Leading at the strategic level

Who It's For

Directors, heads of service and senior leadership teams in health, housing, local government and the voluntary sector

Overview

At the top of a public organisation, strategy stays a document until leaders turn it into shared direction and a culture that carries it. The first part of the flagship Setting the course begins with strategic leadership, from Porter's Five Forces and Rumelt's kernel to Kotter's eight steps and Collins' Level 5 leaders, then leading self through values and identity and leading others through Tuckman, Lencioni and shared leadership. It builds strategic thinking with Horwath's three disciplines, Cynefin, the Strategic Choice Approach and Herbert Simon's bounded rationality, testing implementation on cases including the London Congestion Charge. Finally, it turns to culture, from Schein to toxic cultures, Enron and Timpson.

Aims

It sets out to develop senior leaders who can read the conditions they lead in, make strategic choices that hold up in practice and recognise the culture beneath those choices, so that strategy becomes real through people rather than remaining a document.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Assess a strategy using Rumelt's kernel and Porter's Five Forces, and lead it through Kotter's eight steps and Level 5 leadership.
2. 2Use Cynefin, the Strategic Choice Approach and bounded rationality to make strategic choices suited to certainty, risk or uncertainty.
3. 3Diagnose the culture beneath your strategy, distinguishing positive from toxic cultures with Schein and cases such as Enron and Timpson.

What you'll develop

By the end of this Immerse, you will be able to:

1. 1Compare the planning, positioning, emergent and kernel schools of strategy and assess whether a strategy contains a genuine diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent action.
2. 2Distinguish stated from revealed values and use Goleman's five components of emotional intelligence to assess how you show up under pressure.
3. 3Distinguish strategic thinking from strategic planning, strategic management and strategic leadership, and apply the test of value and real choice to a strategy document.
4. 4Distinguish the five Cynefin domains and describe the decision-making approach each one calls for.
5. 5Distinguish certainty, risk, uncertainty and ambiguity, and use four questions to place a live decision on that spectrum.
6. 6Identify which of the four breakdown points, ownership, translation, competing priorities or review, is undermining a strategy and describe the remedy for each.
7. 7Explain what organisational culture is, using Schein's definition, and distinguish it from climate and from employer brand.
8. 8Distinguish a strong culture from a healthy one, and a positive culture from a merely comfortable one, using the Enron case.