In a regulated market, Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) need to develop and (re)shape their strategies in order to negotiate with the continuous changes unfolding at the regional, national and global level. Since the competition in this market of higher education is overtly hierarchical and positional, the strategic planning is needed even for maintaining the status-quo. For example, with the increasing popularity of rankings, institutions are struggling to find their own ways to get a position in the league tables as it would guide the stakeholders’ preferences in the coming years. It is already established in the literature of Economics of Education that the performance of the HEIs mainly depends on the quality of its inputs, mostly on the students and the teachers. In order to avoid a fall in the relative position, the institutional leaders must be ready with their strategies to attract the best minds available in the market. Also, it is important to implement a suitable internal governance mechanism to ensure proper utilisation of the inputs. But implementing the strategies needs a good deal of financial resources and so, the strategy of resource allocation becomes the most crucial among all of these. The ability to make successful strategies depends mainly on the effective role of leadership, mode of funding and the relative position of the institutions. Keeping these dimensions in mind, the paper examines role of leadership in shaping the competitive strategies of the HEIs with a case study of engineering colleges in India. The main focus of the paper is on the role of leadership in making three crucial strategies, namely, the strategies of input-selection, of governing the inputs and of allocating the resources.