Great Strategic Leaders Take Responsibility

Over the last few weeks, I’ve written about the individual behaviors that the literature suggests lead to great strategic leadership. Perhaps the most important aspect of these behaviors is that to be a great strategic leader, you actually have to lead. 

The main reason why: Great strategy doesn’t happen by magic. 

Someone has to stitch together the disparate thoughts of the team into a coherent whole. A brainstorming session does not yield a coherent set of priorities. 

Someone has to put teeth behind notions like “focus” and “priorities.” People don’t voluntarily give up the projects that give them power, status, and potential promotions—their short-term interests—just because those activities fall outside of what’s in the long-term interests of the enterprise. 

And someone has to take responsibility for both causing and cleaning up the difficult political and emotional fallout from making those decisions.  

Finally, someone has to take a leap of faith. Whatever analysis you do will almost never be good enough to describe how the future will unfold. At some point, someone has to take a point of view (even if lightly held). 

Analysis is also never strong enough to say that sacrificing what’s merely good for the sake of concentrating resources on the drivers of greatness—what HBS professor Frances Frei and Anne Morriss call “dare-to-be-bad” decisions—is absolutely a good idea.

In short, strategic leadership requires courage. 

My use of “someone” in this post is not to imply that strategy is a solo affair. It’s mostly to recognize that strategy is hard because organizing human groups to achieve goals is hard.  

Process doesn’t solve the problem. 

Committees definitely don’t solve it. 

David Ogilvy blamed committees for most of the advertising he saw that didn’t represent a coherent idea: “In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create.” 

In my experience, the same could be said for incoherent strategy.

The only solution is a leader who skillfully uses process and committees to get the group close enough to a decision, then carries the strategy baton across the finish line.