New Water Policy and Practice Issue 4, Number 1, Fall 2017 | Page 22

New Water Policy & Practice Journal
cordingly, they have not yet developed a mindset of investing time in the short
term for benefits that may accrue in the long term. Such a mindset is critical for
many leadership activities. For example, this mindset is needed to invest the time
to build a genuinely shared vision at the start of an initiative, build strategic net-
works for future collaboration, and prepare an influence strategy which is ready to
use when a “window of opportunity” opens (see Kingdon 1995).
Typical impacts associated with this developmental trap include their teams
becoming redundant, losing executive or political support, or losing funding over
time. Non-strategic leaders are usually very good at solving technical problems,
but struggle to make significant progress on long term, complex/adaptive chal-
lenges (see Heifetz & Laurie 1997; Snowden & Boone 2007). This adversely affects
their credibility (a form of personal power; see Northouse 2015) and therefore
their ability to exert influence. It also limits their career options, as complex chal-
lenges are common in the water sector (see Deletic et al. 2013; Dunn et al. 2016;
Taylor, Lincklaen Arriëns & Laing 2015) and most senior organizational roles re-
quire strong strategic leadership abilities.
3.4.2. Developmental Guidance
The first step in helping non-strategic leaders to improve is to help them recognize
they have a capability gap. Facilitating a 360-degree feedback process (see Day
2000) can help to highlight the need to work in this area. The need to become more
strategic may also be affected by the leader’s career ambitions. For example, if they
plan to move into executive roles they will need to place a high priority on build-
ing knowledge and skills in strategic thinking, networking and planning.
At the team leader level, Susan Kogler Hill’s (2015) conceptual model of
team leadership is a useful tool to help leaders recognise that team leadership
involves working in three broad areas—tasks, relationships and the external en-
vironment. Often non-strategic team leaders are good at working internally on
task and relationship issues, but ignore the external environmental work of a good
team leader (e.g. advocating on behalf the team, strategic networking, garnering
resources, identifying threats and opportunities, etc.). Using this model to inform
their day to day team leadership activities can help them to broaden their perspec-
tive and include more strategic work.
Specific skills also need to be strengthened. These include building strategic
networks (i.e. relationships that help their organisation to meet its strategic goals),
strategic thinking and planning (e.g. using a variety of tools such as scenario plan-
ning and backcasting), systems thinking (i.e. learning how to analyse a complex
problem from a holistic perspective), and engaging in scanning behaviours (e.g.
reading broadly to raise awareness of broad industry trends, threats and opportu-
nities). Time management skills are also valuable, such as the ability to distinguish
between important and urgent tasks, and scheduling time to work on important,
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