Page 27 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Building a Unifying Vision 17

vision, without losing the overall energy and meaning of the
broader vision. Sometimes this is just a smaller version of the cor-
porate vision, but it can be supportive while somewhat different.

Tackling these challenges head-on is a critical part of stepping up from
management to leadership. And although it doesn’t have to be the first
thing you do, you will have to focus on building a unifying vision period-
ically because it provides the foundation for many of the other practices
that will make you a great leader. If you practice it on a relatively small
scale with your team or your department, it will give you more confidence
to build a broader vision at another point in your career.
As part of this practice, leaders need to first understand what a good
vision is; they then need to lead a process for determining the vision for
their organization or unit. To give you a sense of what this means, let’s look
at how Jim Wolfensohn shaped a new vision for the World Bank as a whole
and how other leaders in the Bank then built exciting visions for their own
teams as a result.

Creating a vision for the World Bank

When Wolfensohn became president of the World Bank in 1995, he inher-
ited a venerable institution under siege. The organization had been suc-
cessful in supporting worldwide economic development after World War II
and promoting democratic social and economic systems during the Cold
War. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, suddenly the West had
won and the quasi-political purpose of the World Bank no longer made
sense. Additionally, the opening of world financial markets and the rise of
China and other Asian economies meant that developing countries had
access to capital from sources other than the World Bank. Meanwhile, the
Bank was being criticized for earlier neglect of such concerns as the envi-
ronment, local culture, corruption, social justice, and others. By the time
Wolfensohn took the helm, these forces had coalesced into a public move-
ment, called “fifty years is enough,” that explicitly questioned the World
Bank’s need to exist.