Strategic Leadership | Conclusion: The Strategic Integration of Leadership
The time has come to take stock of the enterprise of strategic leadership. As
suggested earlier, at one level, this work is an effort to reinterpret strategic
decision-making processes that occur in some form in every institution.
Strategic thinking may be tacit or self-conscious, fragmented or systematic,
episodic or continuous. Nonetheless, it would be hard to claim that an institution
could function without defining itself and its place in the world through decisions
about its future. Some forms of strategy and reciprocal leadership have to be in
place for academic organizations to function at all.
RECAPITULATION
Starting with these givens, I have attempted to reconceptualize the strategy
process based on an understanding of leadership as a method of direction setting
and sense making rooted in narratives, values, and paradigms. Based on those
meanings, I have tried to show how a systematic approach to strategic leadership offers a coherent and promising method for decision making in colleges and
universities.
The reconceptualization of the strategy process leads to its reformulation. More
than inventing a set of new practices, I have aimed to discover new meanings,
relationships, and possibilities in existing ones. I have suggested that the process
and the discipline of strategic leadership must be woven into the protocols and
structures of collaborative governance. The reformulation changes the form of
strategy by providing it with a comprehensive, systematic, systemic, and integrated
agenda for implementation. As the process unfolds, it can become both embodied
and embedded in the life and work of the organization. In doing so, it exemplifies
258 Strategic Leadership
and enacts many of the characteristics of relational leadership by building trust
and commitment among members of the organization (cf. Kezar 2004).
THE DISCIPLINE OF STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
Although always somewhat artificial when they are separated from their natural
connections in practice, we can distinguish the components of strategic leadership
to understand it more fully. In doing so, we can also recapitulate and systematize
the findings and claims of the preceding sections of this work. I have argued that
strategic leadership is a collaborative and integrative process and discipline of
decision making that enables an organization to understand, define, and adopt
shared purposes, priorities, and goals that are based on the group's identity and
vision. It involves the following elements and assumptions:
• Human agency and values. When strategy is prosecuted as a discipline of leadership, it becomes an integral process of human agency. As a consequence, strategic
leadership requires the critical awareness, articulation, and enactment of values
as organizational patterns of identity and commitment.
• Organizational culture and paradigms. In the process of discovering an institution's identity, the discipline of strategic leadership brings to awareness the
culture of an institution as a system of beliefs, values, and practices. It seeks
to become explicitly conscious of organizational paradigms: the presuppositions
that guide decisions, the norms that orient action, and the assumptions that
shape beliefs.
• Narrative and vision. To elicit the possibilities of leadership, strategy draws on
the power of the organizational story as a sense-making and sense-giving narrative of identity and aspiration. The story and the vision articulate shared beliefs,
commitments, and goals that create a sense of mutual responsibility and common
purpose, reconciling structural tensions in the academic system and culture of
decision making.
• Data and information. Strategic leadership is data driven and information rich.
It uses a variety of strategic indicators and methods of quantitative reasoning to
define an institution's characteristics and display its contextual possibilities and
challenges.
• Responsiveness and responsibility. Contextual responsibility is the defining
mind-set of strategic thinking and leadership. It continuously seeks information about the trends in the wider social, political, economic, educational, and
technological contexts. Strategic leadership defines its purposes and priorities
through a paradigm of responsive interpretation of and responsible interaction
with the world as it is and will be.
• Conceptual thinking. Strategic leadership requires a deep conceptual understanding
of the meaning of the changing environment, organizational purposes and values,
and the distinguishing elements, educational programs, and commitments of the
institution, many of which are in tension with one another.
• Integrative thinking. Given all the forms and dimensions of knowledge and
understanding that it involves, strategic leadership is a quintessentially integrative
Conclusion 259
discipline. The claims that it advances and the goals that it sets require the synthesis of information, concepts, and meanings that come in a variety of forms
from many sources.
• Decision making. As a discipline of decision making, strategic leadership displays the peculiar integrative and sovereign power of decisions. They take place
as enactments that synthesize a wide range of factors. Rarely the consequence of
rational calculation or deductive logic alone, decisions carry the deep imprint of
culture, commitments, and political influences.
• Systemic thinking. Not only is strategic decision making integrative at the
two levels of knowledge and of decision, it is also systemic. It understands that
insights and decisions in one domain of an organization are connected to others
as part of a system.
THE PROCESS OF STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
This recapitulation of strategic leadership as a discipline is enlarged, enriched,
and exemplified as we consider the organizational systems and processes that
enable and enact it. We have seen that strategic leadership as a process involves
a variety of mechanisms, methods, steps, and procedures.
• Collaboration. Reciprocal leadership and decision making require dialogue and
interaction between groups and individuals in order to interpret the meaning of
the organization's context and mission. Many strategic insights and possibilities
are a collaborative achievement, often not available to individuals working in
isolation.
• Governance. The process of strategic leadership requires effective mechanisms of
governance that overcome the complexity and fragmentation of decision making
in higher education. A strategy council or its equivalent has to be empowered to
recommend a coherent strategic agenda for the institution's future.
• Legitimacy. The mechanisms of strategic governance must not only be effective
but must also satisfy campus norms of collegial decision making. Ultimately it
falls to the governing board and the president to ensure that the mechanisms and
methods of strategic governance, strategic leadership, and strategic management
meet the canons of both legitimacy and effectiveness.
• Design. The strategy process and its mechanisms must be carefully designed and
organized to ensure effectiveness. Persons who are assigned key roles should have
appropriate levels of interest, skill, and knowledge, and the president and other
top officers must be committed to the tasks of strategy.
• Systemic methods. Both as a discipline and as a process, strategic leadership is
systemic and discerns the connectedness of the activities and programs of the
organization. As a result, it drives strategic management to be integrative and
seeks to build a momentum of accomplishment through continuing assessment
and improvements in quality as a learning organization.
• Embedded process. The processes of strategic leadership develop relationships
that create trust and respect among participants and encourage confidence and
260 Strategic Leadership
empowerment among both leaders and followers. Over time, the practices of
strategic leadership become embedded in patterns of initiative and systems of
responsibility throughout the organization.
This summary of the elements of strategic leadership also reveals a way to
integrate several of the major approaches to the study of leadership and decision
making in higher education. At various points, we have explored the insights
that can be drawn from studies of collegiate culture concerning the significance
of symbolism, narratives, and sense making. At other places we have reviewed
the findings and the counsel of those who see strategy as a set of management practices. The literature on collegial governance and the empirical and
conceptual studies of presidential and other forms of leadership have also been a
focus of our attention. Our aim has been to integrate these diverse and valuable
threads of research, theory, and practice into a model of leadership as a reciprocal
process of sense making, sense giving, and enactment.
We can perhaps do no better to illustrate the potential integration of these
conceptual and practical motifs than by returning to Burton Clark's (1998) study
of entrepreneurial universities. In these contexts, he notes how a powerful institutional idea links up participants and spreads to practices and processes of decision
making that create enduring and distinctive beliefs, eventually creating a new culture. Strong cultures reinforce practices and create a unified identity, which can in
time become a saga, encapsulating the sense of distinctive organizational achievements. I see these administrative, conceptual, and cultural elements described
by Clark as components that can be integrated through a systematic method of
strategic leadership.
THE DIALECTICS OF LEADERSHIP
There are many perspectives from which this proposal for strategic leadership can
be questioned. Some will disagree with our approach because they do not resonate
with its conceptual framework and methods of argumentation. Others will be skeptical because they resist all forms of strategy, and yet others will await a large-scale
empirical study to support the usefulness of the approach—a complex and difficult
one, given the many variables involved (cf. Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer 2004). On
a more practical level, some will find that the recommendations for changes in governance, the strategy process, and management systems are not possible or realistic,
at least in their circumstances. Others will continue to be most comfortable with
the way they have consistently used strategic planning to good effect as a tool of
management. For all these reasons and others, many decision makers might suggest
that various combinations of the political, symbolic, collegial, or administrative
models of leadership are most useful and effective. A number of leaders, including
many presidents, prefer to be more independent and spontaneous than is suggested
by the collaborative system required in a discipline of leadership.
One of the most persistent questions about strategic leadership will come in
response to the claim that an important dimension of leadership can be practiced
Conclusion 261
as a process and an applied discipline. Returning to some of our earlier themes,
we note again that we are still conditioned to think of leaders as exceptional individuals who hold substantial positions of power, generally because of the unusual
qualities or qualifications they possess. Though the weight of modern scholarship
centers on quite different notions of leadership, on an everyday basis we tend to
reflect within inherited habits of thought. As a consequence, we doubt claims that
some aspects of leadership could be a process and a discipline, when it seems so
manifestly to be a matter of special abilities and characteristics. If a discipline, it
could be taught and learned.
Even those scholars who vigorously endorse the study of leadership do not
necessarily intend to establish the case that it is a discipline of practice, as opposed
to one of reflection. They advance the claim that leadership can be taught as
a method of inquiry, as a "multidiscipline," as "leadership studies," which in itself
is controversial (Burns 1978, 2003). Although it may be implied in the work of
a number of scholars, it is quite another thing to argue that we can teach explicitly
for the exercise of leadership as a discipline of decision making.
Yet, as I have tried to show, strategic leadership is a way to integrate practices,
methods, insights, and knowledge about leadership into an applied discipline for
the exercise of leadership. To be sure, authority and the attributes, expertise, and
practices of leaders should be understood as the conditions on which strategic
leadership depends and the resources it needs to be effective. To use a common but
helpful distinction on which we shall rely, strategic leadership can function only if
these necessary conditions are satisfied. Yet necessary are not sufficient conditions
and it is many of the latter that strategic leadership provides as a discipline and
process of decision making.
Resources: Authority, Talent, and the Tasks of Leadership
We can illustrate the dimensions of the relationship between necessary and
sufficient conditions with reference to authority, a topic we have considered on
several occasions. To be sure, strategic leadership in colleges and universities
depends on authority to be successful. Yet since leadership is a reciprocal process
that finally depends on the consent, involvement, and commitment of a broad
cross-section of a campus community that enjoys substantial decision-making
autonomy, authority alone cannot constitute leadership. We can see it as a critical
resource for leadership (Burns 1978).
A similar relationship between necessary and sufficient is evident in the way
a wide variety of talents and characteristics that are associated with leaders actually
function within a leadership process. The capacity to communicate and to inspire,
qualities of courage and tenacity, ability to resolve conflict and solve problems,
and the possession of expert knowledge and experience are the kinds of attributes
one finds in leaders. These characteristics, again, are clearly necessary but not
sufficient for leadership. For without a value centered structure within which to
orient them to a common task, and to fulfill a high purpose, they can become
262 Strategic Leadership
distorted and disoriented. If the defining goal of leadership becomes the power
and self-aggrandizement of the leader, then these valuable personal resources can
become the snares and delusions of a demagogue or dictator. A defining commitment to fulfilling human needs and possibilities shows itself to be essential to
leadership, serving as a moral criterion for the process. The criterion helps us to
differentiate the special characteristics and dynamics of leadership as a discipline
of purpose, not just of power (Burns 1978, 2003.)
In a similar way, the recent emphasis on the practices and relational processes
of leadership represent an important resource, but one that needs to be supplemented by the system of a discipline. Many contemporary theorists suggest
practices that involve sensitivity to the needs and values of followers, the requirement to develop a vision, and willingness to challenge standard practices (Kouzes
and Posner 1990). All these tasks are indeed facets of the leadership relationship
and conditions of its effectiveness. Yet, without a more structured intellectual
framework and systematic process in which to set them, they can become a loosely
related list of individual acts and practices that lack connection. They can easily
be overtaken by the press of events, forgotten in the crush of institutional business
or lost in the urgencies of implementation.
THE STRATEGIC INTEGRATION OF LEADERSHIP
We can see some of these same patterns of relationship in returning to a topic
we reviewed earlier concerning the various frames or styles of presidential leadership
in colleges and universities: the political, administrative, collegial, and symbolic.
We learned that each of them offers a vital perspective for understanding and
exercising leadership, yet none of them is adequate to the task of integration if it
functions in isolation or sequentially.
Strategic Leadership and Political Leadership
To illustrate, consider the capacity to persuade, to create coalitions, to reward
and punish, to splinter the opposition, to use power creatively and at times coercively, all of which are the stuff of classical political leadership. These are tools
that are required in any organizational context, and many colleges and university
leaders depend on them as tactics and skills required for much of their effectiveness. If campus relationships turn hostile or adversarial, the political, and/or the
administrative frames of leadership often become dominant because they offer the
safety net of authority. There may be no other choice.
The process of strategy itself requires political deftness in its development and
operation, for it has to be inserted into a real world of political relationships and
patterns of influence. Moreover, strategy, if carefully done, becomes in itself a
powerful vehicle of political legitimacy. It is highly collaborative, uses information
transparently, and focuses on issues and tasks through collegial methods. By its
very existence, collaborative strategy makes its own political statement that the
academy's most important values of process and substance matter. It empowers
Conclusion 263
people to address issues of consequence and to seek new opportunities, and in so
doing it builds trust. A good strategy process penetrates and gives a new form to
the political frame.
But strategy transcends political considerations because it defines the contours
of the future in terms of the enduring commitments of the organization. Without
fidelity to core values, politics becomes blind. As both our national and campus
political lives teach us, it can degenerate into systematic distortions, an ugly contest of egos, and character assassination. These weapons are in evidence on some
campuses, as much as in the capital. For its practices to remain responsible, politics
has to be redeemed by purpose, and purpose has to reflect fundamental values.
When politics are integrated into strategic leadership it functions within a process
bounded by a legacy, oriented to a vision, and infused with substantive values.
Strategic Leadership and Administrative, Collegial,
and Symbolic Leadership
As we touch on the other leadership frames or styles—the administrative, the
collegial, and the symbolic—we find similar patterns of relationship with strategic leadership. The other forms provide necessary conditions and resources that
are refashioned and reoriented when they are drawn into the larger dialectic of
integration that strategic leadership provides.
To pursue another example, without a good administrative infrastructure,
strategy will go nowhere. Good data are needed, effective staff support is required,
administrative control systems must be adequate, and the organizational capacities
have to be in place to implement goals. At one level, strategy itself is simply a set
of administrative practices and methods. Yet administrative effectiveness is clearly
not sufficient for the motivation and engagement that are required in strategic
leadership. It does not always welcome or understand change, cannot overcome the
structural conflict to which it is a party, and easily falls prey to routine. More than
administrative expertise and good management are required to serve the evolving
needs and possibilities of academic organizations. Under the impress of strategic leadership the management frame refashions its sense of the world, gains
a purchase on change, and finds more motivating and integrated tools with which
to do its work.
The other two frames of leadership, the collegial and the symbolic, are also
essential. As we have seen repeatedly, strategy has to satisfy the norms and secure
the benefits of shared governance to be effective and legitimate, so collegiality
is an important condition of the process. Academic expertise in teaching, learning, and scholarship has to drive the organization. Our argument has stressed
emphatically that strategic leadership is rooted in the power of symbolic leadership, especially in its use of institutional narratives and in its congruence with
organizational cultures.
Each of these dimensions is present within strategic leadership, but as part of a
larger process of decision making and meaning that changes them in the process.
Whereas strategic leadership gives purpose to political and administrative styles
264 Strategic Leadership
of leadership, it offers structure and systems of responsibility to its symbolic and
collegial forms. Without an integrated system of decision making within which to
function, these other approaches can remain ineffectual. Collegiality offers the
form but not the content of decisions required to respond to change, so strategic
leadership alters its forms while respecting its norms. At times the intricate
protocols of governance become intractable or an elegant excuse for inaction.
Symbolic thinking draws heavily on the indispensable power and meaning of
institutional stories and culture, but it cannot by itself systematize or enact what
it believes. It often tends to resist change by holding up images of a golden past
that will never return.
Strategic leadership draws the other forms of leadership into a system that
creates a true interpenetration of the approaches, a powerful integration of purpose and action. It moves beyond a serial or sequential application of different
leadership methods that would deal with some issues in one way and others
in another, moving from case to case with skills and insights that lack coherence. Mixing styles without an inner logic can lead to one method becoming
dominant, distorting the other approaches to fit its perception of reality. Leaders
often live comfortably for long periods with distorted interpretations of their
organizations, squelching information that challenges their primary frame of
reference. Their sense of personal effectiveness as leaders often becomes tied
to their dominant models of perception. Changing models, and allowing new
insights and new learning to take hold, becomes a threat to personal and professional self-worth.
The Integration of Leadership
Strategic leadership, on the other hand, seeks a genuine synthesis of the different frames of leadership. It draws together all the hard realities of an institution's
choices and circumstances around a sense-making narrative and sense-giving vision
of the purposes that it serves, with the organization as the agent of that vision. The
various frames then function as subsystems within a systematic method that uses,
modifies, and transforms them to implement an integrative strategy. As we have
seen throughout the course of our inquiry, strategic leadership creates the mechanisms of governance, forms of authority and administrative systems it requires to
do its work. It systematically unites power with purpose, vision with action, shared
values with shared governance, and narratives of identity with administrative systems. As an integrative frame of meaning, strategic leadership allows us to see what
is there in varying degrees but is often hidden—a complex but real integration and
interpenetration of an institution's systems of decision making.
Learning Strategic Leadership
One of the reasons that strategic leadership is a process with broad application is
that it functions as an applied discipline. This means that its various components
Conclusion 265
can be taught and learned both practically and theoretically, from the insights
needed to understand institutional cultures, to the development and interpretation of strategic indicators, to knowing and telling the institution's story. To be
sure, some practitioners of the discipline will be far more skilled than others in
using it. But that is always the case in every field or discipline, especially those
that involve various forms of practice. Talent and skill are indispensable. They
weigh very heavily in the leadership equation. Yet few of us will ever qualify
as transforming leaders or brilliant strategists, and fewer still will do so by the
possession of exceptional natural gifts. Nonetheless, most of us can learn a process
and discipline that substantially expands our given abilities to provide direction
for an organization or some part of it. As a discipline and systematic process it is
able to institutionalize effective practices of leadership that otherwise are subject
to the vagaries of circumstance.
In making these claims, we assume that organizations use some wisdom in
selecting various individuals to serve in formal positions of leadership and responsibility, whether as the chair of a committee or as president. Many of the skills,
attributes, and values that we reviewed briefly early in our study are precisely
the characteristics that drive the choice of certain individuals for these various
responsibilities of leadership. It is fair to assume that many of the qualities that we
associate with leadership are spread quite widely though not evenly through the
population. Finding a person with the qualities and skills that match the needs
of a position at various times and under different circumstances is a crucial and
demanding task. At the same time, we are often surprised and pleased to see how
most people rise to the challenges of the responsibilities that they are given.
As individuals come into leadership roles, from president on down the hierarchy,
the question they often ask themselves silently in the dark of night is, "What am
I doing here? How am I supposed to run this committee, or this department, or this
organization? Do I have the tools to do this work? Are my authority, experience,
and skill adequate to the task?"
When the inevitable challenges to the individual's leadership first arrive, the
haunting questions intensify, sometimes in a form that is less helpful and relevant
than it might appear to be. Under pressure leaders may become fixated on whether
they have the repertoire of insights, qualities, and abilities needed for the job,
even though most of those are not quickly or easily subject to modification. Or
they may turn to detailed analyses of the formal powers and prerogatives of their
office, as they wonder whether and how to assert their authority. Although these
queries may be authentic and conscientious and are sometimes relevant, they are
often misplaced. The more authentic questions usually are "How do I use the talents, methods and authority that I already have to do the job?" and "How do I best
go about the task of exercising leadership in systematic ways that both respond to
and motivate others?" It is in response to precisely these questions that the process
and methods of strategic leadership present themselves as a coherent and promising alternative. It offers a structured and integrative discipline of decision making
that can be learned through experience and reflection, by practice and study.
266 Strategic Leadership
This ordering of the problem also puts into perspective the dialectical relationship between strategic leadership as a discipline and the personal attributes
of leaders. We can see, once again, that they provide a threshold that must be
crossed for strategic leadership to be practiced effectively, defining the difference
between unacceptable and acceptable ranges of talent for leadership. If the basic
conditions are not satisfied, the method will be frustrated. The fact that a leader
must satisfy basic standards and have certain qualities is no clearer than in the
realm of values. Leaders must stand for something to do anything. In the applied
discipline of leadership, decisions must include the stamp of authenticity of the
decision maker.
Typically, of course, persons who fail to meet these thresholds are not selected
to exercise authority, and if they are, they are likely to be weeded out quickly.
In most circumstances, persons are chosen for leadership precisely because they
display attributes and skills of leadership well beyond the qualifying level. Under
these conditions, the individual's talents as a leader are mobilized and amplified by the rigor and system of a collaborative process. The practitioner of the art
and science of strategic leadership discovers new ways to make sense of personal
and collective experience and to influence the course of events. In turn, the
process reaches higher levels of effectiveness due to a leader's superior abilities,
genuine virtuosity, or passionate degree of commitment.
Leadership as Sense Making
To be successful, however, strategic leadership does not require heroic, flawless,
or extraordinary leaders. When it takes hold in the decision-making culture of an
organization, it reveals the meaning of leadership itself. Leadership comes to be
understood as a necessary dimension in the development of the social identities
and organizational capacities of human beings. The roots of leadership are not in
hierarchies of power but in methods of sense making that are part of the human
condition. They are tied to human needs and values as they necessarily come to
expression in cultural systems and social relationships. The dramatically diverse
political and cultural artifacts that surround leadership in different societies and
organizations around the globe are predictable aspects of the extraordinary range
of human social experience. They arise, however, from something more fundamental than the diversity itself. Humans live through social and cultural systems
of sense making that preserve and enhance what they care deeply and decisively
about, those institutions, beliefs, and relationships in which they invest themselves to give purpose to their striving. Ultimately, the leadership of organizations,
including colleges and universities, is about sustaining the values through which
humans define themselves and find meaning in social forms. As a transforming
narrative process, strategic leadership never ceases to explore the meanings that
are hidden in familiar places and events, values and purposes. At its fullest, it
enables a homecoming of the spirit. Through narrative, echoing T. S. Eliot, we
"arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time" (Eliot 1943).
Conclusion 267
From this perspective it becomes especially clear why both leadership and
responsibility have to be effectively and widely shared in organizations of higher
learning. As integral strategic leadership takes hold in a college or university, the
values that it serves and the vision that it offers move to center stage. Conflicts
and distractions over protocols and position are relegated to the wings. So engaging is the educational task of transforming human possibilities, so absorbing is
the quest for learning, so compelling is the errand of meeting human needs, that
people experience the powerful norms of a community that serves a magnificent
common cause. In such a community it becomes nearly impossible to draw sharp
lines between those who lead and those who follow. There is more than enough
work to go around, and more than enough responsibility to be shared by different
individuals and groups in different ways at different times.