Leadership is about inspiring, enabling and empowering others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose. Nesting within that, CEOs, senior leaders, middle managers, and frontline supervisors should focus on cultural, strategic, operational, and tactical leadership respectively, with all-in during a crisis.
Cultural Leadership
Ultimately, culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage. It’s the one thing CEOs can never delegate. All need to be clear on who we are and what we stand for as described in the organization’s mission, vision and values.
- Mission: What called to do and why it matters
- Vision: Picture of success in which all can envision themselves
- Values/Guiding Principles: Things you will not compromise on the way – including the nature of the business (design, produce, deliver/distribute, service)
This is what inspires others to be part of the organization and is enduring.
Strategic Leadership
Strategic leadership is about choices – the creation and allocation of the right resources to the right place in the right way at the right time over time. This means there are wrong resources, wrong places, and wrong times. Michael Porter taught us that strategy is about choosing what not to do. Harry Kangis went one step further and taught us that choosing not to do a bad idea is easy. The hard choice is choosing not to do something that’s a good idea for someone else.
Choices are theoretically elegant and practically useless unless they are backed with enabling resources. Strategic choices should play out over time and are the province of senior leaders. This is where the 6% in Don Hampton’s framework comes in. As CEO, he said others had to make 90% of the decisions. 4% were his alone. 6% were shared. Strategic choices must be shared by the senior leadership team, CEO, and board.
Operational Leadership
Operational leadership occupies the middle ground, where the matrix comes to life. It’s part strategic and part tactical. It’s mid-term. It’s the realm of middle managers leading divisions or business units, functions, geographies, programs, or campaigns. These leaders often wear two hats, sitting on the executive leadership team with their influence spanning across the entire organization, and leading their own areas. Business units, functions, geographies and the like will have their own strategies, nested within the overall strategies.
The allies in World War II provide an illustrative example.
- Churchill and Roosevelt set the overall strategy of Europe first, Asia second.
- Marshall’s European strategy was Africa first, partly to come up through the soft underbelly and partly to give the allied forces a chance to learn how to fight before attacking Europe.
- Patton led the Africa campaign across a continent that Churchill and Roosevelt hadn’t even mentioned.
Marshall was empowered to make that choice and empowered Patton to run his campaign.
Tactical Leadership
Strategic leadership flows from the Greek word “strategos” – the art of the general. This is about arranging forces before the battle – planning where to play (and not play) and how to win.
Tactical leadership flows from the Greek word “taktikos” – deploying forces in battle. This is about tactical capacity, a team’s ability to translate strategies into tactical actions decisively, rapidly, and effectively, with high-quality responsiveness under difficult, changing conditions. As one leader puts it, “Tactical leadership is about permanent agility and adaptation looking for solutions.”
This only works if senior and operational leaders empower tactical leaders to make choices different than they would make themselves, nested within the culture and strategic choices, and hold them accountable for their results.
These are more short-term choices and are the realm of frontline supervisors.
Crisis Management
In an earlier article on critical learning about crisis management, I suggested three steps of disciplined iteration in line with an organization’s overall purpose/culture:
- Prepare in advance. The better you have anticipated possible scenarios, the more prepared you are, the more confidence you will have when crises strike.
- React to events. The reason you prepared is so that you all can react quickly and flexibility to the situation you face. Don’t over-think this. Do what you prepared to do to mitigate physical, reputational, and financial threats – in that order of priority.
- Bridge the gaps. In a crisis, there are inevitably gaps between the desired and current situation. Rectify those by bridging immediately critical gaps first and then gaps in your ability to prevent and respond to future crises.
