasks which

are being a change agent who remove the barrier in the change process, and the

effectiveness of power usage in this process. for this purpose, every leader should

consider that they should perform other tasks such as working on showing status quo as

bad elements, providing the vision for the stakeholder in the process, and designing the

whole process for implementing the change.

This concept is critical as nowadays; the market is more complicated than those

previous decades, so making the decision to do the right thing can be considered as the

main responsibility of leaders who want to help the organization to survive in the rapidly

changing environment. However, we should also consider that the thing also should be

done rightly in order to reach success in competitive industries.

So, in general, every leader should build directions for the stakeholder, creating

the organizational design, and building and maintaining the culture that is focused on the

ethical approach. When an organization fails because of having dishonest and unethical
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actions of the stakeholder, the leader will be responsible as he/she did not care about the

culture and empowering the environment and people with the potential hazards in the

business.

direction

we should consider that looking to the future can be a complex job as the leader

should have the necessary knowledge and experience in this regard. for this purpose,

leaders should always scan the general environment of the company and the industry to

gain the necessary and updated knowledge and expertise for modifying the vision and the

direction for the employees. However, we should consider that the vision should be

visible, and it is better to design in a way that leaders can deliver them to their staff in a

short speech. even the direction should be specific and practical.

Even if the leader has a clear vision and direction, he/she will face some difficulty

in implementing in the organization. One reason can be the approach of the top managers

as some of them are not be responsible and consider themselves accountable for the

consequence of the failure of the process. another reason can be the lack of an effective,

rewarding system. this can justify that why some employees are not eager to participate

and evolve in the process. also, it should be designed in a way that that system targets the

teamwork, and motivate individuals to work in teamwork and individually. Also, this

organizational design can help the leaders to monitor and control the system, resources,

and particularly the budgeting. The leader should also consider that mechanism that can

act as glue for integrating a different kind of activities in the corporation. We can

describe the leader to an architect who should design the plan of the whole organization

and its structure.

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Creating and nurturing the culture can be considered as another activity that

leaders should do in their organization. This culture can be guaranteed that the employees

show ethical behavior in their job. we should consider that every organization with its

specific culture can provide the environment that employees need to do their

responsibility. If we want to have effective teamwork in our organization, we should

build an environment that everyone can trust to each other, and they should also feel safe

whenever they want to say their opinion or critics even to the leader. A good example

can be Huawei, which build its wolf culture, where the employees are focused on

teamwork , and they have an aggressive approach towards learning. This culture came

from the approach of the previous leader who wanted to mix military approach towards

learning, and the wolfs’ behaviors together, and introducing this combination as a cultural

characteristic in the environment. From the other side, there were some leaders that

introduced the wrong culture for their organization. However, we should consider that

their strategy may increase their profit in the short-term with their illegal approach, but in

the long-term, this culture will fail the whole company, leaders and all the stakeholders.

So, it is important that the leaders and all the stakeholders such as normal

employees, top managers, and supervisors be aware of their legal responsibility for not

only having ethical actions and behaviors, but they should also try to improve ethical

approach in their decisions.

Regarding the role of leaders as a change agent, they have to remove the barriers

that impede the implementation of the change process. sometimes, leaders have

difficulty in introducing the sense of urgency to the change receivers, and this can make

this process difficult as some of the change receivers are got stuck on the status quo. In
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this way, we can use form the concept of escalation of commitment, in which our

employees are more likely to continues their past strategy in decision making and

continuing their previous behaviors and actions in spite of the fact that they saw the

negative consequence of these strategies and behaviors. Even they continue to invest

more time, effort and money in this way as they sunk at the cost of their decisions. These

barriers can be behavioral, political or systematic. Regarding the political barriers, the

leader should solve the conflicts that can be happened because of the power struggling

between individuals, departments, and subsidiaries. This problem can decrease the ability

of the company to implement the knowledge management system that can help the whole

organization to access to knowledge, experience, and especially tacit knowledge. In fact,

for this purpose the leader can use form different type of power which are:

• Expert power: at the personal and organizational level

• Reward power: at the organizational level

• legitimate power: in the organizational level

• Referent power: in the personal and organizational level

• Coercive power: at the organizational level

However, in my opinion, the use of power depends on the situation and the

resources that we have. If we use push strategy), the situation can be described as a

burning platform, where we have to push and push. So, we have to use the coercive

power. moreover, the leadership style is important as I was thinking about the

transformational leaders who use from the referent power to change the organization. In

this part, I think that every leader should use a different type of leadership, and different

type of powers according to the environment and the changes in it.

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Another topic that I learned was about the role of emotional intelligence in the

strategic leadership. emotional intelligence is the capacity and ability of an individual in

understanding and managing itself emotions as well as managing and controlling the

interpersonal relationships. In this concept, we have five elements of self-awareness, self-

regulation, the motivation, empathy, and the social skills. First, it should mention that the

emotional intelligent can be learned by some exercise, and in this way, the Yale center,

defined the ruler program, which targets to improve these capabilities for children in the

school. For example, self-awareness is the art of understanding our self. When we have

the ability to understand our weakness and strength accurately, we can have more

knowledge about ourselves, and this can help us to predict our behavior in some specific

situations.

This element can help us to manage those emotions that we find by the help of

self-awareness. Among the abilities in this element, we have the self-control ability that

can help us to control ourselves when should react quickly. Another capability is social

awareness, in which we try to recognize other people’s emotion, and in this way by the

help of the social skills, we can have good communication skills with these people. if a

leader does not work on him/herself, he/she can not understand the weakness and strength

of his/her personality. Consequently, this can create the concept of rageaholics and drama

queens that refers to those leaders that people do not tend to follow them. In this way,

strategic leaders by having social awareness can easily recognize the existing politics in

the office, which can help them to even understand the unspoken-rules. So, these leaders

can easily change the atmosphere of the office when there is a negative feeling among

individuals because of a misunderstanding or conflicts.

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Effective leaders should show the empathy to others, and for achieving the

objectives, he/she should have passion. also, leaders should be in focus in getting the

welfare of the company. Moreover, leaders should have good communication skills to

influence others to get involved in the change process. However, an effective leader

should learn the difference between the sympathy and the concept of empathy. Also, it is

important that a leader focus on other possibilities, and evaluate them by passion.

Another concept that effective leader should build for the company is a learning

organization. This concept can help employees to learn continuously, and this can

develop the creativity as they are allowed to underline the assumptions. In my opinion,

we can create the knowledge management system, which can smooth the flow of

information in the organizations. This concept can help us to motivate our individual to

develop themselves, and this can be also a motivation for them to be an organization for a

long period. This system can also increase the culture of cooperation among the staff in

spite of their positions and levels.

Leaders also should integrate ethics with the nature of the business, and this can

help us to increase the probability of showing the ethical behavior from the staff.

Another concept that strategic leaders should lean is the innovation managing, which is

integrated with the change. For gaining the competitive advantage, the companies have

been invested heavily in this area. The new approach in innovation can help the

companies to see new opportunities, and make a new strategy. if we look at Apple, the

company was successful in creating and introducing new and unique products to the

market, which provided great opportunities for the company. However, we should

consider that for making innovate products, we need to have unique technologies, the
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right approach, and the necessary information which is the result of the long-term

research projects.in this way, we should understand that innovation can effective when

we have differentiation strategy. the process of innovation can be done in different ways;

In this way, we can create a product with a unique feature, that help us to have a better

position in the market. this can be effective in the early stage of the industry.

There are different types of innovations, and they can be radical, incremental,

sustaining innovation and disruptive. In radical, we can revaluation change the whole

game as we created something new with the help of the shift in the technology. In

incremental innovation, we will focus on improving our current products, and this

improvement is small. In fact, the innovation can on the previous innovative products,

and find new applications for them. In sustaining approach, we will focus on increasing

the margins in our sales by offering new products with profit focused. In disruptive, we

are looking for making some innovative products that fit the customer's needs, and

simpler technology can be used in this way.

In the innovation process, we have some challenges that strategic leader should

manage. In this way, It is important that the company should consider which option is the

effective option (seed), and then which option should be removed in comparison. Also,

the way, we manage the authority for the decision making of people, the way we tend to

make collaboration or make these capabilities internally are considered as other

challenges for us.

In the innovation’s management, leaders should lean to discover the potentials

innovation, build the intelligence by tasks such as making a network with different

stakeholder, monitoring the behaviors, and evaluating their wisdom. This can help us to
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find out the new ways, and the new situation in the process. for improving the

innovation, we will figure out the technology, and market theme, and in this way, we will

figure out how much this project will (1) cost for us, (2) bring new lessons for us, (3)

bring new values for us, and (4) produce the new values for the company. However, in

this process, we should consider that the time and the speed of this process can be

changed base on different type of innovation, where the radical innovation can be last 10

years, and incremental innovation will cover those process with less than two years.

Leaders should understand that they should facilitate the collaboration between the

company and other companies, and this can cover the strategy that we use for managing

the intellectual property or the reward system. even when we find ourselves in a failure

situation, we can understand that the lessons we learn in this process can be considered as

our valuable lessons.

The entrepreneurial culture also refers to the culture that the ideas can become

from the bottom-line, and in this way, leaders consider every value chain as a potential

source of competitive advantage. This culture can help us to not only take more risks, but

also it can help us to consider new opportunities.

Another concept is resource allotments, in which we consider the two elements of

time investment and the monetary investment in our process. moreover, we should

consider that every project should be evaluated by two elements of project definition and

project impetus, in which we justify our opportunities and how much we can support the

process’s development. Another concept is corporate entrepreneurship, in which the rate

of profitability is more than 50 percent. In this way, the big companies tend to invest in

start-ups, and this can help the companies to reach to new markets. The last concept that
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we learn in this class was the biases in the decision making of the leaders. Sometimes, the

leaders can stick in the escalation of commitment, in which the leader for avoiding to lose

the capital that has been invested in the project, will continue to have a commitment

toward the project. Another bias can be the overconfidence, in which the leaders have too

much confidence in their control in the final outcomes of the process. Therefore, the

leaders should understand that they should understand the possible biased in their

decision making, and find some practical ways to improve the quality of their decisions.