How Should Leaders Review Strategic Priorities?

Introduction

Leadership style and behaviour are key determinants of effective organisational management. The leaders are "The people who co-ordinate and balance the interests of all who have a stake in the organisation, including- the executive team, all other managers and those in team leadership positions or with a subject leadership role"

Witcher (2007) argues that POSIES gives us an impression of a sequence of tasks, top-down strategic planning idea. Leadership style depends on how strategic management is managed by top managers.

There are different leadership styles and therefore there are different ways that leaders review strategic priorities. In Rudolph Guiliani's book 'Leadership', his philosophy is to identify the core purpose of an organisation and align the resources and focus along with that purpose. He also believes strongly in organizing around a purpose. In order to develop an organisation structure Giuliani's first question is always "What's your mission?"- not a day to day but on a long term basis. Therefore he proposes to analyse the Purpose, Objective and Strategy of an organisation before setting the structure.

Weber (1924) classifies types of leadership in relation to types of authority. These vary from a commanding leadership, where people must have obedience to orders, to an inspiring type. This inspiring type may also be related to John Seddon's 'systems thinking'. He argues that leaders should work the work. They should manage how people do things, not what they do. Chester Barnard (1938) argues that Executives primary job was to facilitate co-operation and that authority should not be imposed.

Leadership is sometimes associated with visionary and a personalised form of management. Witcher gives us the example of Ford who had a clear idea of his vision for his car company. His vision was creating simple model cars at low cost and this vision produced the Model-T car, the modern mass production assembly line that made it possible. However, Witcher argued that this form of leadership may encourage short term, individually based goal setting, rather than team work.

Senge (1990) advocates a dispersed leadership for the learning organisation where progress is achieved through small steady changes. A great leader in his view is one who encourages others to say, "We did it ourselves".

Collins (2002) mentions that the difference between good to great performers is a consistent system with clear constraints. Discipline is a very important aspect with vision and faith. Strategic understanding is necessary and he stresses on the idea of getting disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who then take disciplined action. Leadership must be low key and shouldn't require efforts to raise motivation and commitment, if the right thinking people have been put in place. This idea can be related to Giuliani's thought about hiring good people to do good work- "I hire Good people instead of yes men."

Compstat

Computerised Statistics or Compstat is a management system introduced by Giuliani in 1993 with an overall purpose to reduce the rate of crime in New York. The system is used by the New York police Department (NYPD) with the primary function of anticipating and solving problems through the daily collection and analysis of crime statistics. This produced recognisable patterns of crime that the NYPD could use the curb potential trouble before it spreads. In the past, statistics were assessed annually or quarterly, this proved ineffective as by the time a pattern of crime was noticed it would have changed.

Compstat was organised around a purpose, with accountability at its centre, where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) helped with review.

Accountability is at the heart of the Compstat system. Indicators were crafted to tell participants of the twice-weekly meetings whether goals were being met. In the meetings, the collected data was used to scrutinise or praise the performance of the eight borough commanders. However, there is much more to the meetings besides the carrot and stick approach: commanders had objective proof of their good performance and strived to further improve it or underperforming boroughs might clear the way for a commander to ask for help. Furthermore, the meetings also allowed for brainstorming sessions and the exchange of ideas as well as friendly competition between precincts which could have an overall positive effect on performance. According to Giuliani, these meetings were the ultimate expression of how much success relies on acting as a team, sharing ideas, holding each other accountable and relying on one another for support.

KPIs were used to define and measure progress towards strategic goals. Coupled with statistical data, KPIs allowed the NYPD to pinpoint what areas were needed to be improved and who was accountable to approve them. If there were too many performance indicators, then Compstat can become too complicated, resulting in only a few people understanding the system. It was therefore important to decentralise control, allowing each department in New York to create their own system making each KPI salient and relevant to them.

Giuliani set baseline conditions in order to ensure that the KPI were upheld and that Compstat would be a success:

* Data had to be collected regularly and reliably, at least once a week.

* Twenty to forty performance indicators incorporating the core mission of the agency had to be established.

* A regular meeting must be convened at least once a week stating exactly what was required.

Giuliani ensured that the KPIs focused on the core purpose of the organisation allowing resources to be aligned towards the goals of each individual department. The KPIs help identify new aims for each department by assessing what areas needed to be improved and how effective has it been in achieving the original purpose set out.

The impact of Compstat was immediate and revolutionary. Major felonies fell 12.3% from 1993 to 1994. In one year, murders dropped 17.9% and robberies dropped 15.5%. Although crime was falling nationwide, New York's crime reduction surpassed that of any other American city - its rate of reduction was 3 to 6 times the national average. More performance indicators were added resulting similar levels of improvement, specifically giving officers key goals to improve their effectiveness.

This success