Every other arena of leadership is theoretical elegant and practically useless. Cultural leaders inspire. Strategic leaders enable. Operational leaders empower. But it’s the practically accountable tactical leaders who deploy and adjust resources in real time to make things happen.
Yes, sometimes you need crisis leadership. Yes, you need to be intentional about change leadership. And yes, all need to innovate all the time. But the game is won or lost by tactical leaders and their teams who have freedom within a framework.
This is why you need to flip your mindset 180 degrees. Stop thinking in terms of decisions flowing from culture to strategy to operations to tactics. Instead, think about how your cultural, strategic, and operational leaders can best support your tactical leaders. This is the art of delegation: inspiring direction, empowering resources, enabling authority, and credible accountability.
What tactical leaders need from other leaders
The short answer is that tactical leaders need freedom within a framework. They need the freedom to make different choices than their superiors would make within the framework of cultural, strategic, and operational guidelines and the required resources.
Tactical leaders are the front line supervisors, the crew foremen, the engagement leads. They work at the coal face, on the shop floor, in the trenches. They manage tasks in real time, perhaps do daily huddles, and are accountable for real, tangible short-term results. They need to make constant choices about deploying and adjusting their resources and need cultural, strategic, and operational guidelines to inspire, enable, and empower them to make those choices themselves with as little friction as possible.
Medical triage is a classic example of tactical leadership. The triage lead sorts victims into those that need help now, don’t need help now, and can’t be helped. The critical choice is between those needing help now (“immediate”) or not needing help now because they either don’t need help at all, have issues that are “minor,” can wait (“delayed,”) or are beyond help. The lead needs guidelines to make those decisions literally immediately.
Operational leaders bridge between strategies and tactics. They run divisions, functions, geographies, programs, or campaigns. Tactical leaders need these operational leaders to filter the direction from above, make it easy to understand the most important guidelines, marshal resources, and create the space for them to operate.
As Group President of Coca-Cola Europe, Neville Isdell was much more of a decision enabler than decision maker. He’d give us boundaries and guidelines. If our choices fell within those boundaries and guidelines, he’d always support the decisions, no matter the outcome. He empowered the on-the-ground leaders to act.
Strategic leaders are the generals, arranging forces before engagements. They lead the work to create and allocate the right resources to the right place in the right way at the right time. That means there are wrong resources, places, ways, and times. Strategies are choices: Do this. Don’t do that. Do this first. Do that later. Strategies are only strategies if the opposite choice made sense.
At the Power Information Network, we collected, managed, and analyzed retail car sales to provide pricing and marketing guidance to car manufacturers. The strategic choice was that our competitive advantage was in creating the models to analyze the data. That led us to over-invest in analytical capabilities and outsource data-base management. Alternately, we could have chosen to build strengths in data-base management.
Cultural leaders determine who we are and what we stand for. This gets transmitted through things like mission, vision, and values statements. Per my earlier article, culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage and must be the thing that inspires everyone in the organization.
Recall Volkswagen had four values: social responsibility, sustainability, partnership, volunteering. Then they lied about emission test results in direct violation of the first two values. While it must have made sense to the people lying about the emission test results at the time, that choice caused the company irreparable harm over time.
Crisis, change, and innovation leaders work alongside the other four arenas. Tactical leaders need to give way to crisis leaders in times of crisis. They need to embrace change leaders as they manage transitions. They need to contribute to and benefit from innovation leaders at every step of the way.
The point is not that the “other” arenas of leadership don’t matter. It’s just that they all need to see their roles as inspiring, enabling, and empowering tactical leaders, holding them accountable, not controlling them.
