Effectively leading and managing in an uncertain and ambiguous world has become critical for success. Leaders worldwide seek to better understand what Organizational Leadership is so that they can leverage it and become more effective and impactful leaders for their organizations.
This article will go over the main aspects of organizational Leadership and its importance. If you prefer to just watch a video with a summarized version of it, you can use the video below.
Table of Contents
What Is Organizational Leadership
Organizational Leadership is the ability to leverage data and help organizations set strategic goals while motivating individuals to execute their assignments to achieve those goals successfully.
And for anyone to achieve this, they have to acquire and work on several key competencies and skills, which we will go over in detail in this article.
Organizational Leadership is one of The 4 Success Pillars In Global Leadership, and is part of a new global mindset for leading international businesses.
Why Is Organizational Leadership Important
In the past, the leadership community and educators thought leadership as mostly leading people. In due time, researchers found out that organizations become like living beings, with their own culture, needs, power and influence. To conduct these organizations, more than people leadership skills were needed. Researchers found out that leaders also needed certain organizational leadership skills and a whole new mindset.
More and more, vanguard leaders in the market now know that traditional Leadership does not cut it anymore if you want to succeed in such an ambiguous and uncertain world. Working on all 4 Pillars Of Global Leadership and gaining organizational leadership skills became vital.
Organizational Leadership is important because:
Improves Company’s Bottom Line.
“Bottom Line” is the term used in big corporations to refer to the profit line in the P&L Report (Profit and Loss report). Whether an organization is for-profit or non-profit, they have to make money and profit to survive. They have to be financially healthy. There is no way around it. Companies with leaders that have organizational leadership skills have shown to manage their bottom lines more effectively than does that don’t. It’s not necessarily about making more money and profit but about ensuring long-lived business continuity.
Provides The Foundation For Problem-Solving And Decision-Making Mindset.
The core Organizational Leadership Skills provide an excellent foundation for problem-solving strategies and impactful business decisions. In other words, it’s like having the possibility to partake in a feast right in front of you and have the proper cutlery and silverware to do so. You can always create strategies and make decisions for your company. But when you create problem-solving strategies based on impactful business decisions, you take your company to a whole new level of market competition.
Supports Leading Ideas More Effectively.
If personal Leadership is about leading self and people leadership is about leading people, then organizational Leadership is about leading ideas. In the end, you use it to move ideas to realize goals and missions. When you have the right Organizational Leadership, you can move forward the right ideas, in the right way and the right direction, to achieve goals faster, with the swiftest and most cost-effective solutions possible. That’s the power of Organizational Leadership.
Helps Leaders To Remain Focused On Vision-Mission-Values.
The bigger a company becomes, the more moving parts it has. Organizational Leadership is about leading and managing all these moving parts by leveraging data and information, creating the right goals and strategies, and motivating individuals to achieve them. With so many moving parts, it’s easy to get lost from the company’s original vision, mission, and values. But not if you have the right organizational leadership skills, because then you know how to execute and keep track of what’s really important.
Ties The Spirit And The Letter Of Organizational Culture.
As I said before, a Company sort of creates a life of its own. Its culture and needs develop over time. Sometimes, companies grow so big and complex that the culture’s spirit – or in other words, what’s displayed in the corridors – is different from the culture’s letter – or what’s displayed on the cultural drivers and rules on paper. Organizational Leadership is important because it helps organizations keep alignment between cultural spirit and letter and, therefore, maintain the trust of their employees and communities.
Improves Business Reputation.
We live in a world where it takes years and years to build a strong reputation and just a few seconds to destroy it. In the past, a smaller mistake or misjudgment from a company might not cost its reputation. Now, we are living in the social media era, where everything happens in a snapshot. Sometimes, literally. Organizational Leadership helps companies lead the business aligned with ethics and values that can maintain a strong reputation by ensuring all participants in a chain with certain standards of conduct, process, and ideals.
Ensures Business Long-Term Continuity.
As mentioned before, it’s not all about money and profit. No one in their right mind would want money and profit that would soon dry. Any shareholder wants the business they are investing in to be prosperous and long-lived. And that is why they also want leaders working for them who have the right mindset and skills to do so. And that’s why Organizational Leadership is so powerful: it helps leaders ensure business continuity.
Should You Get An Organizational Leadership Degree?
Many degrees come to my mind that you could pursue in the organizational leadership field. Here are some of them:
- BA, Organizational Leadership
- BS, Business Leadership
- BS, Business Administration
- Master of Science, Organizational Leadership and Learning
- Executive Master of Leadership
- Master of Business Administration (MBA)
- Doctorate of Education, Organizational Change and Leadership
- D., Organizational Leadership
In all these degrees, you’ll invest between 3 to 5 years learning many theoretical aspects of business, administration, psychology, and Organizational Leadership. Some good schools also provide study cases and even require international internships to complement learning based on a more experiential learning.
Why Getting The Right Degree Can Be Important
When we are young and going through our first BA or BS, we often possess very limited life and business experience. Learning the theory will of course be important, but we won’t connect the dots just yet. It will take several years of experience to really start connecting the dots.
When you start connecting your dots, after 5 or 10 years of actual work field experience, you’ll see the need to revisit many of those theories, which is why many leaders go back to school to pursue an MBA, for example.
Pursuing a degree in these fields is critical, especially if you want to be a global leader. But before you even have the chance to start applying all the theories you learned in school, they all be long forgotten.
I can’t tell you how many times, throughout my career, I had to go back to my books and college notes when making impactful business decisions or pursuing a new project.
My take is that the degree will be your first contact with Organizational Leadership, but it is not where you will actually create and develop its skills. A robust degree is important to open doors for you in big corporations where you’ll be able to have an international career and land international assignments. Maybe even become an expatriate.
What Are The Core Organizational Leadership Skills?
In my website chatbox, one thing frequently asked is “do I have to go over a full 2-4-year-degree to acquire organizational leadership skills?” If you read the previous section well, you know by now that the answer is “no.” Again, don’t get me wrong: if you don’t have the right degree, doors won’t open for you in the first place.
But, frankly, having the right degree and having the right set of skills are 2 different topics.
Unfortunately, as I explained in the previous section, you won’t learn all the main skills needed in Organizational Leadership by getting a degree by the same name. Depending on each university’s syllabus, you may acquire many of them, but they will be fuzzy and basic since you have no real world application yet.
If you want to acquire the right skills to make impactful business decisions and become more effective, inclusive, and influential, you will need to go through an executive learning program. A program whose purpose and objective is to help you learn and develop skills. Period.
So here is the deal: read what the needed skills are below, and then map what you need to develop for your career growth. If you don’t know how to create a Career Growth Plan, you can check out our Growth Blueprint Workbook that helps you do exactly that. Or you can hire a specialized global leadership development expert to help you in this mapping process. Maybe, you can do both and get even better results!
So let’s see the list of skills:
Financial Literacy.
No matter what function or leadership position, every leader must understand what each of their actions and decisions will create in terms of value to shareholders.
Most think that “finance thinking” is reserved for those working in the finance department.
But the truth is that companies who don’t help all their leaders learn the finance language, regardless of department, don’t thrive as much as those who do.
Learning the essentials about finance will help leaders make smarter and faster decisions because they will know how their decisions will impact the shareholder, the community, and the business continuity.
Strategy And Decision-Making.
All leaders must know how to create – or participate in – a robust strategy cycle in their businesses and endeavors.
They must know the basics of strategic planning to ensure the business mission and vision realization, and therefore learning the strategy process is key.
What comes next is decision-making. Who doesn’t make decisions every day? Global Leadership and executives more so! Small and big.
And we make better decisions if we know the best processes and approaches to make them. There are a few elements in a good decision-making process: clarity of vision-values-strategy, clarity of processes, decision impact awareness, decision criteria, decision fatigue, decision fears, etc.
When a leader is unaware of all these elements and how they work together, the company can have the best PoA (power of attorney table) in the world. Still, leaders will make crappy decisions. So leaders must learn to create a decision-making process for themselves and their teams.
Both Strategy Planning and Decision-Making are learnable skills, contrary to what people might think.
How often did I hear people say that only very intellingent people can create smart strategies and make fast decisions? That’s non-sense. I learned them, you can learn them, anyone can learn them.
Budgeting.
Although budgeting is usually referred to as a finance skill, I decided to put it in a separate bullet here because it is critically important.
And unfortunately, most leaders overlook it, especially if they don’t hold power over their budgets (i.e., someone else makes the final budget planning and decisions).
Learning how to budget a department, an organization, a project, or whatever endeavor you want differentiates the leader who does not yet have budgeting ownership.
This means if you don’t plan and budget your own department just yet, you should learn this skill right NOW. You must learn it before you have actual ownership, offer help to whoever has it, and gain some experience in the process.
This will catapult your (current) reputation and your long-term employability.
You see, leaders are “shareholder’s housekeepers.” Would you want a housekeeper that wastes things and can’t run a house smoothly or one that can make the most with what they have?
Learning how to budget is equivalent to learning how to make the most with what you have. Regardless of your seniority, title, or authority level, this is a skill you must have as a global leader.
Business Acumen.
I will be very honest with you. It took me several years to really understand what business acumen really was. No, I don’t mean the theoretical concept. I mean the actual skill implications. But once I got it, it was career-changing.
When I was house-hunting in the U.S. as an expat, I used my Acquiring Business Acumen Methodology before an important homeowner association meeting. After the meeting, the H.O.A. manager asked to talk with me. He told me he was very impressed with my “HOA Acumen.” He said, “you know more of our operations than residents that lived here for a whole decade.”
Of course, my primary intention was to make sure I was not buying a home in a crappy homeowner association, which would give me a lot of headaches later.
I dare say that learning this skill is essential in all aspects of life, as you saw with my personal example. You can use it to improve your own reputation in the company that you are working for, but it has several other use-cases outside a solely business environment.
In a nutshell, business acumen is your ability to understand the business that you are working for inside out. What are the products, what do they do, who is the audience that buys your products and services, how is your company positioned in the market, what is your company’s strategy, who decides on what, what are the main company policies, main values, original purpose, and so on.
If you are in your company’s silo and only know about your department, you will not be a good leader.
You saw how many aspects business acumen has, and I didn’t even get started! So leaders need to learn a process that they can use to gain that business acumen once they get into a new company.
Executive Presence.
To this day, I remember my first feedback regarding executive presence. I remember asking my manager what he meant by “improving my executive presence,” and he stumbled upon his words and formulated a completely unarticulated babble.
Then to conclude, he said something along the lines of “if you didn’t even understand what I just said, you’re not even qualified to be here.”
Well, I surely was very qualified to be there, and he undoubtedly ensured I kept quiet after that smart final (manipulative) move, right?
Many leaders can’t formulate what executive presence is because it has more than one component to it, so putting them together requires a lot of business awareness and experience.
Executive presence is the leader’s ability to project confidence, professionalism, trustworthiness, reliability, and inclusiveness through a specific set of skills.
People think of executive presence as a have or don’t have kind of talent. But that’s wrong. Executive presence is completely “learnable.”
It’s a conjunction of etiquette skills, communication skills, impression management, posture and demeanor, adequate attire, planning & preparation, influencing skills, intuitive listening skills, and confidence projection.
Right out of the bat, you can see why it is such a hard skill to master: because you have to master FIRST a bunch of other skills and only then learn the skill to glue them all together.
And here is the highlight: it has been shown that leaders with perceived higher executive presence get higher pay than those who are not perceived in the same way. They are usually promoted faster too.
Business Evolution Models.
If you had several years of work experience and worked for different businesses in different growth stages, you know that they were very different.
Businesses are like humans in a sense. They are born, grow, develop, multiply, and die. The difference from humans is that humans have a standard life span, while businesses don’t. But like humans, in order to ensure business continuity, leaders have to invest in the company’s “health.”
The stages in this health cycle are called The Business Evolution Stages.
One of the most famous models, and the one I teach in my online executive program, is the STARS Model.
This is a business evolution model developed by Michael D. Watkins. Like with leadership styles, the purpose is not to box a business.
Understanding this model helps you quickly identify what actions to take based on what you know about a company’s stage.
Models like this help us make sense out of situations faster and devise the proper set of actions to achieve what we want.
That is why I recommend that every client work on the STARS model so that they can improve business acumen in their first 90 days.
By the way, if you want to nail business acumen in your first 90 days as a global leader, make sure to get our guide above because it’s really a gem.
Listen, as a leader, the set of actions you work on in a start-up is entirely different from one in a turn-around stage. Learning this model and what to do with it is critical for every leader who wants to impact businesses positively. This knowledge will help you whether you are in an expert function or a leadership position. Don’t overlook it.
12 Things You Can Do To Improve Organizational Leadership Skills
Here are a few things you can do to start improving your organizational leadership skills:
- Become more literate in finance. Go after a Finance For Non-Finance Leaders training.
- Map your stakeholders’ decision-making styles, preferences, and motivators. Start with your own. What’s your decision-making style? If you don’t know, take the quiz to learn. You can cater your narrative to each of the different styles, and help them make progress in the decision-making process. That’s why learning about them is vital.
- Create a plan to develop your business acumen over time. If you don’t have a plan, check out our First 90-Days Guide to get you started.
- Make sure to develop your Career Growth Plan. Hire a specialized coach or get our Blueprint Program. Your job here is to create a career plan with feasible steps from today until your career goal.
- Learn the STARS model and what each stage needs for growth and becoming prosperous as a business.
- Offer your help in a budget cycle and get more experienced with budgeting.
- Create positive working relationships across the organization you work for. What I mean by that is creating genuine relationships that can last you even after you leave the company. You can start doing that by sharing information and resources. Share this blog post with several key stakeholders, for example. Start engaging with people more and often.
- Associate with good and experienced mentors. Mentors are people who are more experienced than you and who can give you valuable insights into your career and development. The best advice I got I will share here: seek mentors outside your department and outside your company. Make sure to have at least 3 to 5 mentors from a different pool of places. You want to gain different perspectives as a global leader. Subscribe to our webinar, where we explore this perspective topic in much more detail.
- Develop your reputation. Many call it developing your personal branding. That works as well. However you label it, your main goal is to work on impression management.
- Improve your executive presence by first learning the supporting skills of executive presence. In your development roadmap, you can plan then to hire an executive coach to help you glue all the skills together that will show up as a greater executive presence.
- Take opportunities for professional development. Consider international assignments and any type of assignment outside your comfort zone. If you have already worked on your Career Growth Plan, you will know which jobs and assignments you should take to develop. If not, my recommendation is to work on that first before blindly accepting opportunities.
- Build expertise. Whether you go the formal route and find formal education or work on gaining experience and on-the-job-trianing, continuous learning is imperative for any global expert and executive. Seek training and work opportunities aligned with your goals, mentorship programs, formal education, online executive programs. You will keep learning and improving with all these. As you progress in your career, you will notice you will end up needing all of them. And that’s why having a career growth plan is so important: you can structure all these steps into a solid plan.
Organizational Leadership Jobs And Careers
Most leaders with organizational leadership experience enjoy a steady and fast-growth career. And it’s understandable why: after you read this article, you saw how many complex skills and experiences one has to have.
By having organizational leadership skills and experience, you can have careers in:
- Public and private sectors
- For-profit and not-for-profit realms
- Local institutions or global institutions
- Centralized and decentralized organizations
- New start-ups and global conglomerates
The other potential benefit in learning Organizational Leadership is in regards to compensation, benefits, and rewards. According to the U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics, “the median annual wage for management occupations was $109,760 in May 2020, which was the highest wage of all the major occupational groups.”
Occupations in this field also have good health benefits and other rewards like stock options, bonuses, long-term bonuses, and so on.
By learning these skills and gaining experience with them, you are certainly not making a wrong move in terms of employment potential and career.
Final Thoughts
Whether you are a young and ambitious leader or a seasoned one, learning and developing organizational leadership skills and experiences are fundamental to career development.
If you are interested in developing your organizational leadership skills and want to learn a step-by-step process on how to enhance them, check out our online Global Executive Leadership Program. We go over all 4 success pillars of Global Leadership during 9 online modules, including 2 dedicated modules in Organizational Leadership.
In case you have a specific Organizational Leadership Skill in mind that you want to develop or a situation in which you feel stuck, you can purchase one of our executive coaching packages. We can help you sort the issue or topic out during your program and find the best course of action to make things better for you and your team. Executive coaching can be an extremely powerful tool in Organizational Leadership, and many high executives make constant use of it.
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