One afternoon on a winter day in 2009 I sat down to begin coaching Dave, the functional head of corporate marketing in a global healthcare company that had just undergone a reorganization. The good news from all this change was that Dave’s division had inherited a larger team of product marketers. The bad news was that both his existing team and his new team were on edge from the recent changes. They were worried about job security, career opportunities with an expanded team, and how Dave would manage through this transition so that the division would emerge stronger. Everyone liked Dave personally, but he was known for being in the weeds and not necessarily a proactive communicator. If you wanted to know what was going on, you had to hunt him down and ask directly. Otherwise, you might not hear from him for weeks.
When Dave and I began our work together, I asked him to tell me his vision for his new, combined team. He answered by parroting the company goal statement, which had been rolled out with much fanfare. He seemed pleased that he had remembered it. So I pushed back and asked again, “What is your vision? What is going to make your newly formed team energized to come to work every day? What is this team’s role specifically in supporting the company goals?”
Dave stopped for a minute and admitted he hadn’t thought of it. As a functional head, he didn’t think it was his job to set a vision. It was then that I knew exactly where to begin our coaching.
Dave’s take on vision didn’t make him an outlier; he was in the norm. In the day-to-day of work life, vision falls to the bottom of the list. It’s considered a nice-to-have. Many leaders assume that vision is the purview of the very top. Senior executives expect to be involved in the company’s vision, but not to lead it. Only CEOs know that vision is their job.
Vision, as it turns out, is much more egalitarian than totalitarian. All leaders can benefit from having a compelling vision (and it benefits aspiring leaders as well).
Visionaries run the teams everyone wants to work on.
Vision is one of those barely tangible characteristics of executive presence that has great resonance. While we spot it immediately when it’s there—often by calling someone strategic or forward-looking—we are not sure what’s missing when it’s absent. A client of mine once lamented that his executive team couldn’t “hold their own” with the board. As we analyzed what that comment actually meant, it came down to their inability to articulate vision.
As an employee, you know which leaders have vision. They run the teams everyone wants to work on. They are the CEOs people drop everything to follow. They create a reality that we clamor to be a part of. They personalize our work effort. I’ve been on teams with visionary leaders and felt I was changing the world, even if the rest of the company was falling apart around me. Sometimes it’s the CEO who sets that vision. Other times it’s a team leader. In great companies, visions start at the top and cascade down, to distinct teams that translate the vision from their unique perspective. Everyone has a part.
Alternatively, visionless leaders are in danger of cultivating teams with a sense of anomie, a concept proposed by French sociologist Emile Durkheim in the late 1800s that is best described as a feeling of purposelessness, of being disconnected from the whole. Typically, people on such teams are biding time until something better comes along.
We covered the importance of purpose, certainty, and status in Chapter 9. It’s not a big leap to see why vision enables all of these rewarding things, and more. I would argue that vision is necessary in a post–Knowledge Age era where information is readily available, cheap, unreliable, and frustratingly agnostic. We’re drowning in data. When I started in PR, we talked about controlling the message. Today, that’s a joke. At best, you can influence the message.
With so much information to process, we are not getting better at making decisions; we’re getting worse. In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer uses the case of back surgery to demonstrate this point.1 For years, doctors approached back pain (which occurs in a notoriously complex area of the body and is difficult to diagnose) by surveying symptoms and generally prescribing rest as a wait-and-see approach. Most cases of back pain go away on their own when patients allow their body to heal. Today, doctors have the ability to use cutting-edge imaging technology to see into the patient’s lower back and discover various areas of the region that may be causing pain. Often, surgery is prescribed. However, doctors are getting worse at treating back pain, not better. The new interventions don’t appear to be alleviating the symptoms overall. The technology gives doctors a wealth of information about possible causes of back pain, but in general, back pain is as common, as severe, and as long-lasting today as it was 50 years ago. Back surgeons, just like the rest of us, can be overloaded with information and fail to find vital context and direction from it.
In the workplace, a vision helps the leader, and everyone else, figure out what’s important. A vision provides context amidst chaos. We need data plus context to make decisions that are useful, relevant, and aligned with the organization’s overall goals. As Lehrer notes, the human brain can only manage at most seven variables at a time, and when we get overloaded, we latch on to one or two items that may or may not be the most relevant.
Vision setting as a methodology and a process is important, but it’s not what this book is about. Instead, I’m going to cover your role as the carrier of the vision—the visionary. Every leader can and should be a visionary. (After all, what’s the alternative?)
The word visionary sounds big. It conjures images of geniuses, seers, and iconoclasts, but not so much Bob in the accounting office. Ask managers if they consider themselves visionaries. Most will say “no.” Now ask them if they’d like to be. Most will say, “Who wouldn’t?” or “Why not?”
Every single person reading this book has the potential to be visionary. There’s no magic behind it. It just requires time and attention—and an acknowledgment that if you want a strong presence, vision is worth the effort to develop and communicate. As shown in Figure 10-1, there are four aspects to becoming visionary in your daily work life, whether as the CEO of a multibillion-dollar conglomerate or as Bob toiling away on the annual audit. What makes visionaries visionary is their ability to be aspirational and personal, while also articulating a vision that is shared and active. Consider how you can incorporate each of these qualities into the normal gyrations of your day. I’ve yet to meet a leader who lacks the ability to be visionary. You just have to make it a priority.
Visionaries are aspirational and personal, while creating a vision that is shared and active.
Figure 10-1. Elements of a visionary.
The first part of being a visionary is keeping your head up. Visionaries are positive, which makes everyone else feel positive. They encourage potential. They see the same problems that everyone sees, but they also see solutions. When times are bad, their vision acts as a compass to help a team stick together and find a way to the other side.
In Good to Great, Jim Collins discusses how high-performing companies have a core ideology that is enduring and value-driven and has intrinsic importance to employees.2 This ideology—not financial performance or competitive position—is a company’s reason for being. It’s a higher calling, a purpose that people can buy into.
A company’s reason for being shouldn’t be about financial performance or trumping competitors. A vision is a higher calling.
As you consider how to shape your vision into something that can be communicated, keep in mind that there’s a difference between vision and goals. Consider the following statements:
— Increase our performance by 25 percent.
— Crush the giant in our industry.
— Create a product that will become the No. 1 choice in the market.
— Become the fastest-growing company in our sector.
These may be acceptable strategic goals, but are they truly visionary?
On the other hand, your vision can rise above the market fray when you describe it like this:
— Set a standard for innovation and risk taking.
— Exemplify how to balance profitability with social responsibility.
— Be a destination workplace known for leadership development.
— Bring happiness to our customers.
— Save lives.
As the visionary, your role is to tailor the vision so that it is meaningful to your team—whether it’s the whole company or just two people. (Or it could be an outward vision to an industry or marketplace if that’s your domain.) Strategic goals are critical for moving behavior in a common direction, but they don’t inspire the same deep commitment as a vision. Great visions are engaging and inclusive. They support the concept of “flow”; that is, when people are exposed to a great vision, they want to invest themselves psychically in it. Rather than create a sense of us versus them, great visions create assurance that everyone is contributing to the whole. Think back on David Rock’s SCARF model (discussed in Chapter 9). Great visions reduce threats to status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Even if we disagree with the vision, we never feel excluded by it.
One last note: A great vision benefits everyone equitably. I hear a lot of vision statements from entrepreneurs, for example, about growing a market-leading business. Often this means that there are a few people at the top who stand to gain a lot, but then there’s a steep drop-off in monetary reward for the rest of the folks toiling away at work. Be cautious that your vision doesn’t disproportionately benefit a few.
Let’s go back to the story that began this chapter. Dave, the corporate marketing head, decided to formulate a vision where both his former and newly acquired teams felt included. Because the pharmaceutical company where he worked was going through considerable change, with more to come, he also wanted to create an umbrella shelter where his group could have a core purpose, even when the rest of the company capitulated. The company was about improving the lives of others, and his marketing group had a unique role in developing and distributing messages to patients in need of their products. Dave’s vision was to use the most creative marketing in the industry to bring awareness to people whose lives could be improved through his company’s pharmaceutical products. He described his goal in terms of a team member looking back 10 years from now and saying, “That was the most innovative and successful work I ever produced. And I did it for the best possible reasons—saving lives!”
Visionaries take their visions personally. It almost always starts with leaders looking inward to their deepest thoughts about what’s important. It’s a contemplative exercise of balancing what’s right for the larger group, the community in which the company exists, and the leader’s personal values and ambitions. Certainly for entrepreneurs and CEOs of closely held companies, what the leader can get behind has to be a key factor. If a CEO doesn’t want fast growth, he will never be a credible advocate for a vision that includes a meteoric rise. People will see right through it.
Visionary leaders embody their vision through their presence. Their intentions support it and their actions prove it. A corporate vision can, though rarely, bubble up from the bottom or evolve organically from a big event. But it will go no-where if the leader doesn’t feel it in her bones. Leaders provide the passion, energy, and consistency to make a vision real for others. Visions can easily get lost in busy schedules or unexpected market detours; it’s up to the leader to remind people what the group, team, or company is all about.
A vision will go nowhere unless the leader feels it in her bones.
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, certainly knows the importance of embodying a vision.3 Zappos.com is one of the top online retailers in the country. In 2009, Amazon bought the company for more than $1.2 billion. But for 10 years before that, Hsieh saw Zappos through some of the most difficult market conditions possible for an online company. Nearly running out of cash on multiple occasions, the company was kept alive only by Hsieh’s own funds. (At one point Hsieh had to sell his apartment in a desperate fire sale to keep the lights on.) His secret for greatness? An unwavering commitment to providing the ultimate customer experience. For Hsieh, that vision is intensely, deeply personal. At times, the decisions he made to maintain the vision seemed risky, if not downright financially crazy, such as the decision to warehouse inventory to improve customer satisfaction when the company was flat broke. But it worked. Zappos is not only preternaturally booming, it’s so well known for its unique culture and strong corporate vision that when you Google the term “core values,” the top links returned always include Zappos. (For a list of the Zappos core values, see the sidebar.)
1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and a Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More with Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble
Among leaders I work with, the biggest excuse for not being more visionary is that it takes time. And it does take time—not in quantity, but in quality. Determining what you truly want your team, or yourself, to represent takes introspection. It requires you to turn off the busyness in your life and to simply think. You have to quiet your mind to let your brain use its full capacity and allow the Aha! moment to occur. You may not need even a full day to formulate your vision, but it’s a different kind of time spent. However, the payoff is immense.
One of my favorite examples of visioning comes from Bill Gates and his famous “think week.” Each year when he was running Microsoft, he would go away for one full week alone just to remove interruptions and to think. He would read dozens of papers from Microsoft employees about trends and product ideas, as well as digest scores of outside research. Rather than keep his process behind the scenes, he talked openly about “think week,” with both internal and external audiences. He wanted everyone to see how seriously he took this strategic time to craft his vision for Microsoft.
Anyone can replicate this idea. Can’t do a full week? Do a “think day.” Take Bill Gates’s lead and be transparent about it. If you communicate how important having time to think is to you, it shows others how seriously you believe in your vision. This vision is not just a few words on a plaque somewhere, but a living, breathing purpose that guides your decisions.
People will follow your lead. If you want to be a visionary, you have to believe in the path with every ounce of who you are. It is personal.
For vision to inspire and mobilize, it must be shared among the group. Otherwise, it is more of a private goal than a group vision. And while the leader must personally buy in and believe, others must personally invest as well. Sharing a vision is never as easy as it seems. Here’s what usually happens:
Step 1. A person or elite group of people develops a vision.
Step 2. The vision is announced to a larger group.
Step 3. Everyone is expected to embrace the vision for its magnificence.
Step 4. The vision fades to the background.
Truly visionary leaders use their presence to encourage others to be part of the vision. It’s like developing trust: People have to elect to come toward a vision—it can’t be pushed on them. If you push too hard, it begins to feel like coercion, and people will shut out your vision entirely.
People come toward a vision. Similar to trust, it can’t be forced.
As a leader trying to get people to embrace a vision, one of the best approaches is to open up your thinking and invite others to help define the vision—before your mind is made up. It can’t be a symbolic, after-the-fact gesture. The great management guru Peter Senge talks of “learning organizations” combining advocacy with inquiry.4 In this approach, leaders advocate for their position and then inquire how others feel about it. Instead of defending their ideas as objections emerge, leaders continually sharpen them while soliciting other ideas until everyone in the room has offered input.
I’ve taken this process a step further as it relates to inspiring a group to set a vision. (It also works beautifully for any situation that requires that all-important buy-in.) I call it the “DIAL in” process. The basic steps are describe, invite, acknowledge, and leverage (see Figure 10-2).
Figure 10-2. “DIAL in” model for buy-in.
To see how DIAL in works around vision, let’s return to Dave’s story. His team vision is to bring awareness to people whose lives could be improved through the most creative marketing in the pharmaceutical industry. Before he rolled out his vision with much hoopla and a red bow, he first took the idea to his group and followed the DIAL in steps.
Dave shared his thinking with his team members, taking care to fully divulge his thought process. He let them know how important a solid team vision was and how he had arrived at a potential vision for the group. He made sure to let them know that he wanted it to be a vision that supported the corporate mission and, at the same time, held special meaning for team members themselves, no matter what happened around them.
Dave then asked the group, “What am I missing?” and “How can we make this idea better?” As people began to present thoughts, Dave was careful not to defend his own original vision. He didn’t talk much at all during this process, except to probe further and to help others clarify their thoughts. At all times, Dave made sure to tease out the thinking behind people’s statements.
Acknowledgment was a concept first introduced in Chapter 7, in the discussion of empathy, which is another key emotion related to gaining buy-in. Whenever possible, Dave made sure to acknowledge other people’s points—whether or not he agreed with them. Simply hearing Dave say, “I can see why you would say that” or “You’ve put a lot of thought into this topic” helped team members to understand that Dave was taking the time to put himself in their shoes.
As new ideas flowed in the room, they began to build off one another. Dave facilitated by putting disparate ideas together to leverage the thoughts into a more and more relevant, inspiring vision for the whole group. He had to pay sharp attention to avoid getting overly invested in any one idea. Rather, he functioned as the architect of the group’s combined wisdom. As he formed these ideas into a coherent picture, he went back to the beginning and described what he was seeing and hearing—starting the cycle again.
* * *
Finally, Dave wrapped up by thanking his team members for their thoughts and time. He made sure everyone felt heard and had provided input, and he promised a quick follow-up. By the end, he had agreement and some enthusiastic supporters for his vision.
I encourage you to try this process to create a shared vision, or as a buy-in exercise anytime you have a new idea you want to introduce. It sounds simple enough, but here’s a warning: Be prepared to fight against the impulse to defend your ideas as people raise questions. You’ve already invested in your own vision by virtue of the time and energy you’ve expended to get there. Your neural circuits are firing and you’ll likely resist anything that counters your position. However, if you begin to defend your position (often with a lot of “but sandwiches,” such as “That’s a good idea, but … I see why you’d say that, but …), you’ll wind up with a room full of people passively nodding their heads. No one is going to stand up to the boss when his mind is already made up. There’s nothing to gain and lots to lose.
I’ve used this exercise frequently in workshops with seasoned CEOs. One leader will present an idea about which she feels strongly. A few others will act as the audience, providing alternate takes on it. Keep in mind, these are people who are accustomed to having the last (and loudest) word on the ideas they generate. Invariably, the person acting as the leader will admit that it was killing her to hold back her vociferous defense of her ideas. It’s good to learn how easy (or difficult) it is to hear opposing positions, and how to have the self-control to inquire about the other person’s thought processes rather than relentlessly promote your own.
A visionary leader wants to hear how others think and feel. She knows that the power in a vision is that it is shared—and that the sum is always greater than the individual parts.
The first three attributes of a visionary are the most commonly considered. Most leaders know they must be able to believe and share an inspiring vision. We can almost always muster the energy for that. It’s creative and positive and neatly ephemeral. The vision is completed. Box checked.
Visionary leaders, however, know that for a vision to mean anything, it must be active. It must be woven into the nuances of everyday life. Sometimes you must explain it until you’re blue in the face! It requires commitment to a process. No surprise, this is the part of visioning that begins to feel less like fun and more like hard work.
Visionary leaders know that vision is meaningless unless it’s active and alive.
Often, I see this element of a visionary underdeveloped or omitted entirely. When I’m coaching leaders on this point, I can watch them zone out. Or I’ll get a quick dismissal. Yes, yes, we’re doing that. We all want to believe that if we know our own vision and mention it occasionally, everyone will remember it. Frustratingly repetitive as it may seem, vision must be reinforced constantly—not just through words but actions, which are far more revealing. For a quick check on how clearly the group sees your vision, ask your people to write down what they believe the vision is, then compare everyone’s answers. You’ll likely be surprised by what you find.
If you want to be visionary, make a plan to keep the vision alive. Have it become a personal tagline of sorts and weave it into conversations and presentations at every opportunity. Every company meeting—even weekly—should reinforce your vision and show how you are living it. Give examples of a company milestone, or point out a particular team member’s efforts that align with the vision and the strategy. In fact, put that on the agenda! All of your team members should know how their efforts contribute to the vision. Every conversation with an employee should be viewed as an opportunity to reinforce the vision. Post the company’s vision throughout the office and on your website so that customers and partners know it as well. Zappos posts its vision on its website, along with videos of staff members talking about what it means to them, and the concepts are woven into recruiting, hiring, and management practices at the company. All new hires have the company’s core values ingrained in them during training. (To weed out the nonbelievers, Zappos even offers a $2,000 payout at the end of training for anyone who doesn’t fully buy in and wants to leave.) Company celebrations and employee awards are built around the core values. Tony Hsieh even wrote a book about them. At Zappos, the core values are very much a living, breathing part of the culture.
For Dave, our case-study leader who, as you recall, wasn’t an effusive communicator, keeping his vision active meant making a personal plan and strategizing around the ways he could incorporate vision into his normal workday. There were more opportunities than he realized when he considered that being a visionary wasn’t an addition to his job but was a big part of it.
In the day-to-day world of heads-down work, visionaries are the ones who keep their heads up, and along with them, everyone else’s. Visionaries are disciplined to keep looking forward, to tomorrow and the next day and the next. They gain perspective by rising above the chaos to discern patterns from disparate parts. They bring the complex to a simple level and communicate it in a way that makes others want to hear and remember. Their executive presence connotes forward motion and optimism.
A vision doesn’t have to be grand or innovative. It just has to be relevant and meaningful—and always a priority.
I began this chapter by discussing how important vision is in companies, and how it is within reach of every leader. Niki Leondakis’s example illustrates that vision isn’t about grand clairvoyance but a commitment, followed by repeatable practices: all at once aspirational, personal, shared, and active. There are a few ideas here that you can put into practice. As it turns out, being visionary isn’t all that sexy. Bob in accounting has everything he needs. As does Dave in marketing. And you, too.
1. Being a visionary isn’t just for CEOs, futurists, or industry gurus. All leaders can and should view their role as a visionary for their domain.
2. Visionaries communicate visions that are aspirational. Great visions bring groups together around a common and enduring higher purpose, not short-lived strategic or financial goals.
3. Visionaries take their visions personally. They have to invest with their hearts and souls, or no one else will feel a deep commitment.
4. Visionaries create a shared vision. They create buy-in by allowing others to co-create the vision through a DIAL in process, where there’s a cycle to describe, invite, acknowledge, and leverage ideas.
5. Visionaries keep the vision active. Visions should be woven into the fabric of daily office interactions or they are quickly forgotten. This is usually the part leaders would rather skip, as it can feel repetitive and mundane—but it’s key.
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