This final section describes the Strategic Influence Assessment carried out by teams to measure future strategic influence for the organizations reviewed in their previous organizational SWOT analyses. Teams evaluate the anticipated strategic influence for each organization and make suggestions regarding how to see anticipated strategic influence become reality 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 prepare an assessment of present strategic influence and outline the development steps needed to identify those steps to see the strategic influence stay the course for development and change. After assessing strategic influence, teams prepare reports and suggestions based on their findings from the review of each organization’s 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) to identify/determine the organizational design best suited for developing the desired strategic influence, some designs listed by Galbraith, fit anticipated organizational futures; some do not. Describing how designs fit or don’t fit is an important part of understanding the effectiveness of future strategic planning, and the realization of anticipated strategic influence in terms of suggested or negated organizational operating designs.
Teams can create a workable hybrid and add suggestions for organizational practice, using any available documentation about the organization gathered from their investigation and are free to use other materials to support their evaluations and identify effective strategic influence practices. They can also use other research materials to support their evaluation and the directions for developing the organization’s strategic influence.
Taking these steps helps each leader, each team, through each exercise, discover and develop practices common to competent and confident strategic leadership practice. Concluding their strategic leadership journey, from novice to consulting professional, in just 10 weeks of practice.
