The six essential strategic leadership skills, identified in Harvard Business Review research covering more than 20,000 executives, are: anticipate change, challenge assumptions, interpret complex information, decide with incomplete data, align stakeholders and learn from results. They work as a cycle, so weakness in one undermines the others.
What are the six strategic leadership skills?
The most widely used framework for strategic leadership skills comes from Paul Schoemaker, Steve Krupp and Samantha Howland, who published Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills in Harvard Business Review in January 2013. Their research, carried out at the Wharton School and through their consultancy, covered more than 20,000 executives. They concluded that strategic leaders who perform well are good at six things: anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align and learn.
What makes the framework useful is that it describes behaviours, not personality. You can observe each skill, score yourself on it and practise it. It also explains why some intelligent, hard-working leaders struggle with strategy: they may be excellent at one or two skills but weak on others, and a weakness anywhere in the chain undermines the whole.
How do the six skills compare?
| Skill | Core question | Key behaviour | Typical tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anticipate | What is changing? | Scan widely, including outside your industry | PESTEL, scenarios |
| Challenge | What if we are wrong? | Question assumptions; invite dissent | Pre-mortem, devil's advocate |
| Interpret | What does this really mean? | Test several explanations | SWOT, root cause analysis |
| Decide | What will we do, and not do? | Choose on time with clear criteria | Suitability, acceptability, feasibility |
| Align | Who needs to be on board? | Engage stakeholders; communicate the why | Mendelow's matrix |
| Learn | What did we learn? | Review honestly; adjust course | After-action review |
What does each strategic leadership skill involve?
1. Anticipate
Anticipating means spotting threats and opportunities before they become obvious. Most organisations are good at seeing what is directly in front of them and poor at noticing weak signals at the edges: a small competitor with a new model, a shift in regulation, a change in how young customers behave.
What strong leaders do:
- Gather information from a wide network inside and outside their industry.
- Ask customers, suppliers and front-line staff what is changing.
- Use structured tools such as PESTEL and scenario planning.
How to build it: Set up a monthly "outside in" session: each member of the team brings one trend from outside your sector and you discuss what it could mean for you.
Common trap: Only scanning sources that confirm what you already believe.
2. Challenge
Challenging means questioning the status quo, including your own assumptions and the beliefs that made the organisation successful in the past. It is the main defence against strategic drift.
What strong leaders do:
- Reframe problems from several angles to get to root causes.
- Actively seek out views that disagree with theirs.
- Encourage debate and protect people who raise awkward facts.
How to build it: Before your next significant decision, run a pre-mortem: imagine it is two years later and the decision failed. Ask everyone to write down why.
Common trap: Mistaking challenge for cynicism. The aim is to test ideas, not to block them.
3. Interpret
Interpreting means making sense of complex and often contradictory information. Strategic leaders do not jump to the first explanation; they look for patterns, test several hypotheses and only then reach a view.
What strong leaders do:
- Stay curious and open-minded when data conflicts.
- Look for patterns across multiple sources.
- Test working hypotheses with colleagues before committing.
How to build it: When results surprise you, write down three possible explanations and what evidence would support each one before deciding which is right.
Common trap: Analysis paralysis. Interpreting is about getting to a good-enough understanding, not certainty.
4. Decide
Deciding means making tough calls with incomplete information, on time. Strategic leaders balance speed and rigour, weigh long-term growth against short-term results and accept that some decisions will turn out wrong.
What strong leaders do:
- Use clear criteria such as suitability, acceptability and feasibility.
- Consider multiple options rather than "yes or no".
- Weigh risks and unintended consequences for stakeholders.
How to build it: Write a short decision record for important calls: the options, the criteria, what you chose and what would make you change your mind. Review it three months later.
Common trap: Waiting for perfect information. In a changing environment, not deciding is itself a decision.
5. Align
Aligning means building enough support for a direction that it actually gets delivered. It involves understanding stakeholders' positions, addressing conflicting interests and communicating the strategy until people can explain it themselves.
What strong leaders do:
- Map stakeholders by power and interest (Mendelow's matrix).
- Engage early with people who might resist.
- Communicate the why, not just the what, repeatedly.
How to build it: For your next change, list the five people whose support matters most. Meet each one individually before any group announcement and ask what would make the change work for them.
Common trap: Assuming that a good argument is enough. People support what they help to shape.
6. Learn
Learning means treating results, good and bad, as feedback. Strategic leaders build a culture where mistakes are discussed openly, lessons are shared and the organisation changes course when the evidence says it should.
What strong leaders do:
- Run honest reviews after major projects and decisions.
- Share stories of failure as well as success.
- Correct course quickly when evidence contradicts the plan.
How to build it: Introduce a 30-minute after-action review after every major milestone: what we expected, what happened, why, and what we will do differently.
Common trap: Blame. If reviews become hunts for culprits, people stop telling the truth and learning stops.
Strategic leadership skills self-test
Score yourself on each statement from 1 (rarely true) to 5 (almost always true). Then add the two scores for each skill. These statements are my own, written to reflect the behaviours in the HBR framework.
| Skill | Statement | Score (1 to 5) |
|---|---|---|
| Anticipate | I regularly look for information from outside my own team and industry. | |
| Anticipate | I can name two or three trends that could significantly affect my area in the next three years. | |
| Challenge | I actively ask for views that disagree with mine before deciding. | |
| Challenge | I have questioned a long-standing practice in my area in the last six months. | |
| Interpret | When data conflicts, I consider several explanations before concluding. | |
| Interpret | I can explain complex situations simply to others. | |
| Decide | I make important decisions on time, even when information is incomplete. | |
| Decide | I consider long-term effects as well as short-term results when I decide. | |
| Align | I understand the positions and concerns of the key stakeholders in my work. | |
| Align | My team could explain our priorities and why they matter. | |
| Learn | I review significant decisions afterwards to see what I can learn. | |
| Learn | I have changed course on something important because of new evidence. |
How to read your scores
| Score per skill (out of 10) | What it suggests | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| 9 to 10 | A clear strength | Use it to help others; make sure it is not hiding weaknesses elsewhere |
| 6 to 8 | Solid but inconsistent | Practise the "how to build it" exercise for this skill over the next month |
| 2 to 5 | A development priority | Pick this skill (or your lowest two) as your focus for the next 90 days |
Most people find one or two skills well ahead of the others. In my experience coaching SBL students and working with finance professionals, the most common pattern is strong interpret and decide scores (we are trained to analyse and conclude) with weaker anticipate and align scores. If that is you, the biggest gains usually come from widening your sources and spending more time with stakeholders before you present a recommendation.
Which strategic leadership skill matters most?
All six matter, because they form a chain. A brilliant decision that nobody supports fails at the align stage. A well-aligned team pursuing the wrong direction fails at the anticipate or interpret stage. That said, the skill to prioritise depends on your situation:
- In a stable, mature market, anticipate and challenge matter most, because the danger is complacency.
- In a crisis, decide and align dominate, because speed and unity are critical.
- After a setback, learn is the priority, so the same mistake is not repeated.
Why are strategic leadership skills so hard to master?
If the six skills are clear, why do so many capable leaders struggle with them? Research points to three reasons.
First, our own background filters what we see. Hambrick and Mason's upper echelons theory argues that leaders interpret situations through their experience, values and training. An accountant, an engineer and a marketer will read the same market data differently. That is why the challenge skill matters so much: without deliberately seeking other views, you will anticipate and interpret only what your background prepares you to notice.
Second, strategic problems are rarely technical. Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie, in their HBR article The Work of Leadership, distinguish technical problems, which experts can solve with known methods, from adaptive challenges, which require people to change their beliefs and habits. Most strategic issues are adaptive, so they demand the align and learn skills, not just good analysis.
Third, the day job crowds strategy out. Operational problems are urgent and visible; strategic ones are important but quiet. Unless you protect time for anticipating and challenging, those skills simply do not get used, however capable you are.
How do you build strategic leadership skills?
Skills grow through practice and reflection rather than reading alone. A practical approach:
- Take the self-test above and choose your lowest one or two skills.
- Pick one exercise per skill from the "how to build it" notes and do it every week for a month.
- Ask for feedback from a colleague who sees you in meetings. Ask specifically about the skill you are working on.
- Look for a stretch assignment that forces you to use the skill, such as leading a strategy review or a business case.
- Retake the test after 90 days and choose your next focus.
For a full structured programme, including courses and qualifications, see strategic leadership development. For related thinking skills, see strategic thinking and strategic thinking in leadership.
How do these skills relate to other leadership frameworks?
The six skills fit alongside other models rather than replacing them. A 2020 review in The Leadership Quarterly by Samimi and colleagues described eight functions strategic leaders perform, such as making strategic decisions, motivating and influencing, and managing conflicting demands. The six skills are, in effect, the capabilities you need to perform those functions well. They also connect to leadership styles: someone strong at aligning often draws on transformational leadership, while deciding in a crisis may call for a more directive approach. See strategic leadership styles for more.
How does my book support these skills?
Becoming A Strategic Business Leader is a concise guide to the core strategy, governance and leadership models, originally written for the ACCA SBL exam and useful for any manager. It is organised in a way that maps onto the six skills: strategic analysis (chapter 2) supports anticipating and interpreting; strategic choice (chapter 4) and financial decision making (chapter 18) support deciding; stakeholders (chapter 7), leadership (chapter 8) and managing change (chapter 19) support aligning; performance analysis (chapter 3) supports learning. The first three chapters are free.
Bottom line
Strategic leadership comes down to six skills: anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align and learn. They work as a cycle, so a weakness in one undermines the rest. Take the self-test, pick your weakest skill, practise one exercise a week for a month, and retest. Steady, deliberate practice builds strategic leadership far more reliably than waiting for experience to teach you.
FAQs
What are the 6 strategic leadership skills?
According to Schoemaker, Krupp and Howland (Harvard Business Review, 2013), the six skills are: anticipate (spot change early), challenge (question assumptions), interpret (make sense of complex information), decide (make tough calls on time), align (bring stakeholders on board) and learn (review results and adapt). Their research drew on more than 20,000 executives.
Which strategic leadership skill is most important?
It depends on the situation. In stable markets, anticipating and challenging protect against complacency. In a crisis, deciding and aligning matter most because speed and unity are vital. After a setback, learning is the priority. Because the skills form a chain, the most important one for you is usually the one where you are weakest.
How can I improve my strategic leadership skills?
Start by assessing yourself honestly, for example with the self-test on this page. Pick your weakest one or two skills and practise a specific exercise weekly, such as a pre-mortem for challenging or a decision record for deciding. Ask a colleague for feedback, look for a stretch assignment, and retest after 90 days.
Are strategic leadership skills different from management skills?
Yes, though they overlap. Management skills focus on planning, organising, budgeting and controlling current work. Strategic leadership skills focus on the future: spotting change, questioning the status quo, making directional choices and aligning people behind them. Most senior roles need both, and strong managers often need to develop the anticipating and challenging skills most.
What is an example of the align skill in practice?
Before announcing a major change, a strategic leader might map stakeholders by power and interest, then meet the most influential individually to hear their concerns and shape the plan with them. When the change is announced, key people already support it. That deliberate groundwork is the align skill in action.
Sources
- Schoemaker, Krupp and Howland (2013), Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills, Harvard Business Review
- Samimi, Cortes, Anderson and Herrmann (2020), What is strategic leadership? Developing a framework for future research, The Leadership Quarterly
- Hambrick and Mason (1984), Upper Echelons: The Organization as a Reflection of Its Top Managers, Academy of Management Review
- Heifetz and Laurie (1997), The Work of Leadership, Harvard Business Review (HBR Classic reprint)