In Chapter Two we discussed some of the organizational factors influencing leadership, as well as common perspectives and views of it. Whether those views come from your surrounding culture, your organization, or some other source, they can affect the way you see yourself as a leader and your expectations of what leaders do. In this chapter, we examine vision, a key part of discovering the leader in you. Indeed, if you cannot articulate a clear and compelling vision for leadership, your risk of drift is higher, and you may be less able to escape it. Think about it: How can you effectively chart a course out of drift if you don't have a clear view (that is, a vision) of where you want to go?
A leadership vision is foundational to your views of leadership and your long-term success as a leader. Your vision for leadership goes beyond simple expectations and perspectives about the role of a leader. It captures and describes the desired future that you see for yourself and your team, organization, or community. A vision for leadership is different from an organizational mission (which spells out the reason for an entity to exist) and from organizational goals (which articulate specific outcomes). Your leadership vision is an expression of what you want to create, do, or accomplish when you are in a leader role. It describes your philosophy about leadership and your purpose in choosing to be a leader, and it serves as an important guidepost for the core behaviors you enact as a leader.
A leadership vision is not the same as your personal vision. Rather, it is a component of your personal vision; it can help you accomplish the larger vision for your life, which also encompasses other life roles, family desires, where you want to retire, and so on.
Similarly, a leadership vision isn't a specific organizational vision or the future state desired by leaders of a particular organization. Your leadership vision is that which you personally want to accomplish with your leadership. For example, if, like Michael J. Fox, finding a cure for Parkinson's disease were your leadership vision, then you could find many ways to demonstrate your leadership, such as starting a foundation to raise money to support research, going to medical school to learn more about the disease and then treating it, or publishing a newsletter to raise public awareness about the disease.
Conveying a compelling leadership vision is foundational to being an effective leader. CCL research with senior leaders reveals that leaders who are able to articulate a clear and compelling vision for their organization are rated by bosses and peers as more effective leaders.
As a child, you may have "known" that you would someday become an astronaut, a professional athlete, a teacher, or a doctor. As you grew and advanced through school, you might have expressed what you "knew" about yourself by seeking out other young people who shared your interests. Later you began to see yourself in adult roles, such as a family and community member and as a contributor to the organization where you work. Through these stages, you may have woven a vision for leadership into your life. You might not have spelled out that vision in a personal creed or blogged to the world, but it was there.
We've found that leaders at all levels often have at least a rudimentary vision of leadership under the surface. True, some haven't been particularly thoughtful about their lives or reflected on their experiences to imagine what's to come. As a reader of this book, you're unlikely to be one of them. But your leadership vision may still lie below the level of awareness, and thus it's not available to regularly draw on in your role as a leader. Unarticulated, it leaves too much to chance and leaves you vulnerable to drift, it leaves you less than fully engaged, and it leaves you passive and opportunistic in your work.
Without question, who you are as a person and what you want to accomplish in your life (your legacy) influences your vision for leadership. It is this conscious connection between your personal vision and the leadership vision that creates congruency of direction. Consider how one senior executive with whom we worked thought about his legacy (including what he did as a leader) in strongly personal terms:
Dear—
CCL confirmed to you that you're a leader—embrace that and have fun with it. Don't be so hard on yourself—got it. When you're eulogized, people will remember you as a good man who left a legacy of a happy marriage, kids who grew to be productive adults, and a leader who inspired others and was fun to be around. Lastly, you'll be remembered for the people you helped pull up. Life is like a baseball game, and you were lucky enough to have been born on 2nd base. Look around for people having trouble getting into the stadium and give them a hand. Now call your parents.
Think about how having a similarly vivid picture of your legacy might influence your vision for leadership. What do you want your legacy to be? How is your leadership a part of this legacy?
Personal vision and leadership vision can intersect powerfully. Colleagues at CCL brought back this story from a recent trip to India where they had visited with leaders of Pantaloons, one of India's fast-growing retail companies. At the time, Pantaloons was keenly focused on developing the skills of its leaders and frontline workers. Most of them earn low salaries and come from the lowest socioeconomic strata of Indian society. A member of the Pantaloons training arm had begun a leader development program based on a personal insight he gained from the streets of Mumbai as he watched beggars work the traffic intersections. Sympathetically, he noticed that some beggars were more effective in obtaining charity than others. "What is the difference?" he wondered. Careful observation suggested that the more effective beggars displayed a greater sense of self-confidence and self-worth. If he was right, these personal characteristics, which could be nurtured, taught, and developed, could be applied to those who worked at Pantaloons. From that insight, he implemented a visionary, innovative developmental program that ultimately strengthened employee engagement and subsequent organizational performance. His story shows how an individual with a higher purpose can connect his leadership vision to the needs of a group (not the beggars themselves, but others in lower socioeconomic brackets than his) and the needs of a growing business. It shows how a leadership commitment to helping the less fortunate was blended into an innovative hiring and employee development initiative.
Or consider Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank. In 1974, Yunus was an economics professor in Bangladesh; at the time, Bangladesh was experiencing yet another famine. The problem was so large that he questioned whether he could help in any meaningful way. One day Yunus visited a village near the university at which he was teaching to learn more about what he could do to help the villagers cope with hunger. He discovered that the forty-two women in the village wanted a total of twenty-seven dollars to start small businesses so that they could take care of their families in a more sustainable way. After extensive efforts to persuade banks to loan the women money, Yunus took twenty-seven dollars out of his own wallet and funded the women to establish microenterprises. This small investment had astounding and unexpected ripple effects. Indeed, it was the impetus for what eventually led to global microfinance movement.
As of this writing, Grameen Bank had made over $10 billion in loans to over 7 million borrowers, almost all women. The loan recovery rate is over 98 percent, which is better than institutions that lend to higher-income clients. With twenty-four hundred branches, Grameen Bank provides services in many tens of thousands of villages. All of this was started by an economics professor who felt helpless in fighting hunger and poverty and so simply loaned twenty-seven dollars from his own pocket. This work has had such a powerful impact that Yunus and Grameen Bank were awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. The global innovation of microfinance that Yunus and a few dozen poor women in a single village set in motion provides a powerful example of how a compelling, personally derived leadership vision can achieve monumental change that drives business outcomes and improves the daily lives of customers.
Almost daily, we interact with leaders who struggle to find and articulate a meaningful vision for their work as leaders. Tackling this issue head-on is not easy. It requires deeply exploring what motivates you to get up in the morning and drives your attention and energy throughout the day.
As we said earlier, a leadership vision is an expression of what you want to create, do, or accomplish as a leader. To serve as a useful guide, your vision should do three things:
It should incorporate your dreams and passions—the things that motivate and excite you about leading.
It should be authentic and anchored in who you are as a person. It must reflect your values about leadership.
It should continue to evolve. A leadership vision is not static, like a photograph. Rather, it is like daily frames in a slow-motion film. It reflects where you are in your own evolution and where you think you are heading in your own life journey.
Not many leaders spend time thinking about their leadership vision. One told us (typically), "I think mainly in terms of management. I was thinking more in terms of job and job description than I was in terms of leadership and what I had to do." However, one technical manager we met at a chemical company had given it quite a bit of thought: "Leadership is all about being able to formulate a vision, deciding that you want to go somewhere, that there is value in getting there, and then being able to describe that vision, to sell that vision. The word lead comes in when you bring people along with you to attain it."
Having a leadership vision is not just for those at the top. Sure, it is often easier to pursue your own leadership vision and what you want to accomplish as a leader when you are at the helm, but a clear leadership vision can still empower a middle manager or frontline supervisor. Perhaps your leadership vision is to help fix what is broken, saving money and time. If so, it will matter in many contexts: mending the broken spirits of people who were led by an ineffective leader, rejuvenating an old product line in decline, or restoring a brand that was damaged by recall, for example.
Developing your own leadership vision is difficult; simply adopting someone else's vision won't work. Clarifying your vision is an ongoing journey involving a process of exploring likely places for elements you can combine to form a conscious, meaningful, and integrated picture. You discover your vision by honestly looking at yourself and your role as a leader in an organization or community.
The rest of this chapter suggests strategies to help you discover or clarify your leadership vision and make it more visible to yourself and others. Whether you have never thought of having a leadership vision and are starting from scratch, or you have one but it needs more definition, depth, or expansion, the following strategies will take you through various reflective processes to assist you in your work. If you gravitate to some of the strategies more than others and don't feel a need for all of them, simply use the ones that help you the most in clarifying your leadership vision. Here they are, in short:
Tell your own story.
Reflect on your daydreams.
Look for trends and patterns.
Incorporate lessons from role models.
Assess your perspectives on power and conflict.
Make use of your creative involvement.
Follow your intuition.
Look beyond yourself.
There's a book in you: the one you're writing about your own life. Narrative is innate to human growth, and personal vision often springs from myth or one's imagination. The same can happen for a leadership vision. When people discover, create, invent, build businesses, raise families, compose symphonies, or fly to the moon, they do it to fulfill a story that they've been telling themselves and others. Think about your own story and how it is part of your leadership journey:
If we wish to know about a man we ask, "What is his story—his real, inmost story?" For each of us is a biography, ... a singular narrative which is constructed continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our notions. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives, we are each of us unique [Sacks, 1970, pp. 110–111].
The richer and more compelling you can make the story of yourself as a leader, the stronger your leadership vision will be. People tell and retell their stories until they get them right. Your own story is connected to those you inherited from others. This story from one of the leaders we know gives a sense of that continuity:
I had an older brother that I really looked up to, nine years older than me. I was in about fourth grade when he got killed in Vietnam. At that time, my mother told me that I had to be the head of the household. I think that had a profound effect on me. That was a catalyst. I went from being a child to being responsible from that day forward.
I've been in leadership types of positions ever since I was in high school. In high school, it started out with sports. Then I got real serious about politics in high school, and I got involved in some political groups in the sixties. [Now] I'm involved in a number of different nonprofit organizations ... and I have leadership roles in every one of them.
Some stories take generations to tell and to complete. Others are picked up as inspirational waypoints, and the people they're associated with are regarded as pioneers. Some people relish the idea of rewriting their stories over and over again. But even if you don't, we're sure that you've revised and improvised your story over the years, and we are also sure that the basic theme of your story shows continuity over time. Within that push and pull of change and continuity, your vision of yourself as a leader emerges. Take a moment to think about your story and its recurring themes, especially as they relate to your roles as a leader. Think about your life as a series of headlines in a newspaper:
What events have inspired your passion?
What stories would you tell about making a difference as a leader?
What stories would your colleagues tell about you as a leader?
What actions have reflected your values or have made an enduring impression on you?
What would you want a journalist to write about your vision as a leader?
Everybody daydreams—sometimes in quiet moments, sometimes as we're drifting off to sleep, and sometimes when we're engaged in physical activity like walking or running. Although most leaders will rarely admit it publicly, we're sure that many occasionally daydream in a boring meeting.
Daydreams can be important sources of insight, a window into something deeper than they seem, connecting present realities to some desired future state. Indeed, they may even reflect your aspirations as a person and a leader and sketch a bridge to their fulfillment. As Henry David Thoreau noted, "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." We suggest the content of your daydreams can help you articulate a leadership vision.
When you catch yourself daydreaming, make a few notes, and reflect on how they would connect to your vision for leadership. Do you see any obvious connections? Can you make some not-so-obvious connections between your leadership vision and the daydream's seemingly random thoughts? A daydream may reveal an image of yourself as a leader—the kind of successes you're having, how you see yourself as a winner or hero, the kinds of situations you're in, things that bother or worry you, and what you do to contribute to the success of a team. Daydreams can inform how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others—what you might call self-image. By noticing when and where you perceive a positive self-image, you can get a glimpse of the vision you are trying to project or a picture of where you're trying to go in your life as a leader.
As you reflect on your daydreams as a mirror into your leadership vision, it is important to connect them to actions. As Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling says, "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live" (1998, p. 214). With perceptive humor, Mitch Hedberg (2003) says, "I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later." His comment harkens back to our discussion in Chapter One about drifting into leadership versus making a conscious, active choice to pursue it.
Thomas Jefferson imagined a set of principles about how free people should live in relationship to their government, and then he enacted those principles in a lifetime of founding, expanding, and leading a vast country; creating a university; and contributing mightily to the philosophy that undergirds the United States to this day. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "I have a dream," to a crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, his words and deeds helped crystallize a nonviolent civil rights movement. Christopher Reeve (1999), the actor-turned-advocate for biomedical research and spinal injury patients said, "So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable" (p. 300).
Dreams of smaller scope can be equally inspiring, and they don't have to be entirely original. King borrowed from Gandhi, and Jefferson borrowed from the philosophers of the European Enlightenment. As the song in the Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow (Harburg and Saidy, 1947) put it, people will "follow the fellow who follows the dream."
Take a moment now to jot down what you've been daydreaming about lately, and remind yourself for the next few days to remember what you were daydreaming about and how that might help you develop a leadership vision:
Are there common themes in your daydreams that reflect on your vision or aspirations as a leader?
As you think about your past successes and failures as a leader, are there connections you can make between these past experiences and your current daydreams?
If you could write your own daydream of yourself exhibiting exceptional leadership skills, how would it go?
If your leadership scenario indicates you feel stuck, bored, pressured, or similarly unhappy, what solutions are you pondering in your daydreams?
If money were no object, where would you work? What cause or passion would you pursue?
Another way to bring your leadership vision to light is to look for patterns in events you have experienced, behaviors you have engaged in, attitudes that you hold. We're not suggesting that you synthesize a complex map—only to look for repeating or similar themes when you play back part of the tape of your life experiences. Patterns are not always neatly labeled, and they may be more obvious to people around you than they are to you. So feel free to seek the guidance of family members or close friends and colleagues as you document key life trends and patterns.
Start by noticing broad patterns. In the past, what things have you repeatedly paid attention to, gravitated toward, or chosen to do in your work and personal life? For example, one leader we know had chosen as a teenager to attend an all-girls' high school and found there that girls naturally stepped into leadership roles when they were not competing against boys. This experience was the start of her interest in women and leadership, and her later choices throughout her life reinforced the early pattern. Look at your experiences and the passions that hold you, the books you choose to read, the television shows you watch, the quotes or stories that resonate with you. As you think about these early experiences and choices, do you see any connections to your leadership work?
Next, note the important events that you have experienced during the past year or two—especially key projects, activities, and relationships at work. What trends and patterns might you notice in how you spend your time, and what kinds of work attract you?
After you've reviewed some of the broader themes in your experiences, you can more closely examine your behaviors and the roles you play in groups. There are two kinds of lessons for you to gather at this stage. One has to do with how eagerly you engage directly in leadership roles and what kinds of leadership roles you embrace; the other has to do with where you typically try to lead the groups you are in, from whatever roles you play.
Consider the following questions:
When did you have success, and when did you have setbacks? What were some contributing factors?
When were you happiest?
Which situations did you find easy or hard to deal with?
What kinds of projects or teams are you asked to join?
Which of those really interested you? Which do you avoid?
A number of factors could be making certain activities successful, enjoyable, easy, and attractive for you. What's the underlying theme in these situations?
What do they have in common that produces the positive experience?
When we ask people about their role models, we're also asking them about their own aspirations. A person who names Bernie Madoff as a role model has a very different vision from one who names Nelson Mandela. Role models can be real or fictional, famous or private, public figures or personal acquaintances. The important feature of a role model is that you have thought about that person's image and found something attractive in it. That's the element you want to examine for clues to your leadership vision.
This isn't about picking a hero. Ask yourself a series of questions about why such a person interests you so much:
Do you name Bill Gates because he is bright, because he is among the richest persons in the world, or because of his vast philanthropic activities?
Do you admire Nelson Mandela because he overcame adversity, because he became a national savior, or because of the way he performed in office?
Is Muhammad Yunus your role model because he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for developing the microfinance model or because he commands the attention of world leaders?
Is one of the reasons you admire your Aunt Charlene that she travels all over the world and doesn't ask anyone's permission to do anything?
One executive told us what he learned from one role-model boss in his career, the chief financial officer at Esquire magazine:
He would never let anybody go unless he was satisfied that he had done everything that he could to make that person work out in the position. He was essentially telling me that I needed to take as much responsibility as the other person and do everything that I could to make a situation work. That's a large, transcending statement. People look for the easy way out, but there has to be a lot of personal ownership in leadership.
Make a short list of the role models you've followed in life. For each of them, ask yourself the following questions:
Why is this person a role model for you?
How are this person's admirable characteristics similar to and dissimilar from yours?
In what ways did this person exhibit leadership?
What is this person's leadership vision? How was it communicated and put into practice? What made it compelling to others?
Leadership entails using power on occasion. In fact, leadership is about the power to make things happen. Because power has many negative connotations, people often talk about it as influence, impact, or effectiveness. But power itself is neutral. It is the outcomes of using one's power, and whether those outcomes are perceived as good or bad, that determine how effectively power has been used. As Abraham Lincoln noted, "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
How do you feel about having and using power? Where is power in your leadership vision? What part does it play? How does your power affect your ability to relate to other people?
With power comes conflict—no question about that. Like power, conflict is an inevitable part of life as a leader. Across many studies conducted at CCL on the topic of executive derailment, the ability to handle conflict effectively is a key factor that differentiates leaders who don't derail from those who do.
Conflict is inevitable when two people in positions of power or of leadership don't agree. If you embrace conflict as a common element of work life, it can be highly informative and a stimulus for bringing transparency to core issues such as vision and values. Conflict can draw out what you and others hold valuable and are willing to advocate for, defend, and protect. If you understand the effect that values have on how people respond to different situations, then you can better understand the root causes of a conflict. And in understanding root causes, you will also gain insight into the way values affect your vision for leadership.
For some people, leveraging power and managing conflict in pursuit of a leadership vision can be an anxious endeavor. Some never planned to take power, so when conflict arises, as it will in any opportunity to lead, they fall back on old scripts about the importance of modesty, fairness, and not stepping on toes in pursuit of control and influence. This sort of interference isn't easy to sort out, but it's worth your time to try if you find yourself uneasy with power and conflict. If you can view your interactions with others as an opportunity to share and leverage power for a higher purpose, your effectiveness as a leader and the effectiveness of your group are likely to increase.
You might encounter power and conflict in a variety of situations. For example, have you ever been in a situation in which you thought, "Enough is enough!" and insisted on breaking with the status quo? Have you ever lost a leadership position because you believed that the direction that was being taken was wrong? Have you found yourself in a prolonged debate about the merits of a decision or strategy? Have you told someone in a senior position that doing it your way wasn't just better but a lot better, or maybe even the only way to succeed? Consider these questions on power and conflict:
How does power fit into your conceptions of yourself and your vision for leadership? What do you like and dislike about power?
How have you used power effectively and ineffectively?
When you admire others' use of power, what do you admire about them, and what does that convey to you about their leadership vision?
What does misuse of power look like?
How do you feel and act when you don't have power?
What ideas or goals have you fought for in recent years?
What have you gone to the mat about? What does that say about your values and your vision for leadership?
How well do you handle conflict?
In various conflicts you have with others, is there a theme or pattern in the content of the disagreement?
Do you tend to get in conflict with a particular group of people?
How does conflict affect your vision about how you want to lead?
Where you expend your creative energies tells you a lot about your passions and interests and can inform your leadership vision. With respect to the relationship between creativity and vision, creativity is like a fingerprint. It can be what makes your vision for leadership unique. Part of discovering your leadership vision is noticing how you use your creative capabilities. Perhaps you love coming up with new product ideas or improving existing systems. Perhaps you love the power of the written word, and you spend extra hours writing. Perhaps you love helping people solve problems and can easily spend hours listening and thinking about their problems rather than attending to your own.
A leader's creativity can show up in connecting existing ideas that others have not previously connected. It can show up in metaphors and analogies that reinterpret old problems or in some entirely new approach. No matter what form it takes, being creative doesn't happen by chance or without expenditure of desire and effort. People who are perceived as creative will tell you that it takes preparation and hard work and can be pursued in deliberate ways. Central to it are a heightened form of focus and energy and a deep involvement with whatever you're doing.
If you have an area in your life that you consider creative (maybe you play a musical instrument, paint, write, engage in outdoor adventures, or play sports), explore what that activity says about your vision for leadership. You may find that your creative outlets tell you quite a bit about your passion, desires, and energy regarding leadership. Ask yourself the following questions:
When do you feel most creative as a leader, and when do you feel most at ease or in the groove?
When are you so absorbed you lose track of time? Does this ever happen when you are leading? Whether it happens or not, what does that convey to you about your vision for leadership?
When is leadership creative? When it's not, why is that?
Does your organization encourage your creativity? If not, is this why you feel a sense of drift?
How do you as a leader encourage the expression of creativity among others, and what might you be doing that thwarts it?
How do you use your creativity outside your job or leadership role? If there is a gap between your creative level at work and your creative level outside work, what do you attribute that to?
While we believe that developing a leadership vision requires deliberate thought and collection and analysis of data, we also believe that intuition is a source of insight into developing a vision for leadership. Why? Because leaders often lack the data they would like to have to make a decision or articulate a vision. In such moments, tapping into your intuition can help you move from analysis to action. Intuition requires:
Bringing both creative and analytical approaches to an issue
Looking at the horizon, not just what is in front of you
Seeing patterns that can inform your assumptions about how issues will play out in the future
Drawing on your own and others' experiences to inform future decisions
Some of us rely a good deal on intuition and use it to help make decisions. Both intuition and vision are based on parts of ourselves with which we're not fully aware. Both provide insights into what makes sense or what feels right. If there are areas in which you have found your intuition to be particularly valuable, those areas are likely to show up in your vision. Some people trust their intuition when selecting employees. Others trust it about which products will sell or how fast to expand a business. For others, intuition is the primary driver for their vision of leadership.
Consider the following questions about how intuition might influence your leadership vision:
What does your intuition tell you about your vision for leadership?
How does your vision for leadership resonate with other people?
Do you value and trust your intuition? Why is that?
What has happened when you have acted on your intuition in your roles as a leader?
In what situations has your intuition seemed most reliable? When has it been off-base? Can you discern what factors differentiate between being on target or off target with your leadership intuition?
Finally, we strongly suggest you talk to others as you develop your vision for leadership. We believe that leadership is as much about collective activity as it is about an individual leader, and thus your own leadership vision is also connected, implicitly or explicitly, to the vision that others hold. As such, it's important that you be open to and seek input from other people. Our colleagues at CCL, Bill Drath and Chuck Palus, frame it this way.
Our constructs of leadership, it seems, have been built up around ... the powerful individual taking charge. This aspect of leadership is like the whitecaps on the sea—prominent and captivating, flashing in the sun. But to think about the sea solely in terms of the tops of waves is to miss the far vaster and more profound phenomenon out of which such waves arise—it is to focus attention on the tops and miss the sea beneath. And so leadership may be much more than the dramatic whitecaps of the individual leader, and may be more productively understood as the deep blue water we all swim in when we work together [1994, p. 25].
As you think about your vision for leadership, consider the extent to which your vision aligns with and is influenced by the people with whom you work and serve and those you admire. Also consider the following questions:
What inspires you about visions that others have about leadership?
How can you build on and expand the vision held by others and make it your own?
What is it that they want to accomplish, or what problem do they want to solve?
Where does your vision for leadership fall short of the potential of the groups and teams with which you work?
In addition to looking for connections between your vision for leadership and the vision of members of collectives in which you participate, think about how and where you choose to concentrate your efforts in working with other people. Where and what you choose to focus on (or not) indicates something central to your priorities and to your leadership vision.
At the start of this chapter, we defined vision for leadership as an ideal picture of what you might do as a leader. Therefore, as you develop a clearer vision of leadership, you'll clarify your direction as a leader—where you want to go, why, and what you'll do when you get there. You will make better decisions about the paths and options presented to you. You will know when you can and cannot compromise. You will better understand your passions and priorities. You will be better able to move toward roles that will allow you to express what you have to offer as a leader. You will know what you'd like to test or learn from future leadership opportunities. You will also find that clear vision lends a confident, steady sense of identity amid chaos.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, novelist Milan Kundera (1984) suggests that for everyone, there is an "Es muss sein!" ("It must be!"), that is, an overriding necessity that governs a person's life. This necessity will drive you toward a pattern in your ideas, needs, and passions. This necessity will also inform the way that leadership plays a role in your life. Through this process, you will gain insight into why some people find their way to leadership roles and others do not, by either choice or happenstance.
For some people, a desire for leadership forms part of a broader vision they have for themselves as humans. It's important to distinguish your desire for leadership from desire for simply power and influence. In Good to Great, Jim Collins (2001) writes about "level 5 leaders"—those who concomitantly hold as values a burning desire to succeed and a measure of humility (that is, they can attribute success to the contributions of others). In our work with many leaders from different sectors of society, almost without exception, the most effective leaders have combined a compelling vision with a burning desire to lead and a desire to assume responsibility for a higher purpose.
By now you clearly recognize the importance of a leadership vision to guide you through your choices and decisions as a leader. Reflect on the following final questions to see where you are in developing and articulating a clear leadership vision:
What are you trying to accomplish through your leadership?
What would others say about the guiding force for your leadership?
If you were to outline the elements of your leadership vision, what would be included?
Are the elements of your vision compatible or contradictory?
How does your vision for leadership contribute to the success of other people, your team, or your organization?
How does your leadership vision connect to your overall personal vision?
What obstacles impede your enacting your vision for leadership?
New events, ideas, and ways of thinking will cause your vision to shift over time. At times of important transition in your life, you may wish to revisit the sources of your vision of leadership.
In Chapter Four, we move to motivations and values for leading—the third component of the Discovering Leadership Framework. If you still don't have a clear leadership vision, a look at your motivations and values will certainly help. Examining them will also give you more insight into why you feel adrift.