Over the next seven weeks I’ll be sharing seven key competencies that I have seen lead to leadership success. I hope you’ll join me for these seven weeks and that you enjoy the blogs.
Competency 1: The ability to develop a clear and compelling strategic vision
Vision is critical to managing an organization and moving it towards a goal. Proverbs 29:18 says “where there is no vision, the people perish”. Helen Keller said “the only thing worse than being blind, is to have sight but no vision”. It’s the leader’s job, working with their team, to create and communicate a compelling vision for their organization.
A great initial process is for the leader to brainstorm with the team, imagining themselves five years out and looking back at a hugely successful five years and asking “what happened?” Get a laptop with a projection screen or a flip chart, and brainstorm with the team “what happened” in the business that they felt the last five years were so amazing.
The effective leader then takes these thoughts from the team and leverages her broad knowledge and understanding of the industry trends and develops the first draft of a five year strategic vision for the organization. Some key aspects and skills for developing and implementing a good strategic vision are captured below:
Value the process of strategic planning: the plan will lead to important choices on the use of limited financial and talent resources. A good strategic plan will help you as the leader as well as the leadership team, to know what to say “no” to, which is critically important to accomplishing the vision. Most companies that fail do so because they lack a clear and compelling vision and strategy to reach that vision.
Raise your perspective to 10,000 feet: it’s so easy for leaders to get lost in the problems of today and not allow themselves to see the big picture. Being curious about what could be and the industry challenges that are likely to happen in the coming years is important to sound strategic planning. How are the demographics changing? How are technological changes impacting the industry? What are the generational preferences that may be influencing how your product or service will be received in the future? What regulations may change that will impact your industry or consumer behavior? Do some research, build in time to your busy schedule for reflection and contemplation of these bigger picture issues. Discuss your findings and key points with peers and your management team to get further input and ideas.
Delegate your day to day work to give you time for the strategic: Stephen Covey developed a four quadrant grid of important (yes or no) vs urgent (yes or no). Eliminate as much as possible anything that falls into the “not important” quadrants. Then allow your team to manage the “important and urgent” quadrant parts of the business, which are the important day to day tactical decision making and running of the business. The most important quadrant for the leader is the “non-urgent but important”. To do this well, it’s critical to make time for strategic planning and envisioning how to drive change to better meet the challenges of the future. Change is happening at an ever increasing rate, so being adaptive to those changes and emerging trends is crucial to keeping your business relevant and growing.
Align the business and the team to the strategy: once you have developed the strategy, work with your team to refine and to align all parts of the business to the strategy. Parts that no longer fit, consider selling them off, closing them down, or refitting them to align to the strategic vision. Review your management team and organizational structure to see that they are effectively aligned with the strategic vision. The more aligned you make the organization to the strategic vision, the more likely you’ll have success.
Communicate the compelling vision: great leaders communicate the vision with clarity and passion. Help each person in your organization understand the vision, and work to have their questions or concerns addressed. Help them also to see how their job aligns to the strategic vision. Regular communication that repeats the strategic vision and progress towards that vision will be a key to reaching it.
Align business metrics to the vision: While your managers may own aspects of the vision, they as a group, together with you, own achieving the overall vision. It’s a team effort to reach the vision. Your team is “TEAM 1” and they should know that and work toward Team 1 success. Develop a team dashboard with a composite metric that captures the overall progress towards the vision that your team owns. Then also have metrics for each of the management team members that captures the progress of their business unit (“TEAM 2”) toward that vision. A portion of each team member’s compensation should be based on how the team is doing in achieving the vision (team 1’s goals), with the balance associated with the business leader’s individual business unit’s success toward their unit’s goals (team 2’s goals).
The opposite of Proverbs 29:18 is “where there is a clear vision, the people and business flourish”. Make it your goal as a leader to commit to invest in developing, communicating, and driving toward a compelling vision.
