Strategic leadership is the ability to set a long-term direction for an organisation and get people, resources and systems moving towards it. Researchers define it as the functions top leaders perform that have strategic consequences, such as making big decisions, aligning stakeholders, shaping culture and leading change.
What is strategic leadership in one sentence?
Strategic leadership is the ability to set a long-term direction for an organisation and to get people, resources and systems moving towards it, while adapting as the world changes.
That is my working definition, and it lines up with the research. The most thorough recent review, by Samimi and colleagues in The Leadership Quarterly, defines it as the functions carried out by people at the top of an organisation (chief executives, top team members, directors and general managers) that are intended to have strategic consequences for the firm. The key word is functions: strategic leadership is something you do, not a title you hold.
How do experts define strategic leadership?
Different writers stress different parts of the idea. Seeing them side by side helps you build your own understanding.
| Source | Emphasis | In plain English |
|---|---|---|
| Samimi et al. (2020), The Leadership Quarterly | Functions of top leaders with strategic consequences | What senior people do that shapes the whole organisation |
| Hoskisson and colleagues (strategic management textbook), as cited by CPA Ireland | Ability to anticipate, envision, stay flexible and empower others to create strategic change | Seeing ahead and helping others change |
| Schoemaker, Krupp and Howland (2013), Harvard Business Review | Six skills: anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align, learn | A practical skill set you can assess and build |
| Hambrick and Mason (1984), Academy of Management Review | The organisation reflects its top managers | Leaders' backgrounds and biases shape strategy |
Put together, these give a clear picture. Strategic leadership is about the future (anticipate, envision), about choices (decide), about people (empower, align) and about the person doing it (their experience and judgement).
What are the key components of strategic leadership?
I find it helpful to break the concept into five components. If any one is missing, the leadership is not really strategic.
1. Direction
A clear sense of purpose and where the organisation is heading. This is often written as a mission and vision, but the real test is whether people can explain the direction in their own words. See the strategic planning process for how direction is usually set.
2. Choice
Strategy means choosing what to do and what not to do. A strategic leader makes trade-offs about markets, products and investments. Without choice you have a wish list, not a strategy. My page on what strategy is explores this.
3. Alignment
Getting the top team, the wider organisation and key stakeholders behind the choice. This includes structure, incentives and culture. The McKinsey 7S model is a good checklist for alignment.
4. Execution oversight
Making sure the strategy turns into action. Samimi's review lists "overseeing operations and administration" as one of the eight functions of strategic leaders, which is a useful reminder that strategy without delivery is just talk.
5. Adaptation
Watching results and the environment, then adjusting. Strategic leaders treat strategy as a hypothesis to be tested, not a document to be defended.
What do strategic leaders actually do?
Samimi's review is useful because it turns a vague idea into a list of concrete functions. Strategic leaders spend their time:
| Function | Everyday example |
|---|---|
| Making strategic decisions | Approving an acquisition, entering a new country, closing a product line |
| Engaging with external stakeholders | Meeting investors, regulators, key customers and partners |
| Performing human resource management activities | Appointing the top team, planning succession |
| Motivating and influencing | Explaining the strategy at a town hall; persuading sceptics one to one |
| Managing information | Deciding which data the board sees and which trends get attention |
| Overseeing operations and administration | Reviewing delivery of strategic projects and key performance measures |
| Managing social and ethical issues | Setting sustainability targets; responding to a conduct problem |
| Managing conflicting demands | Balancing this year's profit against investment for the future |
If you look at your own week and most of your time sits outside this table, you are probably doing excellent operational work but not much strategic leadership. That is normal for many roles. The point is to notice it and make deliberate space for the strategic part.
What is strategic leadership not?
Several common misconceptions get in the way of understanding the concept.
- It is not just having a vision. Vision without choices, resources and follow-through is a slogan. Many failed strategies had inspiring visions.
- It is not the same as strategic planning. Planning is a process that produces a document. Leadership is what makes people believe in it and act on it. Plenty of organisations have a strategic plan and no strategic leadership.
- It is not only for the chief executive. The research focuses on the top because that is where the biggest decisions sit, but the same functions happen in smaller form throughout an organisation.
- It is not a fixed personality type. Introverts and extroverts, analysts and storytellers can all lead strategically. What they share is a set of habits, not a temperament.
- It is not a one-off event. An away day does not make a strategy. Strategic leadership is continuous: scanning, deciding, aligning and learning, again and again.
Where did the idea of strategic leadership come from?
The modern study of strategic leadership grew from a simple observation in the early 1980s. Donald Hambrick and Phyllis Mason argued in their upper echelons paper that you can partly predict an organisation's strategy and performance by looking at the backgrounds of its top managers. Before that, much strategy research treated firms as if they were run by perfectly rational machines.
Since then, research has grown in several directions. Samimi and colleagues identified five main streams: upper echelons (how leaders' characteristics shape decisions), agency theory (the relationship between the chief executive and the board), the top management team (how diversity and conflict in the team affect outcomes), the institutional view (how leaders maintain legitimacy) and a micro-level stream on how executives' behaviour motivates people. Their main criticism was that these streams rarely talk to each other, which is why the practical definitions above are so varied.
Why is strategic leadership important?
Because the environment never stands still. Organisations that keep doing what made them successful, while customers and technology move on, suffer strategic drift. Strategic leadership is what notices the drift and corrects course.
It also matters because senior choices are hard to reverse. A poor operational decision costs a week. A poor strategic decision, such as a bad acquisition or a missed technology shift, can cost a decade. Upper echelons research makes the same point from a different angle: if the organisation reflects its leaders, then the quality of those leaders' thinking sets a ceiling on the organisation's performance.
Finally, it matters to people. Staff want to know where the organisation is going and why their work counts. Clear strategic leadership gives them that context, which makes everyday decisions faster and better because people can judge for themselves what fits the direction.
What skills does strategic leadership require?
The most practical skills framework is the six skills from Schoemaker, Krupp and Howland's 2013 HBR article, drawn from research with more than 20,000 executives:
- Anticipate threats and opportunities early.
- Challenge assumptions, including your own.
- Interpret ambiguous information.
- Decide with courage when the data is incomplete.
- Align stakeholders behind the direction.
- Learn from successes and failures.
Each skill is explained with behaviours and a self-test in strategic leadership skills.
How is strategic leadership different from operational leadership?
| Strategic leadership | Operational leadership | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | Are we doing the right things? | Are we doing things right? |
| Horizon | Years | Days to months |
| Output | Direction, priorities, capabilities | Delivery, quality, efficiency |
| Uncertainty | High; few clear answers | Lower; known methods |
Neither is better. Organisations need both, and good leaders move between them. There is a fuller comparison in strategic vs operational leadership, and a related distinction in leadership vs management.
What is an example of strategic leadership?
When Satya Nadella became Microsoft's chief executive in February 2014, he told staff the company needed to thrive in a "mobile and cloud-first world" (Fortune). That was direction and choice. He also said renewing the culture would be his highest priority, and pushed a "growth mindset" across the company (Business Insider). That was alignment. All five components were there. I cover eleven more cases in strategic leadership examples.
Where can you learn more?
For the complete overview, including styles, development and the models strategic leaders use, start with my strategic leadership guide. If you want to understand the person behind the role, read what makes a strategic leader.
My book, 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. Chapters 1 to 5 cover strategic planning, analysis, performance, choice and development; chapter 8 covers leadership; chapter 19 covers managing change. The first three chapters are free.
Bottom line
Strategic leadership is what senior people do to set long-term direction and make it happen: choosing where to go, aligning people behind that choice, overseeing delivery and adapting as things change. It rests on six practical skills and can be learned. If you remember one thing, remember that strategic leadership is defined by the choices you make about the future, not by your job title.
FAQs
What is the best definition of strategic leadership?
A strong, research-based definition comes from Samimi and colleagues (2020) in The Leadership Quarterly: the functions performed by people at the top of an organisation that are intended to have strategic consequences for the firm. In plain terms, it is what senior leaders do that shapes the long-term direction and performance of the whole organisation.
What are the components of strategic leadership?
Five components cover most definitions: direction (a clear purpose and vision), choice (deciding what to do and what not to do), alignment (getting people and systems behind the choice), execution oversight (making sure strategy turns into action) and adaptation (learning from results and adjusting). If one is missing, leadership is unlikely to be truly strategic.
Why is it called strategic leadership?
It is called strategic because it deals with strategy: the long-term choices about where an organisation competes and how it wins. Ordinary leadership can focus on motivating a team to hit this month's targets. Strategic leadership focuses on decisions whose effects last for years and shape the organisation's position, capabilities and culture.
Who is responsible for strategic leadership?
The chief executive, top management team and board carry formal responsibility because they make the biggest choices. However, strategic leadership happens at every level. Divisional heads, functional leaders and middle managers all make choices about the future of their areas, and they translate the top team's direction into practical priorities.
Is strategic leadership a leadership style?
Not exactly. Strategic leadership describes what leaders do and the level they operate at, rather than one style of behaving. A strategic leader might be visionary in one situation, participative in another and directive in a crisis. The skill lies in choosing the right approach for the situation while keeping the long-term direction in view.
Sources
- Samimi, Cortes, Anderson and Herrmann (2020), What is strategic leadership? Developing a framework for future research, The Leadership Quarterly
- CPA Ireland, Strategy and Leadership (article citing Hoskisson et al. on strategic leadership)
- Schoemaker, Krupp and Howland (2013), Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills, Harvard Business Review
- Hambrick and Mason (1984), Upper Echelons: The Organization as a Reflection of Its Top Managers, Academy of Management Review
- Fortune (2014), Microsoft names Satya Nadella CEO
- Business Insider, How Satya Nadella used a growth mindset to overhaul Microsoft's culture