Business leaders need to adopt and follow best practices in order to achieve high performance from themselves and their team. The first article in this series noted the importance of being a trustworthy leader as a key behaviour. The next important best practice is being a visionary leader.
But what does visionary leadership mean? And how can you effectively demonstrate to your senior team and those who report to them that you are visionary in your approach?
The highest-performing team members follow leaders who adopt rigorous visual "chain thinking." This amounts to three chronologically sequenced, tightly focused vision statements that describe what the business will become in the short, medium and long term. These deliverables will have your employees believing strongly in the organization and will excite and inspire them to work efficiently together to achieve your highest priority strategic objective: building a continually improving and sustainable high-performing business with a high return on investment (ROI).
The most effective way to demonstrate the best practice of being a visionary leader is to both believe in and communicate three calendarized, strategically linked and supported measurable goals. To do so, you'll need to:
- Look ahead and build a long-term vision statement. Positively envision what you truly believe the business will become by a proposed future date. After writing a summary, integrate the essential processes (e.g. strategic planning, accountability) and/or business units (e.g. operations, marketing, sales and finance) into the statement. Let the words sit for several weeks, and then look at them again; identify weaknesses and/or what is missing or inaccurate and then improve it. (The result from this initial exercise begins to effectively frame your end-point deliverable in the last step below.) Remind yourself that an unrealistic vision is a hallucination. Honestly seek the truth and the truth will set your business free!
- Clearly determine a concise and positive short-term vision for the future. Carefully scale back the above long-term vision by identifying the highest ROI "facts" you collected. Then create a statement – chronologically the first of three – that describes a vision for your business after about a year. Be optimistic, but ensure that the most important pieces fit together in a cohesive and sequenced set of words. In later articles in this series, you will be recommended to produce a strategy execution plan that describes how everyone pulls together and is held accountable to achieve this measurable end-state. The words that you select for your short-term vision statement will provide the strategic framework for your plan. Plan to succeed.
- Get commitment to improve your business' short-term vision. Successful businesses ensure their high performers agree on what the organization's vision should become. While always seeking to maximize ROI, clarify how effectively your short-term vision resonates by asking your employees to commit to helping you improve it. Unpackage it, but have an efficient process in place so you will achieve alignment, where everyone pulls in the same direction. Keep everyone's focus on the macro by ensuring the discussion stays on the big-picture, short-term measurable goal. Once the short-term vision is firmed up, you have an excellent starting point for the collaborative draft process.
- Gain buy-in and ownership to continually improve performance. Now that you have your high-level big picture, remind your high performers that there needs to be a bridge between the macro and micro. Achieve this by having them identify and rank the highest priority areas that your business needs to urgently improve. How these are identified, prioritized and framed are strategically important. Rigorously executing this process will expedite one of the most important leadership best practice behaviours. This is the reality of gaining buy-in and ownership to improve the business. This step is critical in enabling your organization to effectively execute and realize a shared vision.
- Build shared visual chain thinking that inspires. Continue to work collaboratively to build your medium- and long-term vision statements. After gaining sign-off from your high performers, you can finalize and disseminate all three statements. Have them promote and use these statements as internal "stretch tools" to inspire all employees. Remember your highest priority strategic objective: a shared three-stage vision of how your organization will become a continually improving and sustainable high-performing business. Therefore, be justifiably bold!
Proving you are being a visionary leader requires discipline, creative thinking, intellectual rigour and salesmanship. It isn't easy, but the results – having a committed senior team building a high-performing business – make it extremely worthwhile.
This column is the second in a series of edited excerpts from Don Andrews's forthcoming book Performance Intelligence: How to Effectively Execute High-Performance Best Practices.
