Leadership and strategy are not the same

Organisations need to be careful not to confuse the two.

It is true that good strategy and good leadership can be embodied in one individual or one team, yet they remain two fundamentally separate things. Leadership is about holding a vision and inspiring and motivating people to move in a particular direction. Field Marshall Montgomery said “the leader must have infectious optimism and the determination to persevere in the face of difficulties, he must also radiate confidence, even when he himself is not too certain of the outcome. The final test of a leader is the feeling you have when you leave his presence after a conference. Have you got a feeling of uplift and confidence”?

Throughout history there are many examples of charismatic leaders who enjoyed success yet ultimately led their people to disaster. Drucker put it well when he said “The three most charismatic leaders in the 20th century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. What matters is the leader’s mission.”

So, what makes the difference?

Strategy is about fundamental analysis: holding a clear view of the organisation’s core competence, identifying and predicting how the future landscape could be disrupted, and defining the challenges and opportunities facing the organisation. It is about deciding which ones are worth pursuing (and which are not) and which are likely to be achieved. It is also about understanding the obstacles to be overcome in pursuit of that objective.

Then it is about putting in place an architecture and a clear set of ‘soft and hard’ inputs that build on and leverage what has gone before. It is about robustly challenging and testing the plan, weighing risk and its mitigation. An essential characteristic of strategy setting is understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of the competition, as well as the strengths you need to build for a disruptive future. Then it is about bringing those relative strengths to bear on others’ relative weaknesses.

It is also about putting in place the management framework and control systems, focusing on the leading inputs you can actually manage rather than the lagging outcomes you can only report, and developing the intelligence-gathering apparatus that identifies the new challenges facing the business.

Finally, it is about renewal and learning from the previous phases. As Winston Churchill said, “I am always ready to learn, although I don’t always like to be taught”.