Here's the brutal truth: Your organization's future will not be any different from the way things are now if you, your leadership, and your team continue to do the same things in the same way. If your organization's internal rate of change does not exceed the external rate of change, you will fall behind.

After all, the 21st century is too complex, too competitive, too disruptive, and too fast for you not to lead your organization into the future. You've got to spend part of your time being proactive, forward-focused, and strategic.

It doesn't matter what position you hold within your association, your organization wants—and needs—for you to be a strategic leader.

Strategic leadership is about effectively executing short-term responsibilities while shaping the future. When association leaders invite others to be part of creating their futures, as well as understand the role they can play in shaping it, they will step forward and engage.

Defining Strategic Leadership

Strategy authors and experts Steven Stowell and Stephanie Mead say strategic leadership encompasses two things:

• Fulfilling your regular leadership responsibilities in a proactive, forward-thinking way.
• Incorporating a specific set of future-focused traits into your leadership style.

"Not only are strategic leaders concerned about fulfilling today's expectations, they also care deeply about defining and focusing on a future agenda that hones in on the few things that really matter," they write in their book The Art of Strategic Leadership. "Determining a long-term vision for your team helps you allocate scarce resources wisely and channel the collective effort of the team."

Knowing what it will take for your organization to win over the long haul, and creating strategy, goals, plans, and steps to get there is important. But it's not enough.

Strategic leadership is about effectively executing short-term responsibilities while shaping the future.

Strategic leaders do more. They actively engage and leverage the organization's talent—both volunteer and staff—to achieve short-term results while setting the direction that will produce long-term results. They foster and nurture strategic mindsets into the heart and blood of the organization.

In the end, all leaders, at all levels, are responsible for envisioning what they want in the future. The successful strategic leaders help their teams clearly see a long-term vision and create a plan to execute their daily business to get there.

The Science of Strategic Leadership

Here's the good news: Thanks to cognitive neuroscientists like Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman and many others, we now have more than 30 years of scientific discoveries that can help you, your team, and your volunteer leaders increase their strategic thinking and strategic leadership.

Here are a few scientific truths these neuroscientists have discovered:

• The comfort of status quo is causing mental toxicity.
• Our love affair of repeating the past causes a decline in our brain health.
• When we focus only on tactics, details, and logistics, we damage both our strategic thinking and our execution of the details. When we focus on strategy first, we improve both our strategic thinking and our logistics.

Those are some strong words for association leaders. Our love affair of doing the same thing, the same way, repeating the past, and maintaining the status quo is causing decline in brain health that can lead to early dementia and Alzheimer's.

In other words, our need to focus on strategy is not just critical for our association's success but is also deeply personal to our own health.

Assessing Strategic Leadership Readiness

To determine if your leaders' brainpower is where it needs to be, ask these four questions:

1. Can they identify changes in the next one to two years that will affect the association and its stakeholders?


2. Are they flexible thinkers (i.e., comfortable departing from traditional modes of thoughts—from the known to the unknown)?


3. Are they able to focus on opportunities of disruption and business environment changes?


4. Can they weigh the risks and benefits of major, big-picture association decisions?

If you answered no, to any of these, than it is time for you and your leadership to get a strategic frontal lobe capacity tune-up. Focusing on and engaging with more strategic, abstract thinking makes our brains healthy, improves our implementation, and becomes a game-, organization- and life-changer.

Three Steps to Develop Strategic Leadership

Dr. Chapman's research has identified our need to focus on strategy and become better strategic thinkers. Here are three things she recommends doing to practice strategic thinking:

Brainpower of Zoom In. "Zoom In" requires attending to the situation, facts, and content that matters. It does not allow unnecessary details to distract. Nor does it spend copious amounts of time looking at the details. Instead, it uses those details that really matter to support a novel, new approach that your competitor is not doing.

The Brainpower Of Zoom In also promotes the concept that the whole is more important than the sum of the parts. Zoom In corresponds to the power of knowledge where one can make, quick judgments based on facts and expertise.

Brainpower of Zoom Out. What do you remember from the last keynote speaker you heard?

Most of the time we remember funny one-liners, embarrassing moments, or life stories. Rarely do we appreciate the big-picture, meaningful message that was convened.

"Zoom Out" means to see the broader perspective and appreciate the big picture. We mentally lift off to a helicopter view, assessing data and various views from above. We then consolidate this information into major themes, core concepts, and overarching principles. Zoom Out helps avoid silos of isolated, static thinking. It's basically a quick abstracted idea similar to a gut instinct.

Brainpower of Zoom Deep and Wide. This uses the cognitive strategy of incorporating major principles and generalized lessons learned into broader applications. We extract and alter broad principles from complex input. We synthesize topics for stakeholder discussions, programming, and learning.

"Zoom Deep and Wide" embraces entrepreneurial, agile-thinking practices. And it discontinues outdated old principals, procedures, and process that stifle growth. We then create broader and new ways of thinking, behaving, and acting.

Putting these steps into action will allow you, your staff, and volunteer leaders to more easily embrace strategic leadership.