Strategic leadership is the process of transforming an organisation with the help of its people so as to put it in a unique position. Thus, two aspects are involved in strategic leadership. First, it transforms the organisation which involves changing all faces such as size, management practices, culture and values, and people in such a way that the organisation becomes unique. Second, strategic leadership process emphasizes people because they are the source for transforming various physical and financial resources of the organisation into outputs that are meaningful to the society. Thus, strategic leadership proceeds as follows:-
- Strategic leadership deals with vision-keeping the mission in sight-and with effectiveness and results. It is less oriented to organisational efficiency in-terms of cost-benefit analysis.
- Strategic leadership emphasises transformational aspect and, therefore transformational leaders emerge in the organisation. Transformational leadership is the set of abilities that allow a leader to recognize the need for change to ‘create a vision to guide that change and to execute that change effectively.
- Strategic leadership inspires and motivates people to work together with a common vision and purpose.
- Strategic leadership has external focus rather internal focus. This external focus helps the organisation to relate itself with its environment
Organizational Culture: Organisational culture is another element which affects strategy implementation as it provides a framework within, which the behavior of the members takes place. Though there are differing Views on what constitute an organisational culture, generally, it is defined as a set of assumptions the members of an organisation share in common. For example, organisational culture has been defined as follows:
“Organisational culture is the set of assumptions. Beliefs, values and norms that are shared by an organization’s members Thus, there are two types of elements which define the culture of an organisation: abstract elements and material elements. Abstract – elements are internally oriented and include values, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. Material elements are externally focused and include building, personnel dresses, products, etc. Vijay Sathe has exemplified some common things to demonstrate the components of organizational culture:
- Shared things (e.g.. the way people dress)
- Shared saying (e.g.., let’s go down to work)
- Shared actions (e.g., a service-oriented approach)
- Shared feelings (e.g., hard work is not rewarded here)