Organisational strategic leadership, in the public or private  sector,  is the key determinant for sustaining optimum organisational performance.  There is growing interest in deploying strategic leadership theories and practical concepts to strengthening private and  public sector performance and to expand more stages of traditional strategic management. Four ways through which success can be practically achieved, as far as organisational strategic leadership is concerned are promoting employee involvement to create strategy, mapping an organizational vision publicly, empowering followers to lead, and pushing concrete action and networking. There is no single answer to the main question of  how to improve and sustain public sector performance. However, some researchers believe that strategic leadership concepts may become the most apt concepts to embracing better value-driven culture in public sector reform in this twenty first century organisational management era.

So the mammoth question is;  how can the leadership role and performance management system developed theoretically influence public sector performance and how can strategic leadership roles be managed to optimise performance outcome?. Arguably, several key roles of strategic leadership can be offered as strategies to sustain public organisation performance outcome as follows:

1.Determination of Clear Organisational Visions
The first important role of the strategic leader is to determine clearly the organisation’s vision and develop strategic direction. In the public sector, creating long term strategic directions actually demands an improvement of the existing concept of the strategic management process.

Strategic leadership concept is superior compared to two other most prominent leadership paradigms known as managerial leadership and visionary leadership. Strategic leadership practically can be defined as a process of transforming an organisation through its vision, mission and values based on sustainable assessment of internal and external organisational factors: culture and climate, structure and systems as well as through its strategy. Strategic leadership probably is a key for the future success of the organisation. The concept promotes ability to anticipate and envision future opportunities and challenges, maintain flexibility in the midst of internal and external changes. Employing the concept of strategic leadership will enable public or private sector organisational leaders achieve leadership accountability.

2. Development of Human Capital and Organisational Culture ‘Fit’

Strategic leadership may be considered as the key success factor for any change initiatives especially on developing human capital and reshaping current organisational culture to “fit” with the organisational strategy. Human capital relates to the people, knowledge and skills in the organisation. To develop and make it align with the organisational strategy and culture, a leader needs a workable framework in practice. Theoretically, a better strategic leadership framework can be defined as a tool for the aligning of human resource practices and business strategy, cascading performance management system from top level to the individual level in order to achieve organisational performance outcomes. Furthermore, in order to hinder the misuse of various leadership frameworks available in the implementation, an organisation needs to have better guidance on how to explore necessary variables and determine what factors should be considered in order to improve organisational performance rather than just providing a list of effective leadership qualities.

3. Establishing balAnced Organisational Performance Controls

Strategic leaders in the public sector, under the new public management paradigm demand a strong emphasis on how to lead and manage public sector performance based on the result/outcome and establish balanced organisational controls to promote performance excellence. The term performance management system (PMS) can be referred as the current most appropriate term for the balanced and comprehensive control system for leading a public sector organisation to achieve high performance.

However, research has shown that there are five problems found in performance management systems including: inadequate managerial focus, insufficient managerial skills to improve performance, narrowly defined ownership, disconnect with strategy or inadequate linkage to business drivers and failure to execute. To enhance leadership accountability at all levels in public sector, balanced scorecard evaluation strategy can become not only as a measurement system, but as a strategic performance management tool to achieve competitive advantage and sustainability.

4. Promotion of Performance Governance and Creation of Value Based Outcome

Governance system can be defined as “a process whereby societies or organizations make their important decisions, determine whom they involve in the process and how they render account.  The governance system  deserves leadership accountability and performance as two of five principles of good governance in this twenty first century . This philosophy also promotes the so called ‘performance governance leadership’. It encourages public sector to strengthen emphasis on customer focus strategy, and adopts private sector performance management tools, design better budgeting, and promotes clear individual and departmental/organisational accountability. Leadership accountability deals with how the decision making by leaders in government, the private sector and civil society are accountable and transparent to the public and its stakeholders. Implementing performance principles  is about promoting institutions’ responsiveness, effectiveness and efficiency in making best use of resources to produce results.

In conclusion, to guarantee leadership and governance success in any form of organisation, be it private sector or public in the country where the administration is not well protected from political influence, too much bureaucratic practices, lack of leadership commitment to the value of the public service delivery, leaders need to consider strategies offered by the strategic leadership concept as a framework to aim more structural reform in the government to improve public service capacity.

About the Author:

David Agyei Mpettey, MCILG is the Chief Executive Officer of Intrastate Global (GH) Limited

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