Leadership is about setting a direction. It's about creating a vision, empowering and inspiring people to want to achieve the vision, and enabling them to do so with energy and speed through an effective strategy. In its most basic sense, leadership is about mobilising a group of people to jump into a better future.
A new book, "ACCELERATE: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World," by author John P. Kotter provides a powerful new "dual operating system" framework for competing and winning in a world of constant turbulence and disruption.
"The solution is not to trash what we know and start over but instead to reintroduce, in an organic way a second system - one which would be familiar to most successful entrepreneurs. The new system adds needed agility and speed while the old one, which keeps running, provides reliability and efficiency. The two together are actually very similar to what all mature organisations had at one point in their life cycles, yet did not sustain," argues Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School.
The Leader's Role in Vision Development
The "Vision" describes the business three to five years from now, answering the question "where are we going" in a way that makes us want to get there.
Vision, along with the other intangibles, is a part of the creation of a mission statement. A good vision inspires and motivates employees, provides the basis (along with other intangibles like assumptions/beliefs, values and guiding principles) for setting goals along with the strategy to achieve them. Most important, it sets the expectations of all stakeholders and aligns employee efforts. All customers, employees, suppliers and the community are anxious to know what the business/organisation will become....since they all have a stake in its success.
When everyone engaged in the business can agree that their personal beliefs fit well with the company's intangibles (of assumptions/beliefs, vision, values and guiding principles), they understand and will contribute to a meaningful corporate mission statement.
Here are intangible elements defined:
· Assumptions/beliefs: A reality map formed through your collective reinforced experience. This would be a manifesto of the mental models you use and believe in to create your work and personal lives.
· Values/Aspirations: An attitude or world-view depicted by one word or one single concept observed through one's behaviour. Values often influence people's choices about where to invest their energies. Please recognise that values change over time. Being "fair" means something different for a person at 44 than at 4 years old.
· Vision: A word picture of the future leading from now through near to far reality. You energise people to support your purpose or life signature with an overarching description of what you see.
· Guiding Principles: A universal operating standard that guides decision-making both personally and organisationally. Use guiding principles to align, create trust and walk the talk by putting everybody on the same playing field. Energy isn’t wasted in the politics of the team, organisation or community because there aren't different rules for everybody.
Without joint agreement on these intangibles, a vision statement runs the risk of each listener defining it their own way, buying into their own different perspectives, wasting the opportunity for alignment and setting the stage for future disputes that undermine the focus critical for success.
The technique in developing a vision is to do it as a team. Since buy-in is crucial to a successful vision, a solo approach is not likely to be the right answer. The team who must buy-in must also have a role in developing the vision. The leader can then "create the vision" by leading the discussion and declaring his or her synthesis of the team's thinking.
A good vision inspires when it is rooted both in reality and in the assumptions/belief, values/aspirations and guiding principles of the employees.
Reference: John P. Kotter: Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World and Thomas H. Gray: Business Techniques in Troubled Times: A Toolbox for Small Business Success.
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Leading: a team, a plan and a better future
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