Page 43 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Building a Unifying Vision 33

“To Lead, Create a Shared Vision” have found that the ability to be forward
looking is the second-highest characteristic of what employees look for in
a leader (trailing only behind honesty). In other words, your followers—the
people you lead—are expecting you to envision, anticipate, and set a direc-
tion for the future. Depending on where you are in the organization, this
can mean different things. At lower levels, it could center around articulat-
ing a new way of getting projects done faster and with greater impact, or
significantly ratcheting up service to customers; at higher levels, it might
involve setting direction for how your unit will make a difference in the
next few years; and at the CEO level, the challenge will be to figure out an
exciting enterprise path for the next decade.
To do this, Kouzes and Posner strongly suggest that you start by talk-
ing to and listening to your own people, both direct reports and other fol-
lowers. Find out their ideas, dreams, thoughts, hopes, and concerns about
the future for your team, unit, or organization. Tap into their aspirations
and find out what would be exciting for them so that the vision you eventu-
ally create will resonate with the people who have to make it happen. See
the box “A vision-creating exercise” for one way to do this.
Of course, you can’t stop there. You also need to incorporate your own
thoughts and dreams. Some of the vision should be based on good common
business acumen and insight. Scan the horizon. What’s happening in your
industry or your sector? Are there unmet customer, market, or societal
needs that your organization or unit has the capability to fulfill? Are there
new technologies that you could leverage? How could you differentiate
your organization from your competitors (or even from other units in the
company)? More personally, what’s the impact that you’d like to have over
the next few years or more? What would make you feel like you’ve really
made a difference?
As you go through this thought process, start putting together options,
choices, and what-if statements. For example, when Jim Wolfensohn was
first thinking about the vision for the World Bank, he considered the pos-
sibility of focusing on measures of global economic development or aim-
ing for a certain number of countries to achieve a target level of financial