Ordinary Leader vs Strategic Leader: What Works Best?

Are you a leader whose goal is to charter his/her team and company to success?  How exactly do you achieve that? It’s simple! You need a strategy.

This begs the question: What exactly is the difference between an ordinary leader and a strategic one?

An ordinary leader looks to the present and understands how to navigate the day to day needs of an organization. Whereas a strategic leader looks to the future to develop new opportunities, products or services for an organization in order to fulfill goals and missions.

If you want your company to have a solid future and have long term success then this is where strategic leadership comes in.

Why does it work best? Let’s dive in;

Vision

When organizations have a vision they’re aiming toward, they’re able to set short-term goals that help them achieve long-term goals. Where do you want the company to be in 5 years?

A good example is PayPal.  Instead of becoming another ordinary bank, they opted to go for other methods. They chose to focus on building partnerships with traders, sellers, suppliers etc, being quicker to market than other payment innovation companies, and building trust with consumers. All this shows that they had a clear goal of how exactly they wanted to do business.

Planning

Organizations are better equipped to achieve goals and handle strategic decisions when they have a well-thought-out plan.  What is the goal at hand? How exactly do we go about achieving this plan? Risks at hand? These are crucial questions a strategic leader asks when making plans.

Strategic systems

Organizations can save time, money, and resources when they create frameworks and systems to support strategic change. Simply put, think of a company that is transitioning from having its employees in the office to having them work at home. It obviously saves the company some money in terms of paying rent for office space but at the same time, the leaders need to come up with a work schedule and also ensure that the employees have resources for working remotely. For example; do they have working laptops? Are they able to have stable internet?

Big or small, change requires one to have frameworks setup to ensure that everything runs smoothly.

Encourages unity

Effective leadership encourages unity and collaboration. Strategic leaders value team members’ opinions and input.  An ordinary leader will often be dictatorial but a strategic leader will encourage teamwork at all times. They will help find solutions for challenges instead of reprimanding and lecturing. A strategic leader will also acknowledge achievements, minor or major.

Bottom line;

The best leadership style ultimately depends on the organization, but strategic leadership might be better if you want to secure a solid future for your company or business.

Are you a leader seeking to become more strategic and honing your abilities? Sign up for this Strategic Leadership & Management Skills training course to help your team and company reach its goals!