Month: March 2015

As a leader, are you able balance vision with reality?

Your organization requires you to have great vision for the future but it also needs your hard-nosed reality orientation. Great leaders know that if you bring in reality too early people become disheartened and discouraged.

One way to stifle vision with too much reality is to micromanage your people. They will respond in various ways as I discuss in this video.

The best leaders can integrate their vision with reality.

I love when leaders have great visions because:

• Organizations flourish when you show them how the company can capture another market, or perform at a new and unheard-of level.
• Teams are catalyzed to high-level action with good visions.
• At the same time, when you help teams face the negative, they are protected and stay sustainable with reality, not afraid to face financial, market, competitive or other obstacles.

For example, take team meetings.  We all know that the marketing person must present first at the team meeting. Then the financial expert must say what is in the budget, and what is not.  That simply makes sense.  But that is not enough for a great leader.  The best leaders I know and work with are able to do both tasks themselves, and integrate them.

• They know that you must start with vision, as it is the primary source of energy, focus and loyalty.
• They  practice the habit of bringing struggles, challenges and limitations to the conversation, instead of avoiding them, because they know that companies make bad decisions and experience empty promises when the problems aren’t brought up at the right time.
• They don’t in reality too early – before they have time for the vision to capture them, to engage with it, and to become emotionally committed to it.

I often hear from a leader, “I am the visionary.  I set the pace and see the big picture.  I’m not the analyst or the CFO.  I leave that work to them.”  And less so, but still more than I’d like, I also hear from other leaders, “I  keep reality in front so that we are always aware of it, and don’t end up with positive thinking that keeps us from having substance, and puts us in danger of missing important data points.”  Certainly, leaders can’t do it all. They need to hire and resource great analysts, financial people, and creative innovative talent as well.  But that doesn’t mean you aren’t still casting vision and interpreting reality.  Your people don’t need to see this bipolar-type leadership modeled for them, the unrealistic visionary or the head-down nothing-but-ops person.

• You need to be a mixture of both of these traits.
• You need to know when they need to be inspired to go beyond themselves with a story, or your own enthusiasm, or by guiding theirs.
• And you need to know when it’s time for them to buckle down and persevere, doing follow up and diligently working the plan.

Here is the best practice:  Before 5pm every day, bring something visionary to someone in your organization.  And, before 5pm,  face a tough reality with someone, either something the company is experiencing, something you are struggling with, or a problem they have.  Make that a goal.  It doesn’t have to be the same person.  But it must come from you as the integrated leader.

As a leader, in the end, you are what you do.  To lead well, you need the necessary elements of the right vision, values, resources and plan.  These are non-negotiables.

Ultimately, it ends up being about behavior.  You will succeed by what you actually do, and you will be measured by that as well.  Behaving in ways that lead you to the outcomes can’t be overstated.  Too many leaders with great ideas and talent end up with a glass ceiling because they simply didn’t “do” what they were supposed to do.

Don’t be that person.  Here are a few ideas to help you along this path.

Follow every significant conversation or meeting with an action step.  If you are taking the time and energy to meet, brainstorm, strategize or solve challenges, there needs to be some behaviors that happen as a result.  You might have a conversation that you have been avoiding, or get on the phone with a client, or jumpstart your sales team, or cut some costs.  But meetings are only as effective as the actions they produce.

Be accountable for those actions.  Leaders are busy people, often overwhelmed with competing demands for their attention.  I have seen so many leaders just get too buried to follow up on their action steps because the only person they were accountable to them lived in their own head.  Ask your assistant, or board member, or a trusted person, to remind you of the actions you have committed to.  My assistant told me she didn’t want to nag me, as she had done that when she raised her kids.  I told her I’m not a rebellious teen.  I need her to remind me, ask me, recommend to me and yes, nag me!!

Analyze, then act before analyzing again.  This is the famous “paralysis by analysis” problem. Leaders who are a bit perfectionistic, risk-averse and a bit OCD, tend to overanalyze situations.  Then they never take action steps, or by the time they do, the opportunity window has closed.  Here is a way to do this:  in areas you have good history of success with, jump out a little sooner than you are comfortable with.  In areas of struggle or failure, take longer.

Do the best actions, not just any actions.  A busy leader is not always an effective leader.  You may be busy deleting emails or putting out fires, or having compassion fatigue because you are enabling and rescuing too many people. Always, always, always, start back to your mission and your strategy.  Ask yourself two questions:

1. “Is this action serving the mission and the strategy?”  That is, is your action step driving your organization toward the right goals?
2. “Is this action the best use of my time and energy?”  There are lots of positive things you can do.  But do what only you can do.

Take initiative.  Be active.  Be a leader who does what you believe.

By the way, being active doesn’t mean that you say “Yes” to every challenge as I talk about in the video below.