Six Principles of Strategic Leadership
The Goff Strategic Leadership Center believes that successful strategic leaders demonstrate skills across six specific dimensions –the Six Principles of Strategic Leadership. This model of leadership indicates that competence in these six areas contributes to high levels of individual, team, and organizational success. Research conducted by faculty at the University of Utah provides insights into each of these principles and describes specific strategies for how leaders can apply these principles.
6 Principles of Strategic Leadership
WHO I AM.
Your Core is who you are as an individual, which includes your skills, mindsets, and behaviors. This is the strategic leadership potential you bring to your work and team.
Deliver Results with Strong Personal Ownership
Strategic leaders are dedicated to taking responsibility for failure, are biased towards action, fluid in interpreting roles, and uncompromising in commitment to stewardship.
Listen to strategic leaders in our community as they discuss personal ownership and delivering results.
Cultivate Self Awareness, Personal Agility, and Continual Growth
Have a thorough and evolving understanding of their own ambition, passion, strengths, and areas for development.
Cultivate self-awareness by taking the Gallup Clifton Strengths.
Your Role is how you interact and work with others to demonstrate strategic leadership and create value within your group or organization.
Actively Find and Formulate the Right Problems
All our lives we’re taught to be great problem solvers – and this is often what has led to our initial success. Strategic Leaders go beyond this to become problem finders. They proactively seek out problems to solve versus waiting for problems to come to them AND they make sure the problems they are solving are the right ones, formulated to create value.
Identify and Align Resources to Generate Value
Early in our careers, we’re often fantastic individual contributors, knowing how to tackle what’s given to us. However, as Strategic Leaders who proactively find and formulate problems, we’re often putting ourselves in the position to navigate the unknown, where solely relying on our individual skills and competencies simply aren’t enough.
This can be a difficult pill to swallow or even feel like a failure. BUT, Strategic Leaders know that generating value doesn’t mean relying on our own strengths, but on being self-aware enough to identify what other resources are necessary and to align those resources to create value.
Your Goal is what you strive to accomplish as a strategic leader. This is your path to value and the solutions to problems important to your group or organization.
Maintain Relentless Focus on Creating Value
Strategic leaders are relentless in pursuit of long-term strategic value creation and positioning. We are skillful in identifying valuable problems and adeptly solving them.
Read more here.
Craft and Share Compelling Strategic Vision
Strategic leaders are skilled at generating a viable, ambitious vision of success and effectively conveying this ambitious future state to others inside and outside the group.
Read more here and here.