Page 38 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

28 HBR Leader’s Handbook

the right time to create or revise your organization’s or team’s vision. The
second is to establish your own draft vision as a starting point. The next
step is to engage your own team and other stakeholders in actually craft-
ing a more refined vision together. Finally, you’ll need to help your people
connect their work to the vision so that they understand how their contri-
bution makes a difference.

Step 1. Determine whether the time is right
Whether you are a CEO or the leader of a department, function, or plant,
you need to periodically ask yourself whether you have the right vision for
your organization and whether it’s time to modify it or work on a new one.
That’s all the more necessary if you’re just coming into a new leadership
role.
But, often, particularly for new leaders, there is so much going on and
so much to do, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day activities and
forget or put off setting direction.
Even long-serving executives can become too passive; having been in
the same organization for a while often makes leaders blind to their chang-
ing environment—at least until some crisis shakes their world and sinks
their numbers. But staying attuned to the ways the world is changing is
critical for a leader. It is your opportunity—and your role as a leader—to
identify when to reshape a vision.

When to develop a new vision
It may be obvious that you need to sharpen or reshape your vision com-
pletely because of a changing environment or new organizational opportu-
nities, as was the case with the World Bank. Or it may simply be clear that
the current path isn’t working.
But the need for a new vision may not be immediately obvious. For
example, when Patrick O’Sullivan became the CEO of Eagle Star Insur-
ance in the United Kingdom, the company’s senior leaders told him that
the company was doing fine and that its vision to provide reliable, low- cost
property and casualty insurance was sufficient. When O’Sullivan dug