More Thoughts on Leadership and Vision
December 3, 2008 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under Business
Note from Phil:
Stephen Smith is back for another great series of articles on vision, leadership, and the future of great management and great leadership. This is the first in a series of 3. Thanks Stephen!
Note: This is a guest post from @Stephen, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.
Back in October I wrote about Communicating Your Vision in this space. As my “digital nomad” business grows and develops, my vision for its development become increasingly important. As the manager of a business, department or team, one can never really stop thinking about your vision for that group. An argument could be made that it is impossible to be a true leader of a group, organization, company, or industry without having a vision. In the comments to that post, reader Coaching pointed out:
A manager’s vision is something that he can convey to his employees and then show them through his actions and his focus. It can be his greatest asset, or it can be the destruction of his reputation if he fails to keep a constant vigilance in making his vision happen.
Vision is closely tied to positive action and focus, but involves taking that positivity to the next level.
Between Where We Are and Where We Want to Be
Vision: A leader’s ideas and plans for an organization’s future. Idealistic in nature, a vision gives a sense of the differences between the present and future states of an organization. Visionary leaders are often noted for innovations within and organization or industry.A leader’s vision is extremely important because it gives people something to strive toward: a view beyond the present, into the future of the organization.
How to Define the Preferred Future
To develop your own vision of the future you wish to achieve, try the following exercises:
- Start with your aspirations. What are your aspirations? Is there some particular concept, process, or product that you wish to develop?
- Do your research. Compare your ideas with others in your field by studying books, trade magazines, and Web sites. Talk about your ideas with your personal board of directors or mastermind group.
- Spend some time thinking about your organization and its component parts. What could you do to improve the organization? What is the single biggest hurdle to success in your unit or the organization as a whole?
- Think about potential improvements. What can you do to improve the organization or component? Think about both the short term and the long term. This will enable you to set short-term and long-term goals to take steps toward realizing your vision.
- Think about do-ability. Are your goals realistic? If your vision points to goals that seem unattainable, is there a way to break down the vision into a simpler form?
- Use your intuition. Does your vision make sense? Can you explain it to a child?
Building Confidence in Your Vision
Confidence in yourself will be bolstered by both positive thinking and by the process of formulating your vision. Self-confidence frequently tends to be the result of the measurable success of your actions, and is ultimately up to you. To build your self-confidence, you might make a list of your assets and past successes, no matter how small they were. Some assets you might list are education or specialized training, the ability to communicate well with others, or a great sense of humor.
Finally, sharing your vision with others, be it your team or your superiors, is an important aspect of building confidence in your vision. By sharing your vision with your team, you’ll let them know they have a leader who is thinking of the organization’s future, as well as theirs. By sharing your vision with your superiors, you’ll let them know you are an innovative thinker who is not content with the status quo, but intent on reaching something larger.
What do you think?
It’s NOT all about the leader and his/her thoughts and goals! What about the employees/stakeholders? Don’t THEY have something to say? Sure it’s good to be the leader and have the visions of the future (and not from the peyote last night).
Having their buy-in is just as important – and easier to make the movement forward towards the vision.
Usually this leadership vision results in some type of change and people react to change in a positive or negitive manor. To alleviate as much of the negetive reaction to this vision/change, a leader must address the wiifm (what’s in it for me) attitude.
This vision/change requires some skill in selling the vision – it adresses the stakeholders wiifm concerns. A good leader would also need other change agents to talk about the new vision/change and how everyone will benefit from these changes. These change agents also need to be reading off the same page so not to cause confusion or concern as to what is being said.
Tell it and tell it often – Live it – Breath it – every day! If not then the employees will figure that it is a passing trend and if they wait long enough “this to shall also pass.”
You make an very important point, CK.
A vision is OK but not really necessary. Leadership in the right direction is absolutely necessary to success because leading people in how to treat their work, their customers and each other has a huge impact on organizational success.
How the boss treats employees dictates how the vast majority of them will be “led” to treat their work. If the boss leads employees by treating them as if they are very valuable to the organization, they will be “led” to become very valuable. If not, they will be “led” to treat their work similarly.
In the first case, being treated as if they are valuable means treated with great respect. This “leads” employees to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation, and commitment on their work. As such, they are at least four times more productive than if treated with disrespect.
The traditional top-down approach to managing people treats employees with disrespect thus leading them to deny the company most of their creativity, innovation,etc. As you would expect the opposite approach achieves the opposite result.
I proved both ends and points in between the ends of this spectrum in my 30+ years of managing people. The opposite approach to top-down creates managerial nirvana, a state where the organization blows away competitors and almost everyone loves to come to work.
Best regards, Ben
@Ben – I totally agree with your statements regarding the ‘top down’ or ‘command and control’ management style becoming more self-serving to management. To the extreme, management begin to think of themselves as infallible.
I am in favor towards the servant leadership style.
(from http://www.leadersdirect.com/servant.html)
What do servant leaders do?
* devote themselves to serving the needs of organization members.
* focus on meeting the needs of those they lead.
* develop employees to bring out the best in them.
* coach others and encourage their self expression.
* facilitate personal growth in all who work with them.
* listen and build a sense of community.
Good morning CK and Ben, I was traveling yesterday, so I didn’t get a chance to look at the comments.
>>CK: I strongly believe that it is not all about the leader. However, the leader has to have a vision of where the organization is headed. If there is no vision, no direction, then it’s not going to go anywhere.
Like a factory that doesn’t produce any products is not really a factory, an organization that has no vision of a goal isn’t an organization, it’s just a crowd of people.
The “vision” of the leader of an organization need not be elaborate, in fact your example:
“What do servant leaders do?
* devote themselves to serving the needs of organization members.
* focus on meeting the needs of those they lead.
* develop employees to bring out the best in them.
* coach others and encourage their self expression.
* facilitate personal growth in all who work with them.
* listen and build a sense of community.”
…is an excellent statement of a vision that would work for many types of organizations and groups.
In order to set about meeting this list of goals the Servant Leader would definitely need to do their research about the best ways to serve their particular group, study the practicality of the efforts, and so on.