Leadership can be found at all levels of an organization
Great leaders drive results by focusing on four key leadership skills and behaviors:
- Communicating as a leader.
- Ensuring individual and team accountability.
- Developing clear and concise strategy statements.
- Leveraging cross-functional and cross-cultural collaboration.
One of my core leadership beliefs is that leaders can be found at all levels of an organization. Leadership is not something confined to the upper ranks of management or the top tiers of an organization chart.
Likewise, strategy is not something done only at the corporate or strategic business unit level. Any leader can have a strategy, such as:
A customer retention strategy. 
A service quality strategy.
An innovation strategy.
A new product strategy.
A cost-reduction strategy.
A leadership development strategy.
A team development strategy.
A strategy is simply a vision of going from a current situation to a desired state, complete with actionable plans and identified resources. But while this may sound simple, in reality most strategies are anything but simple. In addition, as Jedi Master Yoda teaches us, “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”
However, setting a strategy or a vision for your workgroup is never sufficient in itself. Far too many strategies fail to achieve their intended outcomes. I’ll share with you in a forthcoming series of blog posts some of the main reasons why strategic plans fail.
For strategies to become successful, leaders must use all the four skills above. Otherwise, the outcomes achieved are unlikely to be the results desired and anticipated.
This article is excerpted from my book Great Leadership Words of Wisdom, which is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats and has over 1000 quotes on leadership from global business leaders, statesmen, athletes, coaches, sages, and philosophers.
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