The Leader’s Priorities: The Building Blocks of Compounding Power
Effective leaders look ahead and provoke change. The very factors that produced today’s success can lead to tomorrow’s failure. Therefore, a leader must be able to embrace change and move with the currents of advancements and culture. As an agent of change, the leader sets a fire so that staff members see the flames with their own eyes and smell the smoke with their own nostrils. They personalize it.
Exponential Leadership: It Starts on the Inside
With solid character emitting from the heart of a leader, other virtues naturally emanate, exemplifying the standards for the team. Effective leaders and their staff members can be compared to a ship’s captain and the crew: even though it is essential that the ship’s captain have some vision of what lies beyond the horizon, it is also important that the crew understand the standards by which their performance will be assessed as they sail toward it.
Overcoming the Leadership Vacuum: Harnessing the Compounding Power of Teamwork
The success of organizations depends on strong, visionary leadership. Companies can compensate for the absence of certain skills and resources but cannot overcome the absence of effective leadership. This leads to a high level of frustration among leaders and team members. What causes this dilemma? The leaders’ skill sets are weighted toward other areas. Consequently, a massive leadership vacuum develops.
The Barrier of Stewardship
Staffing is your most valuable resource and, at the same time, can be the most difficult component to navigate. Maybe you’re at a place where you need to hire for a specialized position that you don’t have in-house, or perhaps you can’t utilize volunteers to accomplish tasks to the degree you desire. Getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats is critical for organizational growth!
Part 4: Communicate the Vision
It is important for us to remember that regardless of how wonderful a vision is, it is dead on arrival if we are unable to communicate it effectively. Replication should not be our priority. We can, however, enhance our own presentation skills by observing others’ style with the hope of adopting some qualitative elements to help us communicate our vision more clearly and effectively. You may want to pull up Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as an inspirational refresher.
Part 3: Goals and Teamwork
Once you know your destination (vision) and have set guiding principles (strategies), you need to specify action steps for stakeholders to take. Your team should be clear on what their responsibilities are, how they are to do it, when they should be done, and how they know when they have been achieved. Here is a familiar and simple formula to help us remember how to define effective goals. They should be SMART.
Part 2: STRATEGIES ARE YOUR MAP
Vision, strategy, and goals are three very distinct components. They are all a part of the whole but stand alone in their function. To arrive at a specified location, you need a map (the strategy). They require thoughtfulness, teamwork, and developing specific action steps. While each part is important, no one element alone will help you realize your vision. Each is dependent on the other.
Part 1: Naming a Vision
We all have our own understanding of vision. Some may think that it is a pie-in-the-sky, abstract concept created by the folks in corner offices with giant glass windows, or maybe from those who interview focus groups in a think tank somewhere. Perhaps you see vision as something quaint to talk about, but not usually applicable to the throws of real life. That notion is completely understandable because if not understood and implemented correctly, that is what vision often becomes. So, what is vision? Simply put, vision is a statement that paints a picture of the desired end stated in such a way that people can see it, see themselves in it, and implement it.
Part 1: Naming a Vision
We all have our own understanding of vision. Some may think that it is a pie-in-the-sky, abstract concept created by the folks in corner offices with giant glass windows, or maybe from those who interview focus groups in a think tank somewhere. Perhaps you see vision as something quaint to talk about, but not usually applicable to the throws of real life. That notion is completely understandable because if not understood and implemented correctly, that is what vision often becomes. So, what is vision? Simply put, vision is a statement that paints a picture of the desired end stated in such a way that people can see it, see themselves in it, and implement it.