Strategic leader: for every problem, a solution (or even two!).

A strategic leader is one of the best leaders any company can have, because he has highly developed capacities of analysis and action, and therefore is able to deal with situations that seem to have incomprehensible causes and unobtainable solutions.

However, according to a study conducted by PwC Study on a sample of 6,000 senior managers, only 8% of those taken into consideration consider themselves strategic leaders. It is a low percentage, even if it has risen compared with recent years because companies have more instruments available for getting their managers to evolve in this direction.

Jessica Leitch, David Lancefield and Mark Dawson, three expert partners of PwC Study, have prepared a list of the 10 principles with which a company can train strategic leaders to add to their staff.

1- Distributed responsibilities: a company should have different employees at all levels, entrusted with different responsibilities. This way, the overall intelligence of the team grows, along with adaptability and flexibility of the organisation.

2- Honest and open information: sharing certain information within a company helps collaborators have a good overall vision and to develop a critical and active approach to their role and to the roles of others.

3- Creation of continuous and different stimuli: there are different ways in which a company can induce its collaborators to think about certain topics. The most common ones are internships, internal agency courses, attending university courses, reverse mentoring.

4- Safety in failure: a strategic leader learns from his mistakes, but not only: he must learn to distinguish which mistakes collaterally brought a positive result to the company. To do that, it is useful to have dialogue among teams involved in a failure in order to analyse it and draw useful conclusions for the company’s future actions.

5- Collaboration: at times a leader is not aware that he is a strategic leader until someone points it out to him by emphasising some of his characteristics, causing him to work on them. This is why each leader should constantly communicate with his team, as well as with managers and collaborators in other departments.

6- Practise as well as theory: the classic training for developing leadership in collaborators works, but it gives better results if supported by direct experience. Peter Senge, a renowned lecturer at MIT, suggests forming a team of potential strategic leaders and giving them an assignment to do in a limited time with a scant budget to analyse the way the task is carried out, the results obtained and to draw useful conclusions.

7- Intelligent hiring: hiring a new collaborator should be based on two different considerations: experience and ability, first of all, as well as forma mentis suited to the requirements of one’s company. A strategic leader knows what to do, and he knows it in relation to every detail and in relation to the whole picture of the company’s situation.

8- Authenticity: a strategic leader must be able to count on his managerial capacities as much as he can on his own interest, experiences and passions during work, in order to arrive at new and innovative solutions.

9- Personal reflection: Chris Argyris, expert in business strategy, suggests “doubleloop learning” to all managers, a way of thinking that envisages analysing the way in which situations are analysed before analysing the situations themselves.

10- Continuous learning: strategic leaders are aware that they do not have answers for everything, and that they have to keep learning and making progress. By acting in this way, they drive all team members to give their opinions and ask for help when needed, without feeling intimidated.

In order to develop strategic leadership at a company, it is necessary to work continuously and concurrently on these 10 points. And it is worthwhile: companies where strategic leaders work have a much wider margin of improvement and growth, because a so-called strategic leader, metaphorically speaking, has the ability to find his bearings in any forest: he sees the forest, but he is also able to see and distinguish individual trees in it.