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As technology, the economy and market factors become significantly interconnected globally, the key challenges that leaders from middle to executive levels in organizations face have become increasingly prominent. In the Global Leadership Forecast 2014/2015 (Sinar et al., 2014) around 40 percent of the leaders stated that their organization’s overall leadership quality was high. The struggle being initiating employee innovation, leading through cultures and generations and the intercultural communication in companies at home and overseas. Deficiency in knowledge, skills, support or simply lack in time and opportunity prevented the leaders from overcoming these struggles. These struggles connect with another study (Gentry et al., 2013) conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership where seven influential countries were surveyed and it was discovered that six main leadership challenges were consistent through all countries. The six challenges being developing employees, instigating inspiration, development in managerial efficiency, guiding innovation, directing a team and managing the politics and internal shareholders.
Leaders are facing greater pressure and a need to sustain effective leadership to ensure their organization’s prosperity. In order to handle the growing pressure leaders must exhibit strategic abilities and statistics display (Beatty, 2010) that less than 10 percent of leaders are able to exhibit these skills which is considered insufficient. The focus appears to be on perfecting operational leadership (Beatty, 2010) and this is acceptable to a certain extent because if an individual places complete attention to operational leadership then, they will lose focus and will be uncertain on how to deal with situations that become complex such as times of recession.
Strategic leadership requires an individual to constantly think, reflect and analyze all viewpoints and relationships that border their organization so that the organization’s affluence is promoted and sustained. This can only be achieved when this person has an insightful comprehension of the complexity between the company, shareholders and the environment. This means that strategic leaders must be able to (Schoemaker et al., 2013) anticipate through trends, imagining various scenarios with available information and having broad networks that include the consumer, partner and competitor perceptions. Through these obstacles, opportunities (Gavetti, 2011) and strengths are highlighted but now the strategic leader needs to challenge the assumptions formed by others or themselves. The individual must interpret (Schoemaker et...