Strategic Influence
This section describes the Startegic Influence assessment carried out by 3 teams. Two teams of leaders represent the nonprofit sector and one team of ministry leaders represents Christian Ministry. Nonprofit leader measured the future strategic influence of the organizations reviewed in their SWOT analysis of two separate nonprofit organizations; one in Canada and one in Nigeria. The third team, from Christian Ministry, measured the future strategic influence for The House, a church located in British Columbia Canada.
The review of all three organizations, started with a SWOT analysis, evaluated anticipated strategic influence for each organization reviewed and made suggestions on how to further develop that anticipated strategic influence for each organization’s future. Using chapter 4 of Richard Hughes, Katherine Colarelli Beatty & David Dinwoodie (2014) Becoming a Strategic Leader (pp. 145-195), teams prepared an assessment of each organization’s present strategic influence and outlined developmental steps for seeing future strategic influence develop for the organization by staying the course toward planned future development and change. Teams prepared reports and suggestions based on findings in their review of organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Using Chapters 6-9 of Galbraith’s Designing Organizations: Strategy, Structure and Process at the Business Unit Levels (pp. 131-216), teams identify/determine the organizational designs best suited for developing the desired strategic influence. Designs listed by Galbraith, describing specific design fit or lack is an important part of understanding the effectiveness future strategic planning will have on the organizations reviewed. Realizing anticipated strategic influence describing organizational vision for the future in terms of suggested or negated organizational operating design creates effective frameworks for protecting an organization’s future path and makes success more likely than without identifying the structure they follow.
Teams created workable hybrids and added suggestions for organizational practice, using available documentation about the organization gathered from their investigation. In this section, the Christian Ministry team observed models presented by Galbraith (2014) fit more into a business model geared towards making a profit and creating networks where organizations can leverage one another to gain higher productivity. From this observation, the Christian Ministry leaders chose to identify a networking strategy for influencing the surrounding community and those coming into contact with the church as being most effective for developing the church’s present strategic influence and the development of it’s future strategic influence practice. For the nonprofit organizations, one team chose a hybrid of the reconfigurable network organizational design for providing the best options for the organization depending on its needs. The other team chose a single-business strategy and functional organizational design.
Taking these steps helped each leader, each team of Christian Ministry and noprofit leadership professionals, through each exercise discover what it means to become a more effective strategic leader and develop practices common to the competent and confident practice of strategic leadership.
