Strategy-building is key to any organization’s success across industries. It helps decide the fate of the company in the long run and tackles with the roadblocks that come along the way. Talking about the career scope for strategic management professionals, it can easily be deemed to be bright, in the times to come, as the demand for this profession has never gone down steeply.
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Here, in this article, we will be discussing the general corporate hierarchy for strategy professionals. As a strategy aspirant, you will get to know about your future career path, having gone through this content piece. Those serious towards making a career in business strategy must enroll in online business certifications that act as a stepping stone to breaking into a strategy career. They will certainly offer you a distinct competitive advantage, starting out in the said role.
In a corporate set up, there exist three different levels of managerial roles – the upper, middle, and lower-level management.
Strategy Management Hierarchy: An Outlook
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Most of the organizations conform to the three-level management hierarchy, stated below:
- Low-level strategy managers
- Middle-level strategy managers
- Top-level strategy managers
The above-stated pool of managers, based on their authority, execute a different set of strategy tasks. Let’s discuss the role of each level of the hierarchy, briefly.
Top-Level Strategy Leaders.
These comprise the president, board of directors, the vice-president, and the CEO of the firm. They are popularly categorized under ‘C-Suite’ executives, wherein the letter ‘C’ represents ‘chief’.
- suite strategic management professionals oversee and control the overall operations that fall under their authority, in this case, strategy performance and correction of flaws in strategy, along the way. They determine the company goals, policies, strategic plans, and decide the direction, moving forward into the future. Further, C-suite strategy managers play a crucial role in the mobilization of external resources. This lot of business leaders are also deemed accountable to the company stockholders, and the public.
Mid-Level Strategy Leaders
Under this category, comes branch managers, general managers, and departmental managers. They take instructions directly from the c-suite leaders, and pass them onto the low-level managers, for the execution to take place. Mid-level leaders oversee the low-level managers, and take the progress report from them, regarding the execution part of the strategy, from time to tome.
Middle-level managers have to put in more time to directing the work-flow associated with the strategy blueprint, compared to the top-level strategy executives. A few of their major job duties comprise:
- Implementing business plans that are in sync with the firm’s policies and the directives of top-level management.
- Passing on information and orders from the top management to the lower management.
- Offering guidance to low-level managers regarding the efficient implementation of strategy, so that an optimal performance from the workforce could be obtained.
Low-Level Strategy Managers
This level of management comprises job positions such as section leads, foremen, and supervisors. They direct and control the workforce working under them for an efficient implementation of the strategic guidelines.
The job responsibilities of a low-level manager include:
- Assigning tasks to the employees
- Supervising and guiding the workforce on a day-to-day basis
- Overseeing the quantity and quality of the production
- Making suggestions before the middle-management to bring in process improvements
- Resolving employee grievances & work-related issues
Also referred to as ‘first-level managers, low-level strategy leaders are seen as role models by the employees within the organization. These leaders, apart from shouldering their primary job responsibilities, offer additional guidance to the staff under them. Such kind of guidance would include motivating employees, passing on performance feedback to the staff from time-to-time, and offering career-planning advice.
