As we mentioned earlier, an effective organizational strategy can

help establish and reinforce your image as a leader in an organization.

Yet strategies do not simply emerge on their own. You need
to utilize leadership skills to formulate and implement organizational
strategies. An extensive body of literature has sought to
identify the key characteristics or styles of effective leaders (Bums,
1978; Selznick, [1957] 1984; Bennis and Nanus, 1997; Abram§on
and Bacon, 2001; Denhardt and Denhardt, 2006).
Effective leaders are known to possess a wide range of
styles-from inspiring and entrepreneurial, to sensible and trustworthy,
to fastidious and uncompromising. Most of the literature
on leadership maintains that different leadership styles or
qualities are important in different decision-making contexts,
cultures, and organizations. The leadership style needed to handle
a natural disaster will likely be different from the leadership
skills needed to deal with an employee who is unproductive and
uncooperative. The ability to match leadership style to organizational
context is best learned through experience and practice
(Denhardt and Denhardt, 2006).
There are limits to how far your talents and traits will allow
you to adapt to new situations. Winston Churchill was a brilliant
wartime leader, but the minute World War II ended, the
British people couldn't wait to vote him out of office. For
the manager who is looking for ways to develop and implement
a strategy to lead an organization in a new direction, it is useful
to focus on what leaders actually do.
Good leaders do many of the things we have already
described in this book: they create change in organizations

in earlier chapters, it is important to highlight these functions for

the purposes of understanding what a leader will need to accomplish
within the organization.
Infuse the Organization 'With Value. Infusing an organization
with value involves defining an organization's mission and
role and adapting that mission to the needs of organizational
survival. It requires a leader to define a core set of objectives and
operating principles and then to constantly communicate these
values to the members of the organization. In order to infuse a
sense of values, a leader must convince members to adapt and
essentially absorb the organization's precepts. Recent research
on Department of Defense organizational units has found that
managers are more effective when they are able to closely align
the values of their organization with the existing normative values
of employees (Paarlberg and Perry, 2007). To some degree
this means responsiveness and scanning of the social and political
values that shape individual norms and preferences. It means
showing how the values promoted through your strategies and
program tie into social goals.
Naturally, such a communication process is not a one-way
street. Both manager and staff must modify their behavior and
preferences in creating a living, breathing organization. The
organization is transformed into a social grouping valued by its
members for its own sake, exclusive of its productive purposes.
Evidence of this transformation is the organization's concern
for self-maintenance. Like any living being, the organization is
attempting to survive. The organizational manager must nurture
this organism and steer it toward productive purposes. In
a healthy organization, staff members share a sense of common
purpose and mutual values. In an efficient organization, this
social energy is transformed into marketable products and Services.
The manager must be in touch with the informal social
forces at work in the organization and attempt to understand
and influence those forces.
Dc{,elop the Organizati,"i's Distinctive Competence. This
is the creation of marketable services and products. In the public
sector, this translates into programs that generate political
support. It requires that an organization be uniquely capable of
performing some task valued by those who distribute resources.
Infusing the organization with value is the process of stimulating
an organization to share the same goals and attitudes.
(Jordon Chase (Chase and Reveal, 1983) describes how,
when he first became a health administrator, he would ask his
commissioners and senior managers what they had been doing.
Initially, some of his senior officials would answer by telling
him how many meetings they had attended, how many memos
they had written, and how many staff members they had hired.
Chase would respond, "But whom did you make healthy today?
Did you make anyone in New York healthier-and how do you
know?" (1" 177). Chase's goal was to redirect his senior officials'
perspectives toward the services they were to provide.
Developing distinctive competence stimulates the organization
to behave productively. This is achieved by setting realistic goals
and developing standard operating procedures.
Distribute Incenti'lles. Incentives are used to motivate the
organization's staff to act in desired ways. A manager must direct
incentives with an understanding of an individual's talents and
preferences. Selznick ([1957] 1984) considers one primary function
of leadership to be the understanding of an organization's
informal social structure. By understanding your staff's values,
preferences, communication patterns, and relationships, you can
direct incentives and stimulate productivity.
This is why leadership cannot be practiced from behind a
desk. You must get out and learn ahout the social organism you
manage---cin order to influence it. Tom Peters and Nancy Austin
(1985) advocate "managing by wandering around" (1" 8).
Robert Behn (1988) has adapted this notion to the public sector;
he writes about "management by groping along" (p. 64).

They all note that it is difficult to manage if you sit around waiting
for adequate information to come to you. Peters and Austin
(1985) point out that "hard-data-driven information is usually a
day late and [is] always sterile" (p.6, Peters and Austin's italics).
By spending at least 25 percent of the time with staff members
and customers, a manager can be in touch "with the first vibrations
of the new" (p. 7). Your primary source of influence is your
power to direct incentives. Successful strategy implementation
requires an assessment of the incentives available to stimulate
organizational change.
Structure and Mediate Internal Conflicts. The manager
plays a unique role in an organization's social structure.
Disagreements and conflicts among staff members are brought to
the manager to resolve. Mediating conflict is cost-free for neither
organizational managers nor staff people. Employees lose influence
over the final decision by allowing conflicts to percolate up
the organizational ladder. Managers risk alienating some workers
by deciding in favor of their organizational opponents. This final
function of leadership also involves setting up pro~esses for identifying
and resolving conflict. In general, leaders should approach
conflict with care. The chances of failure are great because before
a conflict gets pushed up the hierarchy for resolution, positions
harden, egos are engaged, and emotions are exposed.
Leadership is an important factor to be considered when
you formulate and implement strategies. You need a management
philosophy that works for you, and you need to develop
the ability to listen to, learn about, and observe your environment.
Bear in mind that you are never writing your strategy on
a blank piece of paper. All organizations, and in fact all human
enterprises, bring with them both a history and a trajectory. You
must understand where the organization has been and where it
is headed if you are to steer its future direction.
Even the best-laid plans often fail, and you should be modest
in assuming that what you are attempting will work. It may
SHAPING ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS AND STRATEGIES 273
be trite to say, but the key to recovering frmn failure is to lea:!,l
quickly from your mistakes. In government, it is often very (litficult
to identify failures, and because goals are so broad and
vague, it is often possible to avoid responsibility for. f~ilu~e: For
example, if our goal is to clean up the groundwater, It IS dlfhcult
to say whether our program is working if we do not know how
contaminated the water is in the first place. .
Nevertheless, there are certainly failures. An effort to keep graffiti
off certain subway cars may not work. A municipality's effort
to keep a local factory from moving may fail. A program to process
licenses might fall short of its goal by 15 percent. These types
of failures are inevitable. Our personal view is that failures must
be quickly and explicitly identified, analyzed, and a~sorbed .. By
absorbed we mean that the lessons learned should be mtemaltzed
and a ne~ effort should be launched to overcome the failure. It is
. critical that the staff involved in the failure not be punished for failing.
Instead, focus your negative incentives on those who attempt
to hide failure or are unwilling to learn from their mistakes.