The Nature and Dimensions of Strategic Leadership

Abstract

This paper aims to provide an understanding of the nature and dimensions of strategic leadership. It considers the nature of strategy in its broadest sense and puts forward a model of a sustainable strategically focused school. This model encompasses strategic processes and approaches but is driven by strategic leadership. The main thrust of the paper is to examine the personal attributes of strategic leaders and the activities they undertake. It is drawn from our strategy research since the late 1990s. Introduction: What is strategy and strategic leadership? One of the key challenges, when taking up a senior leadership position, is the move from an operational perspective to a strategic perspective. Strategic leadership, by definition, links the strategic function with the leadership function. School leaders articulate the definition of the organisation's moral purpose, which can be considered as 'why we do what we do'. The values that underpin this moral purpose are linked to the vision, considering 'where we want to be and what sort of organisation we want to be in the future'. Strategic leadership is the means of linking this broad activity to shorter-term operational planning, thereby imbuing the responses to immediate events with elements of the value system and the longer-term strategic direction. Strategic leadership is, therefore, defining the vision and moral purpose and translating them into action. It is a means of building the direction and the capacity for the organisation to achieve that directional shift or change. This translation requires a proactive transformational mind-set which strives for something better, rather than the maintenance approach of transactional leadership.