Page 26 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

16 HBR Leader’s Handbook

thoughtful home: A home that takes care of the people inside it and the
world around it.”
The practice of crafting a vision is a key component of your ability to
create significant impact as a leader. Whether you are in charge of the
whole organization or just a piece of it, a vision provides the starting point
for developing strategic plans, recruiting talent, setting goals, and chal-
lenging people to find new and better ways to get things done. Equally
important, the vision helps to align groups and individuals (who may be
doing quite different work) around a common direction, while also inspir-
ing them to contribute to something that is bigger than them.
Your role as a leader is to shape a compelling vision to fit your organi-
zation (or unit, or team) and its environment, and then recraft it periodi-
cally as conditions change. By crafting, sharpening, or revising your vision
in the right way, at the right time, you can have enormous influence over
your organization’s or unit’s direction and the emotional engagement of
your people. But this kind of vision doesn’t just drop out of the sky. The
practice of making a vision is challenging because:

• It can be hard to determine whether it’s the right time to develop
a new vision; you don’t want to do it too often and risk burnout, or
not often enough and risk complacency.

• It’s easy to be too timid in setting a vision; to do its job, a vision
must be bold.

• Many of your colleagues and constituents will have competing
ideas and points of view and you’ll need to corral these into a
coherent direction.

• The process can be time-consuming, so you’ll have to carve
out time to focus on creating the vision while dealing with
shorter-term issues that will seem more urgent and compelling.

• Assuming you are not the CEO, you’ll need to connect the vision
for your specific team or business unit to your company’s overall