Discover the crucial role that leadership plays in achieving better organizational performance and how best to use that role strategically.

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Organizations stand or fall on their ability to execute strategy effectively. Has your company already tried implementing initiatives like Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, ERP, JIT, TQM, CMM, BPM, CRM, OPM3, or other spoonfuls of management alphabet soup—without seeing effective results? Perhaps your long-term strategies aren’t getting the sustained leadership that they need to succeed because of the urgencies of day-to-day business.

As the capstone course in the Stanford Advanced Project Management curriculum, Leadership for Strategic Execution addresses the crucial role that leadership plays in achieving better organizational performance in today’s dynamic global environment. Developed by IPS and the Stanford Center for Professional Development at Stanford University, this intensive, three-day course helps develop skills in critical areas of providing leadership to teams of people who translate strategy into effective results. The concepts presented are reinforced through simulations, videos, demonstrations, structured exercises, and group laboratories.

You’ll obtain a clear understanding of the leadership role and how best to use it strategically. You’ll learn how you can be an effective leader, whether for making strategic decisions, translating strategy, assessing risk, establishing sponsorship, or managing change within your organization. And you’ll leave the course—and the program—with an in-depth appreciation for the critical context leaders must provide to create the optimum level of performance through portfolio, program, and project management.

Benefits to the Organization

As a result of Leadership for Strategic Execution, your organization will benefit from:

• Increased organizational alignment that leads to fast, high-quality strategic decisions
• Visual tools that enable a shared dialogue on the options, constraints, risks, and interfaces essential for more effective portfolio and project execution
• Better enterprise risk management thinking

Learning Objectives

After attending Leadership for Strategic Execution, you will be able to:

• Apply a framework of strategic leadership at the organizational, team, and personal levels
• Use evidence more extensively in decision making
• Apply a decision-making process
• Describe how the various types of innovation create alignment issues
• Create maps of strategy to the execution layer
• Use a process for prioritizing action to manage the risks associated with organizational systems that affect execution
• Assess their total power levels and identify areas for improving execution ability
• Assess the strength of execution sponsorship, determine their role in sponsorship, and diagnose specific problems that require action
• Use a simple and powerful human dynamic model to change the way they interact with others and become more influential

Target Audience

This course is designed for all professionals who are responsible for strategic management: mid- to senior-level managers, project, program, and portfolio managers, and team members. This course has no prerequisites, but Converting Strategy into Action is highly recommended.

Course Topics

The DNA of Strategic Execution

• Introductions
• Course map and expectations
• A framework for examining leadership
• Case study for analysis
• Strategy, execution, and leadership
• Alignment across domains and organizational levels

What Wise Leaders Do: An Evidence-Based Approach

• Support for an evidence-based approach
• What is evidence-based management?
• Hazards of business advice
• Being wise is more important than being smart
• Leadership and the illusion of control
• Thoughts about leadership

Making Effective Decisions

• Elements of a quality decision
• Individual decision-making biases
• Application: Carter Racing case study
• Group decision-making bias

Strategy Innovation

• Factors that influence innovation decisions
• Which strategic outcome do we want?
• How mature is the market in which we will innovate?
• Types of innovation
• Dealing with organizational inertia

Strategy Execution Mapping

• The execution dilemma
• Strategy planning considerations
• Strategy mapping process
• Application: Cisco Enterprise IT case study
• Strategy mapping process: additional steps
• Communicating visually

System Risk Assessment

• Obstacles to execution
• Managing system risk
• System risk assessment process
• Application exercise
• System risk management guidelines

Leading with Power

• Ambivalence about power
• Sources of power
• Power case study: Tina Brown
• Attributes for acquiring and holding power
• Influence strategies

Sponsorship

• Perspectives on sponsorship in organizations
• Sponsorship is a two-way street—analyzing the manager/sponsor relationship
• Portfolio, program, and project sponsorship
• Rules for managing sponsor relationships

Insights to Leadership

• Leadership for managing change
• Insights profile feedback analysis and discussion