What Is Organizational Leadership?
Updated on October 15, 2024.
Droves of CEOs are leaving their posts. According to a report published by the outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, more than 1,900 CEOs stepped down in 2023. This figure marks a 55% increase from the previous year and sets the record for CEO turnover since the firm began tracking such data in 2002.
Leaders move on for numerous reasons. For some, adapting to increasingly complex leadership roles proves to be challenging. For example, today’s CEO is not only responsible for profitability but also effectively navigating rapid economic, social and political change. In educational leadership, this could mean working toward educational equity and developing strategies to repair social structures still experiencing damage from the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than ever, it takes strong organizational leadership skills to lead organizations and communities through transformation. What is organizational leadership exactly, and why is it important?
Keep reading to learn the fundamentals of organizational leadership and how a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) can help leaders foster organizational leadership skills to become change agents capable of leading their organization through critical times successfully.
How Does Organizational Leadership Show Up?
Organizational leadership is a management philosophy. Unlike other leadership styles, it empowers individuals to achieve a common goal or mission.
Organizational leaders are:
- Encouraging. Through communicating belief and trust, they inspire people to use creativity, experiment and learn from mistakes.
- Change agents. They’re comfortable with transformation, and they encourage it as a path to collective success.
- Effective leaders in every industry. Organizational leaders are school principals, business owners, policymakers and beyond.
Organizational leadership helps organizations and communities flourish.
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What Is the Difference Between Organizational Leadership and Traditional Management?
Traditional management has been the prevailing leadership style for years. It involves developing and translating strategy into specific steps, assigning responsibilities, and ensuring accountability.
Over the past two centuries, traditional leadership and management has scaled organizations into global enterprises. However, it’s reaching its limits. According to the Global Leadership Forecast 2023, a report published by the consulting firm DDI, just 40% of leaders rated their company’s leadership quality as “very good” or “excellent” in 2022. That’s the lowest level since 2014.
Leaders must employ different leadership styles to help organizations and stakeholders thrive in today’s unprecedented marketplace. Organizational leadership can help accomplish precisely that.
By developing organizational leadership skills, leaders can initiate change and re-engage people to work together toward achieving a common goal.
What Does Strong Organizational Leadership Look Like?
Strong organizational leadership brings people together through trust and inspiration to effect change. Leaders must be adaptable, communicative, influential, creative and organized.
Below are just a few of the organizational leadership skills that effective leaders have in common.
Managing Change
Organizational change is inevitable. The forces driving that change can be anything from technological innovations to unique disruptions, such as a pandemic. These change agents can all cause an organization to veer off course without effective leadership. Today’s leaders must be prepared to become agile adapters. Working outside the comfort zone and inspiring others to do the same is critical to progress toward shared goals. Strong organizational leaders know how to address and drive change.
Influencing Others
Strong organizational leaders inspire, motivate and unite people to achieve short- and long-term goals. This skill is crucial when interacting with direct employees, but it can also be essential with other stakeholders, from customers to C-suite executives.
Problem-Solving
A problem-solving mindset helps leaders serve as change agents. It involves innovation, creativity and critical thinking. Strong organizational leaders are comfortable identifying problems and developing and assessing solutions to make the most informed decision. By doing so, they can introduce and drive change that helps meet objectives.
Decision-Making
Organizational leaders must make countless sound decisions in the best interests of internal and external stakeholders. They’re adept at prioritizing decisions, evaluating the options and choosing the one that supports progress toward shared goals.
Taking accountability for the outcome is also important. Accountable organizational leaders earn trust and drive continuous improvement.
Communicating Effectively
Those who deploy effective organizational leadership are good at conveying information clearly and persuasively. Organizational leaders are experts at listening, negotiating and building relationships. Effective communication ensures progress and has the potential to reduce employee burnout.
Organizational Leadership Examples
Seeing organizational leadership in action shows how these components work together to achieve a goal. For example, organizational leaders draw upon problem-solving skills, communication competencies and decision-making capabilities to quickly resolve workplace conflicts. These skills allow leaders to quickly identify issues and develop solutions that keep the peace between sources of conflict and ensure that neither party feels slighted.
Guiding a business through changes such as policy implementation or introduction of new technologies also requires leaders to lean on multiple skills. While change management skills are obviously key, effective communication skills and the ability to influence others can also help teams accept change.
What Are the Benefits of Strong Organizational Leadership?
Strong organizational leadership offers three key benefits: positive transformation, stakeholder engagement and improved performance. Leaders with organizational leadership skills can drive significant change by building trust with people. This trust leads to higher levels of commitment and better outcomes.
Transformation
Leaders with strong organizational leadership skills can function as change agents in communities or organizations seeking to make significant transformations. They’re prepared to generate, transform and apply leadership practices that lead to actionable change. As a result, organizational leaders can make a broad and lasting impact — in schools, communities, government, health care, and public and private organizations.
Employee Engagement
Organizational leadership skills create effective leaders who can build trust with stakeholders, including employees. According to the global analytics and advisory firm Gallup, employees are four times as likely to be engaged when they trust their leadership. Trust improves employees’ emotional commitment to the organization and its goals and helps companies with talent development.
How Do You Develop Organizational Leadership Skills?
Knowing what organizational leadership is can help working professionals take the step toward being leaders that make a difference. For those who wish to grow influence and confidence, earning an Ed.D. has the distinct benefit of developing organizational leadership skills.
An Ed.D. is a practitioner-focused doctoral degree. Ed.D. students are nonprofit leaders, business leaders, educators and higher education administrators. As graduates, they’re prepared with the organizational leadership skills to drive meaningful change in their work environment, with their colleagues or in the community.
Marymount University offers a premier online Ed.D. program in Leadership and Organizational Innovation that empowers students as change agents ready to initiate and inspire. The degree can be applied to various industries, from policymaking to education and beyond.
The online Ed.D. program at Marymount is highly personalized. Every student identifies an issue impacting their organization and, with faculty support, creates innovative solutions through research, theory and guided practice.
Alicia Hunter is pursuing Marymount’s online Ed.D. to influence the federal and state governance of public school information. She said, “My research at Marymount will shift public discourse about the available public school data published by state departments of education, local school districts and third-party sites.”
Do you want to make a meaningful impact in your field and lead into the future? If so, the online Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Organizational Innovation at Marymount could be right for you.
Become a Change Agent Through Marymount University’s Online Ed.D. Program
Whether you want to make a difference in your organization or community, the online Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Organizational Innovation at Marymount will empower you to lead positive change as an organizational leader.
With practical courses like Global Leadership Perspectives and Crisis Management and projects that enact change to real-world problems of practice, this online Ed.D. program equips professionals with the tools to create innovative solutions that propel transformation. Connect with an enrollment advisor to get started.