How to Link 7S Model with Leadership and Management

How to Link 7S Model with Leadership and Management

How do you link the 7 s framework with leadership and management. Because when discussing leadership and management most writers say leaders set the major objectives and strategies and managers will transmit and implement this strategies.

But what confuses me is that stategy is part of the technical skills( hard skills) which is taken care by managers.

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Sarah, Malawi

Leadership & Management

there is a figure in a book by Watson (1983), its got demarcations for the hard and soft triangle. the hard one is for management and the soft one is for leadership. it might be of assistance

Camila Amaya Castro
Student (MBA), France

7S, Leadership & Management

Keep in mind that 'leaders' and 'managers' can often be the same person, they are not hierarchical positions but a role one plays. So for this question don't pay too much attention to that.
Strategy needs buy-in from the organization, for example including (middle) management. Implementation needs to be driven by all and top management, most often by means of consistent, aligned and persistent communication.

Philippe Guenet
Coach, United Kingdom

7S Model is a Systemic Overall View But is Reinforcing Central Leadership

The 7S Model seems relevant to outline the systemic connectivity between Strategy / Skills / Organisation / etc. This is a good thing because much of the progress (or lack of) in organisations tends to be due to systemic inertia. Progressing all 7 of them in congruence is necessary and 7S has the merit of highlighting this (though we could challenge the importance of some of the Ss in some cases).

Consultants and leaders (that tend to hire consultants) like the idea of bringing central visibility so to support the central decisions, only made better and quicker. This is inherited from a Project / Programme / PMO culture and it is still a major desire of investments from organisations where leadership needs to be the epicenter of control.

The modern take on leadership aims to bring the decisions into the organizational parts, closer to where the actual work is happening. Here again, the 7S-es could be useful to expand this view and ensure that local decisions are in line with systemic perspectives.

However, when I see 7S for problem solving, I start having a bit of an issue. Problem solving is a more operational issue than a strategy approach. Cost optimisation as well is often wrongly considered as a strategic consideration and driven top down. 7S would tend to have the consequence to reinforce this. What is fantastic about Toyota / TPS is that cost considerations is a constant of business operations. It is everybody's job to challenge continually how things are done and figuring out better / more cost effective ways of doing things. This is part of the operational behaviours. It does not need to be guided; it is in-built in the ways of working.

Much of working with digital needs to rely on more emergent channels because the engineers are the only ones that see the products. This calls for very emergent, distributed ways of approaching improvements and even a strategy that 7S is not supporting... And more problematically, would tend to stifle.