The Leader as a
Strategist Report
For this assignment, you
will choose an organization to analyze. This organization can be one you are
personally familiar with, or one you have observed to be an effective
organization, You now become a newly appointed senior leader in that
organization.
As a new leader, you
must prepare a report for the CEO that assesses the organization’s overall
alignment between its vision, mission, values, and strategy. This report should
consist of the following sections:
1.
An analysis of the
strategic cascade of the organization
This includes assessing the organization’s strategy and market position. Use
the framework implied in Michael Porter’s (1997) article “What is Strategy.”
When describing the business strategy of your organization, consider the
following questions:
·
What is the target
market (target customer)?
·
What is your
organization’s value proposition (How does it deliver value that satisfies the
target’s wants and needs?)?
·
How is your product or
service positioned in the market (What specific features and attributes define
the product/service and how is its value reflected in its pricing,
distribution, marketing communications, etc.?)?
·
How is your
organization sustainably different from your competitors (What is the source of
uniqueness and how sustainable is it from being diminished by competitors?)?
2.
A strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis
A SWOT analysis is a strategy planning tool that examines both internal and
external environments for factors and trends that should shape planning and
operations over the next five years. Environmental factors internal to the
company are classified as strengths (to be leveraged) or weaknesses (to be
mitigated), while external factors are classified as either opportunities (to
be pursued) or threats (to be monitored and responded to).
Some primer questions for the SWOT analysis
include the following:
Strengths
·
What advantages does
your organization have?
·
What do you do better
than anyone else?
·
What unique or
lowest-cost resources can you draw upon that others cannot?
·
What do people in your
market see as your strengths?
·
What factors mean that
you “get the sale”?
·
What is your
organization’s unique selling proposition (USP)?
Weaknesses
·
What aspects of your
product or service could you improve?
·
What market segments
or competitive areas should you avoid?
·
What are people in
your market likely to see as weaknesses?
·
What factors can make
you lose sales?
Opportunities
·
What good
opportunities can you spot?
·
What interesting
trends are you aware of?
Useful opportunities can come from such things
as the following:
o Changes in technology and markets on both a
broad and narrow scale
o Changes in government policy related to your
field
o Changes in social patterns, population
profiles, lifestyle changes, and so on
o Local events
Threats
·
What obstacles do you
face?
·
What are your
competitors doing?
·
Are quality standards
or specifications for your job, products, or services changing?
·
Is changing technology
threatening your position?
·
Do you have bad debt
or cash-flow problems?
·
Could any of your
weaknesses seriously threaten your business?
3.
A summary of the
internal environment, including the organization’s values and the key elements
of the organization architecture that influence worker behavior.
Include the following characteristics when analyzing the internal environment:
·
Structure: This
includes the ways the organization assigns formal roles and responsibilities,
decision-making authority, expertise and skills, and work tasks. Think of the
organization chart and how its implied structure directs the decision making,
resource allocation, and workflow of the organization. Is it consistent with
the strategy?
·
Systems: This
comprises the information flows that coordinate activities between groups and
across the organization structure while helping direct worker behavior,
including performance management, financial management, operating, forecasting
and planning, and other regulating mechanisms. How do these systems help align
workers and their actions with the strategy?
·
Culture: This consists
of the unwritten rules and norms that govern worker behavior and help
coordinate the activities across structural boundaries. Is the organization
culture an enabler or impediment to the corporate strategy? What specific
behaviors embedded in the culture support the strategy? What specific behaviors
block the strategy?
A synthesis of the
information evaluating the ability of the organization to implement the
strategy using Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices (for example, modeling the
way) as a framework.
Include answers to the following:
·
Company Culture
o Describe the values and culture of your
organization.
o What are the values of your organization?
o How are they reflected in the behaviors you see
at work?
·
Employee Behaviors
o Describe the behaviors in your organization.
o Are these behaviors consistent with the
business strategy?
o Where do they conflict with the strategy?
o What new behaviors are required to align with
the strategy?
·
Leadership
o How might you and other leaders create new
behaviors to support the strategy?
o What specific actions would you implement to
communicate, motivate, model the way, coach, inspire the vision, challenge the
process, and encourage the heart?
Your response to each
part of the assignment should be approximately three pages.
Your final product will
be in a word document and be approximately 10–12 pages in length and utilize
4–7 scholarly sources in your research. Your paper should be written in a
clear, concise, and organized manner; demonstrate ethical scholarship in
accurate representation and attribution of sources; and display accurate
spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
