Becoming a Strategic Leader: Your Role in Your Organization's Enduring Success

Today’s organizations face difficult challenges in order to remain competitive—the quickening pace of change, increasing uncertainty, growing ambiguity, and complexity. To meet these challenges, organizations must broaden the scope of leadership responsibility for strategic leadership and engage more people in the process of leadership. In Becoming a Strategic Leader Rich Hughes and Kate Beatty from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) offer executives and managers a handbook for implementing a strategic leadership process that reaches leaders at all levels of organizations. Based on CCL’s successful Developing the Strategic Leader Program, this book outlines the framework of strategic leadership and contains practical suggestions on how to develop the individual, team, and organizational skills needed for institutions to become more adaptable, flexible, and resilient. The authors also show how individual managers can exercise effective strategic leadership through their distinctive and systemic approach—thinking, acting, and influencing.

Richard L. Hughes is a senior enterprise associate at the Center for Creative Leadership campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is the senior author of the textbook Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience.

Katherine Colarelli Beatty is the program manager for the Developing the Strategic Leader (DSL) program. She is a trainer in the DSL program and also designs and delivers custom programs.

The Center for Creative Leadership is an international nonprofit educational institution whose mission is to advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide. Based in Greensboro, North Carolina, it conducts research, produces publications and assessment tools, and offers a variety of educational programs. For the second consecutive time, CCL was ranked number one in leadership education in the Executive Education Special Report in BusinessWeek magazine. For more information visit CCL's Web site at www.ccl.org.