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When it comes time to implement a strategy, many companies find themselves stymied at the point of execution. Having identified the opportunities within their reach, they watch as the results fall short of their aspirations. Too few companies recognize the reason.

Mismatched capabilities, poor asset configurations, and inadequate execution can all play their part in undermining a company's strategic objectives. Although well-regarded corporations tend to keep these pitfalls squarely in their sights, in our experience far fewer companies recognize the leadership capacity that new strategies will require, let alone treat leadership as the starting point of strategy. This oversight condemns many such endeavors to disappointment.

What do we mean by "leadership"? Whereas good managers deliver predictable results as promised, as well as occasional incremental improvements, leaders generate breakthroughs in performance. They create something that wasn't there before by launching a new product, by entering a new market,or by more quickly attaining better operational performance at lower cost, for example. A company's leadership reaches well beyond a few good men and women at the top. It typically includes the 3 to 5 percent of employees throughout the organization who can deliver breakthroughs in performance.

Since bold strategies often require breakthroughs along a number of fronts,a company needs stronger and more dominant leadership at all levels if these strategies are to succeed. A defining M&A transaction, for example, requires leadership throughout an organization's business units and functions in order to piece together best practices and wring out synergies while striving to carry on business as usual. In addition, leaders throughout both companies must transcend the technical tasks of the merger to rally the spirits of employees and to communicate a higher purpose.

As the number of strategic dimensions and corresponding initiatives increases, so does the pressure on leadership. Not surprisingly, our work in many industries with companies of all sizes has shown that high-performers, especially those with lofty aspirations, have the most difficulty meeting their leadership needs. Of course, companies that perform poorly are also lacking in leadership capacity. The higher a company's aspirations or the more radical its shift in strategic direction, the larger the leadership gap. This rule holds true for high performers and laggards alike.

The consequences of inattention
Most CEOs will agree that leadership is important, yet few assess their leadership gap precisely. Fewer still build an engine to develop the right quantity of leaders with the right mix of capabilities, at the right time, to match opportunities.

If the number of leaders needed to achieve a strategic goal—for example, expanding current operations or developing new businesses—were set against the number of existing leaders, a company could uncover the numeric leadership gap it must address. Even if an organization has enough leaders, it may discover a shortfall in their capabilities. A company expanding internationally, for example, could find that its current leaders lacked the cultural sensitivity to operate in unfamiliar geographies. Or a corporation entering new markets could find it had too many engineers and not enough business builders.

The failure to assess leadership capacity systematically before launching strategic initiatives can leave top executives scrambling to fill gaps at the last minute—with significant consequences.

In the short term, companies that undertake new strategies without the right leaders in place are forced to burden their existing ones with additional responsibilities. As such leaders take on the new challenges, the demands from day-to-day operations invariably increase, leaving less time for other tasks. Often these leaders drop the activities with less tangible outcomes, such as staff development, for which the effects are not immediately evident. If a company stretches its existing leaders too far, their overall effectiveness takes a nosedive. From the start, this trade-off compromises strategic objectives. Companies executing strategies under these circumstances assume either that they can get by with suboptimal leadership or that achieving just part of their initial objectives will capture a corresponding percentage of the strategy's net present value. We know from experience that these assumptions can be fatally wrong: one critical misstep can jeopardize the entire investment.

In the longer term, a persistent leadership gap will be responsible for an inexorable decline in the number and quality of leaders. Companies create a vicious cycle in which good leaders become overextended or are moved haphazardly and thus have less time to develop younger talent. The day will come when they hand over the reins to a less experienced, ill-prepared group of successors. Left unchecked, this cycle can ultimately put the company's core operations and strategic growth at risk.

Leadership first
Given the severe consequences of a leadership gap—the best-planned strategy is no more than wishful thinking if it can't be translated from concept to reality—why do so many companies discover their leadership shortfall only when executing their strategies? This question raises another, more fundamental one regarding strategy and leadership: which is the chicken and which is the egg? Companies have taken a number of useful approaches to this puzzle.

One successful US conglomerate with global operations routinely holds discussions that integrate both strategy and leadership. Any consideration of a strategic initiative invariably includes the question, "Who exactly will get this done?" If the company does not have a sufficient number of the right leaders, the plan does not proceed.

Another approach is to weigh a corporation's strategic options against its ability to launch new businesses, new approaches, and other forms of breakthrough performance—in other words, its leadership. Consider, for example, the global-expansion strategy for a successful resource company. The effort included identifying the leadership required to drive breakthrough performance over five years in areas such as running and expanding existing businesses, developing new ones, renovating corporate processes such as risk management, and providing overall change leadership. The company then gauged its leadership gap by comparing these requirements with the qualities of its current leadership bench. It made a number of strategic decisions to determine, among other things, which path was best for realizing the strategy, whether to revise its aspirations, and whether to develop leaders internally or hire them from outside.

A third approach is to plan the path toward a predetermined strategic goal by taking into account the quantity, timing, and mix of leaders that the various alternatives require. Companies using this framework may rule out some possibilities if developing the requisite depth of leadership is unrealistic in the time frame dictated by the marketplace. A leading food company in Asia, for example, aspired to become the dominant regional player. With five strong national brands, it had at least three clear options for how to achieve that goal: take a cautious approach by launching one brand as a pilot in each overseas market before introducing other brands; focus on China by building a beachhead with one brand in a single city, then sequentially rolling that brand out region by region within China; or, finally, acquire a player in one regional Chinese market, thus gaining outlets and local expertise, and use this opening to roll out all five brands to more markets in China over time.

While many factors, including the company's appetite for risk, weigh on these decisions, in this case each option had distinct leadership requirements. The first, for example, would initially require at least five to ten well-rounded leaders—entrepreneurs capable of establishing local networks, operating under unfamiliar conditions, and managing all five brands. The second option called for a business builder who was deeply familiar with the beachhead city to direct a team of four to six emerging leaders who could spearhead the subsequent expansion. A business-development leader would also be helpful in seeking an alliance partner to speed up the company's pace and bolster its confidence during the regional expansion. The third possibility, by contrast, would immediately require an expert to structure, valuate, and negotiate deals and, in the medium term, a few executives capable of operating in each of the regional Chinese markets. After the company critically reviewed its current and potential leaders, it made the decision to adopt the third of those options.

These three cases illustrate how thinking about leadership up front can affect a strategy's direction, path, and outcome. But can a company bring leadership considerations into its strategic discussions even earlier, before it chooses a general direction? To do so, the company must think rigorously about its current leadership pool—the types of leaders and their mix of capabilities—and lay out the strategy accordingly. If a manufacturer's strong suit is leaders with superb marketing capabilities, for example, a market-driven strategy would be implied and might include selling another manufacturer's products. Taken to this level, leadership becomes the true starting point for strategy.

Souce: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/leading_in_the_21st_century/leadership_as_the_starting_point_of_strategy

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