Aproximación al planteamiento teórico del liderazgo estratégico

Zusammenfassung

Ortega’s proposal is summarizing the final project and the programme of a leader. His Strategic Leadership is developed in a special moment and specific space. The leader must look over uncomfortable, conflictive and inefficient reality. For that reason, he ought to transcend his time and social environment. The Strategic Leader is making a diagnosis of the present and projects the solution to a wanted and probable future, combining “to be” with “ought to be”. He must also accept that the changes will take time. But, following Keynes’ idea, the leader had to recognise that the long term is a confused guide for the present occasion: “In the long term we are all dead.” The leader must impose his will on something specific. Otherwise, all efforts will be in vain. At the end, he would have disappeared and its project with him. The Strategic Leader must act in a reachable time, being always present and controlling the changing process. In this paper I am analysing the circumstances of Strategic Leadership. The leader must have followers, recruited in the mass of his society, to reach the aims of the project. Following David McClelland’s thoughts, the leader is showing three essential ambitions: achievements, affection —in other words, affinity or belonging to someone— and power. To avoid a destructive leadership, he must accept to be controlled by superior values and institutions. These characteristics are completed by an affective and recognised authority by people of his level, but not only his equals, who sometimes are challenging him. A Strategic Leader must be free from corporative pressures because he is at a higher level. The leader is not an efficient manager, no a superior in the pyramid of hierarchy. He is much more. He is an “eccentric” personality, challenging his time and social dimension. The Strategic Leader has the capacity of managing a “mother-like” organisation and not a pyramidal one. I shall present in my paper some cases of a leader as a manager of a “mother-like” organisation and some inquiries of public opinion on this matter. To conclude my social overview I shall study the failure of the military leader of the Spanish Second Republic during the Civil War: General Vicente Rojo (1894-1966). He was not successful in his application of Ortega’s principle: to save the circumstances and to reconcile the two antagonist groups. Instead he was overwhelmed by time and space, and he did not save himself. At the end of his life he admitted his failure in a reasonable way.