Good strategic leaders can motivate teams, move mountains, and create positive company changes that will last for years or even decades. There are many types of leaders. Learning what makes a strategic leader and how to practice strategic leadership in your life is the key to achieving greatness.
Key Qualities of Good Strategic Leaders
Although strategic leaders might differ in their personalities or objectives, there are a few essential qualities that are consistent across the board. Cultivate these strategic leadership aspects in your own life, and start to see massive results.
Empathy
One of the best qualities a strategic leader can have is empathy. The ability to step into another’s shoes can show your team that you genuinely care about them and have their best interests at heart. Additionally, cultivating empathy can help effective leaders understand what motivates your team, your customers, your peers, and help compel swift and effective change.
Empathetic leaders tend to have an open-door policy. They tend to understand their employees as people rather than cogs in a machine, and that level of trust and generosity filters down through the organization.
Ecosystem Thinking
Good strategic leaders are able to take a broad perspective and see the entire playing field and how each of its components interact. They are able to connect the dots across disparate data points to create a long-term view that translates into a strategic plan.
Strategic Thinking
The ability to think critically, problem solve, and apply strategic thinking is key to great strategic leadership. This will provide the foundation for crafting a great strategic plan that balances both long-term goals and short-term goals. Understanding hypothesis-driven thinking is fundamental to mastering strategic thinking.
Teamwork
No matter how strong you are on your own, every company needs a functioning team and sound organizational leadership to get things done. Understanding how different personalities interact - whether on a project team or a management team - and what makes people tick is a unique quality of a strategic leader.
By embodying this, not only will you create team cohesion, but the team will also communicate better with each other, allowing them to solve problems, hit strategic goals, recognize your strategic vision, and perform decisive action even in your absence. A quick personality assessment, like DiSC, can tell you where your team members are regarding their work styles and allow you to steer the team appropriately.
Listening as a super power
While many senior leaders are good at talking, the really exceptional ones know how to listen. Active listening skills are vital if you want to be a good strategic leader and effectively execute your strategic plan. When communicating with your team, put away your phone and try not to focus on anything else you might have going on at home or elsewhere in your life.
If your employees identify you as a good listener, they will automatically know that you’re taking their concerns seriously and to heart. This can motivate them to be more invested in their work and take greater initiative and pride in their work.
Additionally, it’s good practice for you. Well-developed leadership abilities like active listening are not only just great skills for the workplace; they can serve you well in your interpersonal relationships and in making smart strategic decisions to set you ahead in a competitive landscape.
A Winning Attitude
It’s not always possible to have a sunny outlook every day because as much as we want to leave our home lives at the door, problems outside work can pop up during the business day. On the other hand, we can control our attitude and remember not to take out external problems on our staff. Effective leadership is often synonymous with transparency.
Having a great attitude that’s a mix of optimism and realism can seriously motivate your team. Additionally, it’s okay to share when you’re having a bad day and ask for a bit of compassion and empathy yourself. We're not encouraging over-sharing, but letting them know that you’re having a rough morning in advance might keep them from misinterpreting any shortness.
Excellent Communication Skills
If you take anything from this list, make it to this point. Excellent communication skills combine all these qualities and are one of the most important traits in levelling up your leadership and business. Excellent communication skills are especially important if you’re trying to scale your business or working cross-functionally.
Moreover, if you’re working in an international context, good communication and leadership skills can help you navigate tricky cultural norms and understand how best to manage and lead. Encourage your employees to work on their communication styles as well, and always operate with transparency and respect.
These essential qualities are the foundation for any good strategic leader.
Good Strategic Leaders Employ the Pyramid Principle
Good strategic leaders know how to communicate strategically with everyone at all levels of an organization. Utilizing the Pyramid Principle is one of the core strategic leadership tactics that can help in your communication and in moving you and your team forward.
For example, if you’re a Sales M🧠anager interested in pitching a big client, the Pyramid Principle would apply to a streamlined vision of your pitch. You know that you don’t have a lot of time to grab attention in the meeting, so you have to be compelling, which is why you need to start with the answer. This might sound counterintuitive, but it establishes an anchor and gets you and your client on the same page.
Consider the answer or recommendation at the top of the pyramid. The rest of the Pyramid Principle focuses on how you justify making this recommendation and why it’s a good idea. The second level of the pyramid hinges on justification. Be prepared to bring lots of data to back up what you’re saying.
This level is all about support, so present your most compelling arguments here. Continually circle back to why your recommendation is best, and be prepared to answer a lot of questions.
The third layer of the pyramid is a deeper dive into the support, using case studies, success stories, or any additional analytics you might find helpful. The reason that this one is the last is that it’s the most intensive. Basically, you’re building on what you’ve done in the second layer, but now you just have to buy in.
Why it Works
The Pyramid Principle works because it inverts the traditional way that people try to state a case or recommendation. If you start with alot of facts and figures, or the bottom section of the pyramid, your audience will simply wonder where you’re going with all of it and start to lose focus. By the time you reach the top of the pyramid or your recommendation, there’s a good chance that they could be checked out, particularly in today’s climate of short attention spans!
If you start with the top of the pyramid however, they’ll be invested either in trying to disprove why your original suggestion is wrong or looking for reasons to justify it. Either way, you have their full attention. Since you generally only have ten to fifteen seconds of undivided attention to hook your audience, use it wisely. This business strategy can serve strong leaders well when dealing with busy clients.
Also known as strategic story-telling, the Pyramid Principle should be used following hypothesis driven problem solving which you can read about here.
Want to learn the art of strategic story-telling? Check out our Strategic Thinking course. Once you get the hang of it, strategic story-telling becomes second nature, but you need the foundational skills to start. Many senior executives use the tactic to illustrate corporate strategies.
Why Leadership Starts with You
Whether you’re cultivating communication strategies to better interact with your team or trying to scale your organization or business, strategic leadership starts with you. While you might need to put in a little more work in the beginning, the payoff in saved time, and better results, can be enormous.
Remember, your vision might be exceptional, but you need strategic leadership to prompt your team to follow your lead and communicate effectively.
Keep Your Strategy and Leadership Sharp with Ongoing Education
If you’re ready to take the next steps to becoming a great strategic leader, we’re here to help. Learn more our Strategic Thinking course here.
