Discovering the Leader in You | your leadership vision
In Chapter Two we discussed some of the organizational factors
influencing leadership, as well as common perspectives and views
of it. Whether those views come from your surrounding culture, your
organization, or some other source, they can affect the way you see
yourself as a leader and your expectations of what leaders do. In this
chapter, we examine vision, a key part of discovering the leader in
you. Indeed, if you cannot articulate a clear and compelling vision for
leadership, your risk of drift is higher, and you may be less able to escape
it. Think about it: How can you effectively chart a course out of drift if
you don't have a clear view (that is, a vision) of where you want to go?
A leadership vision is foundational to your views of leadership and
your long-term success as a leader. Your vision for leadership goes
beyond simple expectations and perspectives about the role of a leader.
It captures and describes the desired future that you see for yourself
and your team, organization, or community. A vision for leadership is
different from an organizational mission (which spells out the reason for
an entity to exist) and from organizational goals (which articulate specific
outcomes). Your leadership vision is an expression of what you want to
create, do, or accomplish when you are in a leader role. It describes
your philosophy about leadership and your purpose in choosing to be a
leader, and it serves as an important guidepost for the core behaviors
you enact as a leader.
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50 Discovering the Leader in You
CONSCIOUS PERSONAL AND
LEADERSHIP VISIONS
A leadership vision is not the same as your personal vision. Rather, it
is a component of your personal vision; it can help you accomplish the
larger vision for your life, which also encompasses other life roles, family
desires, where you want to retire, and so on.
Similarly, a leadership vision isn't a specific organizational vision
or the future state desired by leaders of a particular organization. Your
leadership vision is that which you personally want to accomplish with
your leadership. For example, if, like Michael J. Fox, finding a cure
for Parkinson's disease were your leadership vision, then you could
find many ways to demonstrate your leadership, such as starting a
foundation to raise money to support research, going to medical school
to learn more about the disease and then treating it, or publishing a
newsletter to raise public awareness about the disease.
Conveying a compelling leadership vision is foundational to being
an effective leader. CCL research with senior leaders reveals that
leaders who are able to articulate a clear and compelling vision for their
organization are rated by bosses and peers as more effective leaders.
As a child, you may have ''known'' that you would someday become
an astronaut, a professional athlete, a teacher, or a doctor. As you grew
and advanced through school, you might have expressed what you
''knew'' about yourself by seeking out other young people who shared
your interests. Later you began to see yourself in adult roles, such as a
family and community member and as a contributor to the organization
where you work. Through these stages, you may have woven a vision
for leadership into your life. You might not have spelled out that vision
in a personal creed or blogged to the world, but it was there.
We've found that leaders at all levels often have at least a rudimentary vision of leadership under the surface. True, some haven't been
particularly thoughtful about their lives or reflected on their experiences
to imagine what's to come. As a reader of this book, you're unlikely to
be one of them. But your leadership vision may still lie below the level of
Your Leadership Vision 51
awareness, and thus it's not available to regularly draw on in your role
as a leader. Unarticulated, it leaves too much to chance and leaves you
vulnerable to drift, it leaves you less than fully engaged, and it leaves
you passive and opportunistic in your work.
Without question, who you are as a person and what you want
to accomplish in your life (your legacy) influences your vision for
leadership. It is this conscious connection between your personal vision
and the leadership vision that creates congruency of direction. Consider
how one senior executive with whom we worked thought about his
legacy (including what he did as a leader) in strongly personal terms:
Dear—
CCL confirmed to you that you're a leader—embrace that and have fun
with it. Don't be so hard on yourself—got it. When you're eulogized, people
will remember you as a good man who left a legacy of a happy marriage, kids
who grew to be productive adults, and a leader who inspired others and was
fun to be around. Lastly, you'll be remembered for the people you helped pull
up. Life is like a baseball game, and you were lucky enough to have been born
on 2nd base. Look around for people having trouble getting into the stadium
and give them a hand. Now call your parents.
Think about how having a similarly vivid picture of your legacy
might influence your vision for leadership. What do you want your
legacy to be? How is your leadership a part of this legacy?
Personal vision and leadership vision can intersect powerfully. Colleagues at CCL brought back this story from a recent trip to India
where they had visited with leaders of Pantaloons, one of India's fastgrowing retail companies. At the time, Pantaloons was keenly focused
on developing the skills of its leaders and frontline workers. Most of
them earn low salaries and come from the lowest socioeconomic strata
of Indian society. A member of the Pantaloons training arm had begun
a leader development program based on a personal insight he gained
from the streets of Mumbai as he watched beggars work the traffic
intersections. Sympathetically, he noticed that some beggars were more
52 Discovering the Leader in You
effective in obtaining charity than others. ''What is the difference?'' he
wondered. Careful observation suggested that the more effective beggars displayed a greater sense of self-confidence and self-worth. If he was
right, these personal characteristics, which could be nurtured, taught,
and developed, could be applied to those who worked at Pantaloons.
From that insight, he implemented a visionary, innovative developmental program that ultimately strengthened employee engagement
and subsequent organizational performance. His story shows how an
individual with a higher purpose can connect his leadership vision to
the needs of a group (not the beggars themselves, but others in lower
socioeconomic brackets than his) and the needs of a growing business.
It shows how a leadership commitment to helping the less fortunate was
blended into an innovative hiring and employee development initiative.
Or consider Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank. In
1974, Yunus was an economics professor in Bangladesh; at the time,
Bangladesh was experiencing yet another famine. The problem was so
large that he questioned whether he could help in any meaningful way.
One day Yunus visited a village near the university at which he was
teaching to learn more about what he could do to help the villagers cope
with hunger. He discovered that the forty-two women in the village
wanted a total of twenty-seven dollars to start small businesses so that
they could take care of their families in a more sustainable way. After
extensive efforts to persuade banks to loan the women money, Yunus
took twenty-seven dollars out of his own wallet and funded the women
to establish microenterprises. This small investment had astounding and
unexpected ripple effects. Indeed, it was the impetus for what eventually
led to global microfinance movement.
As of this writing, Grameen Bank had made over $10 billion in
loans to over 7 million borrowers, almost all women. The loan recovery
rate is over 98 percent, which is better than institutions that lend to
higher-income clients. With twenty-four hundred branches, Grameen
Bank provides services in many tens of thousands of villages. All of
this was started by an economics professor who felt helpless in fighting
hunger and poverty and so simply loaned twenty-seven dollars from
Your Leadership Vision 53
his own pocket. This work has had such a powerful impact that Yunus
and Grameen Bank were awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. The
global innovation of microfinance that Yunus and a few dozen poor
women in a single village set in motion provides a powerful example
of how a compelling, personally derived leadership vision can achieve
monumental change that drives business outcomes and improves the
daily lives of customers.
DISCOVERING OR CLARIFYING YOUR
LEADERSHIP VISION
Almost daily, we interact with leaders who struggle to find and articulate
a meaningful vision for their work as leaders. Tackling this issue head-on
is not easy. It requires deeply exploring what motivates you to get up in
the morning and drives your attention and energy throughout the day.
As we said earlier, a leadership vision is an expression of what you
want to create, do, or accomplish as a leader. To serve as a useful guide,
your vision should do three things:
1. It should incorporate your dreams and passions—the things that
motivate and excite you about leading.
2. It should be authentic and anchored in who you are as a person. It
must reflect your values about leadership.
3. It should continue to evolve. A leadership vision is not static, like a
photograph. Rather, it is like daily frames in a slow-motion film. It
reflects where you are in your own evolution and where you think
you are heading in your own life journey.
Not many leaders spend time thinking about their leadership vision.
One told us (typically), ''I think mainly in terms of management. I was
thinking more in terms of job and job description than I was in terms
of leadership and what I had to do.'' However, one technical manager
we met at a chemical company had given it quite a bit of thought:
''Leadership is all about being able to formulate a vision, deciding that
you want to go somewhere, that there is value in getting there, and
54 Discovering the Leader in You
then being able to describe that vision, to sell that vision. The word lead
comes in when you bring people along with you to attain it.''
Having a leadership vision is not just for those at the top. Sure,
it is often easier to pursue your own leadership vision and what you
want to accomplish as a leader when you are at the helm, but a clear
leadership vision can still empower a middle manager or frontline
supervisor. Perhaps your leadership vision is to help fix what is broken,
saving money and time. If so, it will matter in many contexts: mending
the broken spirits of people who were led by an ineffective leader,
rejuvenating an old product line in decline, or restoring a brand that
was damaged by recall, for example.
STRATEGIES FOR DISCOVERING
A LEADERSHIP VISION
Developing your own leadership vision is difficult; simply adopting
someone else's vision won't work. Clarifying your vision is an ongoing
journey involving a process of exploring likely places for elements you
can combine to form a conscious, meaningful, and integrated picture.
You discover your vision by honestly looking at yourself and your role
as a leader in an organization or community.
The rest of this chapter suggests strategies to help you discover
or clarify your leadership vision and make it more visible to yourself
and others. Whether you have never thought of having a leadership
vision and are starting from scratch, or you have one but it needs more
definition, depth, or expansion, the following strategies will take you
through various reflective processes to assist you in your work. If you
gravitate to some of the strategies more than others and don't feel a
need for all of them, simply use the ones that help you the most in
clarifying your leadership vision. Here they are, in short:
• Tell your own story.
• Reflect on your daydreams.
Your Leadership Vision 55
• Look for trends and patterns.
• Incorporate lessons from role models.
• Assess your perspectives on power and conflict.
• Make use of your creative involvement.
• Follow your intuition.
• Look beyond yourself.
Tell Your Own Story
There's a book in you: the one you're writing about your own life.
Narrative is innate to human growth, and personal vision often springs
from myth or one's imagination. The same can happen for a leadership
vision. When people discover, create, invent, build businesses, raise
families, compose symphonies, or fly to the moon, they do it to fulfill a
story that they've been telling themselves and others. Think about your
own story and how it is part of your leadership journey:
If we wish to know about a man we ask, ''What is his story—his
real, inmost story?'' For each of us is a biography, ... a singular
narrative which is constructed continually, unconsciously, by,
through, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our
thoughts, our notions. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so
different from each other; historically, as narratives, we are each
of us unique [Sacks, 1970, pp. 110–111].
The richer and more compelling you can make the story of yourself
as a leader, the stronger your leadership vision will be. People tell and
retell their stories until they get them right. Your own story is connected
to those you inherited from others. This story from one of the leaders
we know gives a sense of that continuity:
I had an older brother that I really looked up to, nine years
older than me. I was in about fourth grade when he got killed in
Vietnam. At that time, my mother told me that I had to be the
head of the household. I think that had a profound effect on me.
That was a catalyst. I went from being a child to being responsible
from that day forward.
56 Discovering the Leader in You
I've been in leadership types of positions ever since I was in
high school. In high school, it started out with sports. Then I got
real serious about politics in high school, and I got involved in
some political groups in the sixties. [Now] I'm involved in a number of different nonprofit organizations ... and I have leadership
roles in every one of them.
Some stories take generations to tell and to complete. Others are
picked up as inspirational waypoints, and the people they're associated
with are regarded as pioneers. Some people relish the idea of rewriting
their stories over and over again. But even if you don't, we're sure
that you've revised and improvised your story over the years, and we
are also sure that the basic theme of your story shows continuity over
time. Within that push and pull of change and continuity, your vision
of yourself as a leader emerges. Take a moment to think about your
story and its recurring themes, especially as they relate to your roles as
a leader. Think about your life as a series of headlines in a newspaper:
• What events have inspired your passion?
• What stories would you tell about making a difference as a leader?
• What stories would your colleagues tell about you as a leader?
• What actions have reflected your values or have made an enduring
impression on you?
• What would you want a journalist to write about your vision as a
leader?
Reflect on Your Daydreams
Everybody daydreams—sometimes in quiet moments, sometimes as
we're drifting off to sleep, and sometimes when we're engaged in
physical activity like walking or running. Although most leaders will
rarely admit it publicly, we're sure that many occasionally daydream in
a boring meeting.
Daydreams can be important sources of insight, a window into
something deeper than they seem, connecting present realities to some
desired future state. Indeed, they may even reflect your aspirations as a
Your Leadership Vision 57
person and a leader and sketch a bridge to their fulfillment. As Henry
David Thoreau noted, ''If one advances confidently in the direction of
his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he
will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.'' We suggest the
content of your daydreams can help you articulate a leadership vision.
When you catch yourself daydreaming, make a few notes, and reflect
on how they would connect to your vision for leadership. Do you see any
obvious connections? Can you make some not-so-obvious connections
between your leadership vision and the daydream's seemingly random
thoughts? A daydream may reveal an image of yourself as a leader—the
kind of successes you're having, how you see yourself as a winner or
hero, the kinds of situations you're in, things that bother or worry you,
and what you do to contribute to the success of a team. Daydreams
can inform how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by
others—what you might call self-image. By noticing when and where you
perceive a positive self-image, you can get a glimpse of the vision you
are trying to project or a picture of where you're trying to go in your
life as a leader.
As you reflect on your daydreams as a mirror into your leadership
vision, it is important to connect them to actions. As Harry Potter author
J. K. Rowling says, ''It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to
live'' (1998, p. 214). With perceptive humor, Mitch Hedberg (2003)
says, ''I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where
they're going and hook up with them later.'' His comment harkens back
to our discussion in Chapter One about drifting into leadership versus
making a conscious, active choice to pursue it.
Thomas Jefferson imagined a set of principles about how free people
should live in relationship to their government, and then he enacted
those principles in a lifetime of founding, expanding, and leading
a vast country; creating a university; and contributing mightily to
the philosophy that undergirds the United States to this day. When
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, ''I have a dream,'' to a crowd in front
of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, his words and deeds helped crystallize
a nonviolent civil rights movement. Christopher Reeve (1999), the
58 Discovering the Leader in You
actor-turned-advocate for biomedical research and spinal injury patients
said, ''So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem
improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become
inevitable'' (p. 300).
Dreams of smaller scope can be equally inspiring, and they don't
have to be entirely original. King borrowed from Gandhi, and Jefferson
borrowed from the philosophers of the European Enlightenment. As
the song in the Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow (Harburg and Saidy,
1947) put it, people will ''follow the fellow who follows the dream.''
Take a moment now to jot down what you've been daydreaming
about lately, and remind yourself for the next few days to remember
what you were daydreaming about and how that might help you
develop a leadership vision:
• Are there common themes in your daydreams that reflect on your
vision or aspirations as a leader?
• As you think about your past successes and failures as a leader, are
there connections you can make between these past experiences
and your current daydreams?
• If you could write your own daydream of yourself exhibiting
exceptional leadership skills, how would it go?
• If your leadership scenario indicates you feel stuck, bored, pressured,
or similarly unhappy, what solutions are you pondering in your
daydreams?
• If money were no object, where would you work? What cause or
passion would you pursue?
Look for Trends and Patterns
Another way to bring your leadership vision to light is to look for
patterns in events you have experienced, behaviors you have engaged
in, attitudes that you hold. We're not suggesting that you synthesize a
complex map—only to look for repeating or similar themes when you
play back part of the tape of your life experiences. Patterns are not
always neatly labeled, and they may be more obvious to people around
Your Leadership Vision 59
you than they are to you. So feel free to seek the guidance of family
members or close friends and colleagues as you document key life trends
and patterns.
Start by noticing broad patterns. In the past, what things have you
repeatedly paid attention to, gravitated toward, or chosen to do in your
work and personal life? For example, one leader we know had chosen as
a teenager to attend an all-girls' high school and found there that girls
naturally stepped into leadership roles when they were not competing
against boys. This experience was the start of her interest in women
and leadership, and her later choices throughout her life reinforced
the early pattern. Look at your experiences and the passions that hold
you, the books you choose to read, the television shows you watch,
the quotes or stories that resonate with you. As you think about these
early experiences and choices, do you see any connections to your
leadership work?
Next, note the important events that you have experienced during
the past year or two—especially key projects, activities, and relationships
at work. What trends and patterns might you notice in how you spend
your time, and what kinds of work attract you?
After you've reviewed some of the broader themes in your experiences, you can more closely examine your behaviors and the roles you
play in groups. There are two kinds of lessons for you to gather at this
stage. One has to do with how eagerly you engage directly in leadership
roles and what kinds of leadership roles you embrace; the other has
to do with where you typically try to lead the groups you are in, from
whatever roles you play.
Consider the following questions:
• When did you have success, and when did you have setbacks? What
were some contributing factors?
• When were you happiest?
• Which situations did you find easy or hard to deal with?
• What kinds of projects or teams are you asked to join?
• Which of those really interested you? Which do you avoid?
60 Discovering the Leader in You
• A number of factors could be making certain activities successful,
enjoyable, easy, and attractive for you. What's the underlying theme
in these situations?
• What do they have in common that produces the positive
experience?
Incorporate Lessons from Role Models
When we ask people about their role models, we're also asking them
about their own aspirations. A person who names Bernie Madoff as
a role model has a very different vision from one who names Nelson
Mandela. Role models can be real or fictional, famous or private, public
figures or personal acquaintances. The important feature of a role
model is that you have thought about that person's image and found
something attractive in it. That's the element you want to examine for
clues to your leadership vision.
This isn't about picking a hero. Ask yourself a series of questions
about why such a person interests you so much:
• Do you name Bill Gates because he is bright, because he is among
the richest persons in the world, or because of his vast philanthropic
activities?
• Do you admire Nelson Mandela because he overcame adversity,
because he became a national savior, or because of the way he
performed in office?
• Is Muhammad Yunus your role model because he won the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2006 for developing the microfinance model or
because he commands the attention of world leaders?
• Is one of the reasons you admire your Aunt Charlene that she
travels all over the world and doesn't ask anyone's permission to do
anything?
One executive told us what he learned from one role-model boss in
his career, the chief financial officer at Esquire magazine:
He would never let anybody go unless he was satisfied that he had
done everything that he could to make that person work out in
Your Leadership Vision 61
the position. He was essentially telling me that I needed to take
as much responsibility as the other person and do everything that
I could to make a situation work. That's a large, transcending
statement. People look for the easy way out, but there has to be a
lot of personal ownership in leadership.
Make a short list of the role models you've followed in life. For each
of them, ask yourself the following questions:
• Why is this person a role model for you?
• How are this person's admirable characteristics similar to and
dissimilar from yours?
• In what ways did this person exhibit leadership?
• What is this person's leadership vision? How was it communicated
and put into practice? What made it compelling to others?
Assess Your Perspectives on Power and Conflict
Leadership entails using power on occasion. In fact, leadership is
about the power to make things happen. Because power has many
negative connotations, people often talk about it as influence, impact,
or effectiveness. But power itself is neutral. It is the outcomes of using
one's power, and whether those outcomes are perceived as good or
bad, that determine how effectively power has been used. As Abraham
Lincoln noted, ''Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to
test a man's character, give him power.''
How do you feel about having and using power? Where is power in
your leadership vision? What part does it play? How does your power
affect your ability to relate to other people?
With power comes conflict—no question about that. Like power,
conflict is an inevitable part of life as a leader. Across many studies
conducted at CCL on the topic of executive derailment, the ability to
handle conflict effectively is a key factor that differentiates leaders who
don't derail from those who do.
Conflict is inevitable when two people in positions of power or of
leadership don't agree. If you embrace conflict as a common element
62 Discovering the Leader in You
of work life, it can be highly informative and a stimulus for bringing
transparency to core issues such as vision and values. Conflict can draw
out what you and others hold valuable and are willing to advocate for,
defend, and protect. If you understand the effect that values have on how
people respond to different situations, then you can better understand
the root causes of a conflict. And in understanding root causes, you will
also gain insight into the way values affect your vision for leadership.
For some people, leveraging power and managing conflict in pursuit
of a leadership vision can be an anxious endeavor. Some never planned
to take power, so when conflict arises, as it will in any opportunity to
lead, they fall back on old scripts about the importance of modesty,
fairness, and not stepping on toes in pursuit of control and influence.
This sort of interference isn't easy to sort out, but it's worth your time to
try if you find yourself uneasy with power and conflict. If you can view
your interactions with others as an opportunity to share and leverage
power for a higher purpose, your effectiveness as a leader and the
effectiveness of your group are likely to increase.
You might encounter power and conflict in a variety of situations.
For example, have you ever been in a situation in which you thought,
''Enough is enough!'' and insisted on breaking with the status quo?
Have you ever lost a leadership position because you believed that the
direction that was being taken was wrong? Have you found yourself in
a prolonged debate about the merits of a decision or strategy? Have
you told someone in a senior position that doing it your way wasn't just
better but a lot better, or maybe even the only way to succeed? Consider
these questions on power and conflict:
• How does power fit into your conceptions of yourself and your
vision for leadership? What do you like and dislike about power?
• How have you used power effectively and ineffectively?
• When you admire others' use of power, what do you admire about
them, and what does that convey to you about their leadership
vision?
• What does misuse of power look like?
Your Leadership Vision 63
• How do you feel and act when you don't have power?
• What ideas or goals have you fought for in recent years?
• What have you gone to the mat about? What does that say about
your values and your vision for leadership?
• How well do you handle conflict?
• In various conflicts you have with others, is there a theme or pattern
in the content of the disagreement?
• Do you tend to get in conflict with a particular group of people?
• How does conflict affect your vision about how you want to lead?
Make Note of Your Creative Involvement
Where you expend your creative energies tells you a lot about your
passions and interests and can inform your leadership vision. With
respect to the relationship between creativity and vision, creativity is
like a fingerprint. It can be what makes your vision for leadership
unique. Part of discovering your leadership vision is noticing how you
use your creative capabilities. Perhaps you love coming up with new
product ideas or improving existing systems. Perhaps you love the power
of the written word, and you spend extra hours writing. Perhaps you
love helping people solve problems and can easily spend hours listening
and thinking about their problems rather than attending to your own.
A leader's creativity can show up in connecting existing ideas that
others have not previously connected. It can show up in metaphors
and analogies that reinterpret old problems or in some entirely new
approach. No matter what form it takes, being creative doesn't happen
by chance or without expenditure of desire and effort. People who are
perceived as creative will tell you that it takes preparation and hard work
and can be pursued in deliberate ways. Central to it are a heightened
form of focus and energy and a deep involvement with whatever you're
doing.
If you have an area in your life that you consider creative (maybe you
play a musical instrument, paint, write, engage in outdoor adventures,
or play sports), explore what that activity says about your vision for
leadership. You may find that your creative outlets tell you quite a
64 Discovering the Leader in You
bit about your passion, desires, and energy regarding leadership. Ask
yourself the following questions:
• When do you feel most creative as a leader, and when do you feel
most at ease or in the groove?
• When are you so absorbed you lose track of time? Does this ever
happen when you are leading? Whether it happens or not, what
does that convey to you about your vision for leadership?
• When is leadership creative? When it's not, why is that?
• Does your organization encourage your creativity? If not, is this
why you feel a sense of drift?
• How do you as a leader encourage the expression of creativity
among others, and what might you be doing that thwarts it?
• How do you use your creativity outside your job or leadership role?
If there is a gap between your creative level at work and your
creative level outside work, what do you attribute that to?
Follow Your Intuition
While we believe that developing a leadership vision requires deliberate
thought and collection and analysis of data, we also believe that
intuition is a source of insight into developing a vision for leadership.
Why? Because leaders often lack the data they would like to have to
make a decision or articulate a vision. In such moments, tapping into
your intuition can help you move from analysis to action. Intuition
requires:
• Bringing both creative and analytical approaches to an issue
• Looking at the horizon, not just what is in front of you
• Seeing patterns that can inform your assumptions about how issues
will play out in the future
• Drawing on your own and others' experiences to inform future
decisions
Some of us rely a good deal on intuition and use it to help make
decisions. Both intuition and vision are based on parts of ourselves
Your Leadership Vision 65
with which we're not fully aware. Both provide insights into what makes
sense or what feels right. If there are areas in which you have found your
intuition to be particularly valuable, those areas are likely to show up in
your vision. Some people trust their intuition when selecting employees.
Others trust it about which products will sell or how fast to expand a
business. For others, intuition is the primary driver for their vision of
leadership.
Consider the following questions about how intuition might influence your leadership vision:
• What does your intuition tell you about your vision for leadership?
• How does your vision for leadership resonate with other people?
• Do you value and trust your intuition? Why is that?
• What has happened when you have acted on your intuition in your
roles as a leader?
• In what situations has your intuition seemed most reliable? When
has it been off-base? Can you discern what factors differentiate
between being on target or off target with your leadership intuition?
Look Beyond Yourself
Finally, we strongly suggest you talk to others as you develop your vision
for leadership. We believe that leadership is as much about collective
activity as it is about an individual leader, and thus your own leadership
vision is also connected, implicitly or explicitly, to the vision that others
hold. As such, it's important that you be open to and seek input from
other people. Our colleagues at CCL, Bill Drath and Chuck Palus,
frame it this way.
Our constructs of leadership, it seems, have been built up around
... the powerful individual taking charge. This aspect of leadership is like the whitecaps on the sea—prominent and captivating,
flashing in the sun. But to think about the sea solely in terms of
the tops of waves is to miss the far vaster and more profound phenomenon out of which such waves arise—it is to focus attention
on the tops and miss the sea beneath. And so leadership may be
66 Discovering the Leader in You
much more than the dramatic whitecaps of the individual leader,
and may be more productively understood as the deep blue water
we all swim in when we work together [1994, p. 25].
As you think about your vision for leadership, consider the extent
to which your vision aligns with and is influenced by the people with
whom you work and serve and those you admire. Also consider the
following questions:
• What inspires you about visions that others have about leadership?
• How can you build on and expand the vision held by others and
make it your own?
• What is it that they want to accomplish, or what problem do they
want to solve?
• Where does your vision for leadership fall short of the potential of
the groups and teams with which you work?
In addition to looking for connections between your vision for
leadership and the vision of members of collectives in which you
participate, think about how and where you choose to concentrate your
efforts in working with other people. Where and what you choose to
focus on (or not) indicates something central to your priorities and to
your leadership vision.
WHAT A CLEAR LEADERSHIP VISION
WILL DO
At the start of this chapter, we defined vision for leadership as an
ideal picture of what you might do as a leader. Therefore, as you
develop a clearer vision of leadership, you'll clarify your direction as
a leader—where you want to go, why, and what you'll do when you
get there. You will make better decisions about the paths and options
presented to you. You will know when you can and cannot compromise.
You will better understand your passions and priorities. You will be
Your Leadership Vision 67
better able to move toward roles that will allow you to express what you
have to offer as a leader. You will know what you'd like to test or learn
from future leadership opportunities. You will also find that clear vision
lends a confident, steady sense of identity amid chaos.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, novelist Milan Kundera (1984)
suggests that for everyone, there is an ''Es muss sein!'' (''It must be!''), that
is, an overriding necessity that governs a person's life. This necessity
will drive you toward a pattern in your ideas, needs, and passions. This
necessity will also inform the way that leadership plays a role in your
life. Through this process, you will gain insight into why some people
find their way to leadership roles and others do not, by either choice or
happenstance.
For some people, a desire for leadership forms part of a broader
vision they have for themselves as humans. It's important to distinguish
your desire for leadership from desire for simply power and influence.
In Good to Great, Jim Collins (2001) writes about ''level 5 leaders''—those
who concomitantly hold as values a burning desire to succeed and a
measure of humility (that is, they can attribute success to the contributions of others). In our work with many leaders from different sectors
of society, almost without exception, the most effective leaders have
combined a compelling vision with a burning desire to lead and a desire
to assume responsibility for a higher purpose.
CONCLUSION
By now you clearly recognize the importance of a leadership vision to
guide you through your choices and decisions as a leader. Reflect on
the following final questions to see where you are in developing and
articulating a clear leadership vision:
• What are you trying to accomplish through your leadership?
• What would others say about the guiding force for your leadership?
• If you were to outline the elements of your leadership vision, what
would be included?
68 Discovering the Leader in You
• Are the elements of your vision compatible or contradictory?
• How does your vision for leadership contribute to the success of
other people, your team, or your organization?
• How does your leadership vision connect to your overall personal
vision?
• What obstacles impede your enacting your vision for leadership?
New events, ideas, and ways of thinking will cause your vision to
shift over time. At times of important transition in your life, you may
wish to revisit the sources of your vision of leadership.
In Chapter Four, we move to motivations and values for
leading—the third component of the Discovering Leadership
Framework. If you still don't have a clear leadership vision, a look at
your motivations and values will certainly help. Examining them will
also give you more insight into why you feel adriftI
n Chapter Two we discussed some of the organizational factors
influencing leadership, as well as common perspectives and views
of it. Whether those views come from your surrounding culture, your
organization, or some other source, they can affect the way you see
yourself as a leader and your expectations of what leaders do. In this
chapter, we examine vision, a key part of discovering the leader in
you. Indeed, if you cannot articulate a clear and compelling vision for
leadership, your risk of drift is higher, and you may be less able to escape
it. Think about it: How can you effectively chart a course out of drift if
you don't have a clear view (that is, a vision) of where you want to go?
A leadership vision is foundational to your views of leadership and
your long-term success as a leader. Your vision for leadership goes
beyond simple expectations and perspectives about the role of a leader.
It captures and describes the desired future that you see for yourself
and your team, organization, or community. A vision for leadership is
different from an organizational mission (which spells out the reason for
an entity to exist) and from organizational goals (which articulate specific
outcomes). Your leadership vision is an expression of what you want to
create, do, or accomplish when you are in a leader role. It describes
your philosophy about leadership and your purpose in choosing to be a
leader, and it serves as an important guidepost for the core behaviors
you enact as a leader.
49
50 Discovering the Leader in You
CONSCIOUS PERSONAL AND
LEADERSHIP VISIONS
A leadership vision is not the same as your personal vision. Rather, it
is a component of your personal vision; it can help you accomplish the
larger vision for your life, which also encompasses other life roles, family
desires, where you want to retire, and so on.
Similarly, a leadership vision isn't a specific organizational vision
or the future state desired by leaders of a particular organization. Your
leadership vision is that which you personally want to accomplish with
your leadership. For example, if, like Michael J. Fox, finding a cure
for Parkinson's disease were your leadership vision, then you could
find many ways to demonstrate your leadership, such as starting a
foundation to raise money to support research, going to medical school
to learn more about the disease and then treating it, or publishing a
newsletter to raise public awareness about the disease.
Conveying a compelling leadership vision is foundational to being
an effective leader. CCL research with senior leaders reveals that
leaders who are able to articulate a clear and compelling vision for their
organization are rated by bosses and peers as more effective leaders.
As a child, you may have ''known'' that you would someday become
an astronaut, a professional athlete, a teacher, or a doctor. As you grew
and advanced through school, you might have expressed what you
''knew'' about yourself by seeking out other young people who shared
your interests. Later you began to see yourself in adult roles, such as a
family and community member and as a contributor to the organization
where you work. Through these stages, you may have woven a vision
for leadership into your life. You might not have spelled out that vision
in a personal creed or blogged to the world, but it was there.
We've found that leaders at all levels often have at least a rudimentary vision of leadership under the surface. True, some haven't been
particularly thoughtful about their lives or reflected on their experiences
to imagine what's to come. As a reader of this book, you're unlikely to
be one of them. But your leadership vision may still lie below the level of
Your Leadership Vision 51
awareness, and thus it's not available to regularly draw on in your role
as a leader. Unarticulated, it leaves too much to chance and leaves you
vulnerable to drift, it leaves you less than fully engaged, and it leaves
you passive and opportunistic in your work.
Without question, who you are as a person and what you want
to accomplish in your life (your legacy) influences your vision for
leadership. It is this conscious connection between your personal vision
and the leadership vision that creates congruency of direction. Consider
how one senior executive with whom we worked thought about his
legacy (including what he did as a leader) in strongly personal terms:
Dear—
CCL confirmed to you that you're a leader—embrace that and have fun
with it. Don't be so hard on yourself—got it. When you're eulogized, people
will remember you as a good man who left a legacy of a happy marriage, kids
who grew to be productive adults, and a leader who inspired others and was
fun to be around. Lastly, you'll be remembered for the people you helped pull
up. Life is like a baseball game, and you were lucky enough to have been born
on 2nd base. Look around for people having trouble getting into the stadium
and give them a hand. Now call your parents.
Think about how having a similarly vivid picture of your legacy
might influence your vision for leadership. What do you want your
legacy to be? How is your leadership a part of this legacy?
Personal vision and leadership vision can intersect powerfully. Colleagues at CCL brought back this story from a recent trip to India
where they had visited with leaders of Pantaloons, one of India's fastgrowing retail companies. At the time, Pantaloons was keenly focused
on developing the skills of its leaders and frontline workers. Most of
them earn low salaries and come from the lowest socioeconomic strata
of Indian society. A member of the Pantaloons training arm had begun
a leader development program based on a personal insight he gained
from the streets of Mumbai as he watched beggars work the traffic
intersections. Sympathetically, he noticed that some beggars were more
52 Discovering the Leader in You
effective in obtaining charity than others. ''What is the difference?'' he
wondered. Careful observation suggested that the more effective beggars displayed a greater sense of self-confidence and self-worth. If he was
right, these personal characteristics, which could be nurtured, taught,
and developed, could be applied to those who worked at Pantaloons.
From that insight, he implemented a visionary, innovative developmental program that ultimately strengthened employee engagement
and subsequent organizational performance. His story shows how an
individual with a higher purpose can connect his leadership vision to
the needs of a group (not the beggars themselves, but others in lower
socioeconomic brackets than his) and the needs of a growing business.
It shows how a leadership commitment to helping the less fortunate was
blended into an innovative hiring and employee development initiative.
Or consider Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank. In
1974, Yunus was an economics professor in Bangladesh; at the time,
Bangladesh was experiencing yet another famine. The problem was so
large that he questioned whether he could help in any meaningful way.
One day Yunus visited a village near the university at which he was
teaching to learn more about what he could do to help the villagers cope
with hunger. He discovered that the forty-two women in the village
wanted a total of twenty-seven dollars to start small businesses so that
they could take care of their families in a more sustainable way. After
extensive efforts to persuade banks to loan the women money, Yunus
took twenty-seven dollars out of his own wallet and funded the women
to establish microenterprises. This small investment had astounding and
unexpected ripple effects. Indeed, it was the impetus for what eventually
led to global microfinance movement.
As of this writing, Grameen Bank had made over $10 billion in
loans to over 7 million borrowers, almost all women. The loan recovery
rate is over 98 percent, which is better than institutions that lend to
higher-income clients. With twenty-four hundred branches, Grameen
Bank provides services in many tens of thousands of villages. All of
this was started by an economics professor who felt helpless in fighting
hunger and poverty and so simply loaned twenty-seven dollars from
Your Leadership Vision 53
his own pocket. This work has had such a powerful impact that Yunus
and Grameen Bank were awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. The
global innovation of microfinance that Yunus and a few dozen poor
women in a single village set in motion provides a powerful example
of how a compelling, personally derived leadership vision can achieve
monumental change that drives business outcomes and improves the
daily lives of customers.
DISCOVERING OR CLARIFYING YOUR
LEADERSHIP VISION
Almost daily, we interact with leaders who struggle to find and articulate
a meaningful vision for their work as leaders. Tackling this issue head-on
is not easy. It requires deeply exploring what motivates you to get up in
the morning and drives your attention and energy throughout the day.
As we said earlier, a leadership vision is an expression of what you
want to create, do, or accomplish as a leader. To serve as a useful guide,
your vision should do three things:
1. It should incorporate your dreams and passions—the things that
motivate and excite you about leading.
2. It should be authentic and anchored in who you are as a person. It
must reflect your values about leadership.
3. It should continue to evolve. A leadership vision is not static, like a
photograph. Rather, it is like daily frames in a slow-motion film. It
reflects where you are in your own evolution and where you think
you are heading in your own life journey.
Not many leaders spend time thinking about their leadership vision.
One told us (typically), ''I think mainly in terms of management. I was
thinking more in terms of job and job description than I was in terms
of leadership and what I had to do.'' However, one technical manager
we met at a chemical company had given it quite a bit of thought:
''Leadership is all about being able to formulate a vision, deciding that
you want to go somewhere, that there is value in getting there, and
54 Discovering the Leader in You
then being able to describe that vision, to sell that vision. The word lead
comes in when you bring people along with you to attain it.''
Having a leadership vision is not just for those at the top. Sure,
it is often easier to pursue your own leadership vision and what you
want to accomplish as a leader when you are at the helm, but a clear
leadership vision can still empower a middle manager or frontline
supervisor. Perhaps your leadership vision is to help fix what is broken,
saving money and time. If so, it will matter in many contexts: mending
the broken spirits of people who were led by an ineffective leader,
rejuvenating an old product line in decline, or restoring a brand that
was damaged by recall, for example.
STRATEGIES FOR DISCOVERING
A LEADERSHIP VISION
Developing your own leadership vision is difficult; simply adopting
someone else's vision won't work. Clarifying your vision is an ongoing
journey involving a process of exploring likely places for elements you
can combine to form a conscious, meaningful, and integrated picture.
You discover your vision by honestly looking at yourself and your role
as a leader in an organization or community.
The rest of this chapter suggests strategies to help you discover
or clarify your leadership vision and make it more visible to yourself
and others. Whether you have never thought of having a leadership
vision and are starting from scratch, or you have one but it needs more
definition, depth, or expansion, the following strategies will take you
through various reflective processes to assist you in your work. If you
gravitate to some of the strategies more than others and don't feel a
need for all of them, simply use the ones that help you the most in
clarifying your leadership vision. Here they are, in short:
• Tell your own story.
• Reflect on your daydreams.
Your Leadership Vision 55
• Look for trends and patterns.
• Incorporate lessons from role models.
• Assess your perspectives on power and conflict.
• Make use of your creative involvement.
• Follow your intuition.
• Look beyond yourself.
Tell Your Own Story
There's a book in you: the one you're writing about your own life.
Narrative is innate to human growth, and personal vision often springs
from myth or one's imagination. The same can happen for a leadership
vision. When people discover, create, invent, build businesses, raise
families, compose symphonies, or fly to the moon, they do it to fulfill a
story that they've been telling themselves and others. Think about your
own story and how it is part of your leadership journey:
If we wish to know about a man we ask, ''What is his story—his
real, inmost story?'' For each of us is a biography, ... a singular
narrative which is constructed continually, unconsciously, by,
through, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our
thoughts, our notions. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so
different from each other; historically, as narratives, we are each
of us unique [Sacks, 1970, pp. 110–111].
The richer and more compelling you can make the story of yourself
as a leader, the stronger your leadership vision will be. People tell and
retell their stories until they get them right. Your own story is connected
to those you inherited from others. This story from one of the leaders
we know gives a sense of that continuity:
I had an older brother that I really looked up to, nine years
older than me. I was in about fourth grade when he got killed in
Vietnam. At that time, my mother told me that I had to be the
head of the household. I think that had a profound effect on me.
That was a catalyst. I went from being a child to being responsible
from that day forward.
56 Discovering the Leader in You
I've been in leadership types of positions ever since I was in
high school. In high school, it started out with sports. Then I got
real serious about politics in high school, and I got involved in
some political groups in the sixties. [Now] I'm involved in a number of different nonprofit organizations ... and I have leadership
roles in every one of them.
Some stories take generations to tell and to complete. Others are
picked up as inspirational waypoints, and the people they're associated
with are regarded as pioneers. Some people relish the idea of rewriting
their stories over and over again. But even if you don't, we're sure
that you've revised and improvised your story over the years, and we
are also sure that the basic theme of your story shows continuity over
time. Within that push and pull of change and continuity, your vision
of yourself as a leader emerges. Take a moment to think about your
story and its recurring themes, especially as they relate to your roles as
a leader. Think about your life as a series of headlines in a newspaper:
• What events have inspired your passion?
• What stories would you tell about making a difference as a leader?
• What stories would your colleagues tell about you as a leader?
• What actions have reflected your values or have made an enduring
impression on you?
• What would you want a journalist to write about your vision as a
leader?
Reflect on Your Daydreams
Everybody daydreams—sometimes in quiet moments, sometimes as
we're drifting off to sleep, and sometimes when we're engaged in
physical activity like walking or running. Although most leaders will
rarely admit it publicly, we're sure that many occasionally daydream in
a boring meeting.
Daydreams can be important sources of insight, a window into
something deeper than they seem, connecting present realities to some
desired future state. Indeed, they may even reflect your aspirations as a
Your Leadership Vision 57
person and a leader and sketch a bridge to their fulfillment. As Henry
David Thoreau noted, ''If one advances confidently in the direction of
his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he
will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.'' We suggest the
content of your daydreams can help you articulate a leadership vision.
When you catch yourself daydreaming, make a few notes, and reflect
on how they would connect to your vision for leadership. Do you see any
obvious connections? Can you make some not-so-obvious connections
between your leadership vision and the daydream's seemingly random
thoughts? A daydream may reveal an image of yourself as a leader—the
kind of successes you're having, how you see yourself as a winner or
hero, the kinds of situations you're in, things that bother or worry you,
and what you do to contribute to the success of a team. Daydreams
can inform how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by
others—what you might call self-image. By noticing when and where you
perceive a positive self-image, you can get a glimpse of the vision you
are trying to project or a picture of where you're trying to go in your
life as a leader.
As you reflect on your daydreams as a mirror into your leadership
vision, it is important to connect them to actions. As Harry Potter author
J. K. Rowling says, ''It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to
live'' (1998, p. 214). With perceptive humor, Mitch Hedberg (2003)
says, ''I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where
they're going and hook up with them later.'' His comment harkens back
to our discussion in Chapter One about drifting into leadership versus
making a conscious, active choice to pursue it.
Thomas Jefferson imagined a set of principles about how free people
should live in relationship to their government, and then he enacted
those principles in a lifetime of founding, expanding, and leading
a vast country; creating a university; and contributing mightily to
the philosophy that undergirds the United States to this day. When
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, ''I have a dream,'' to a crowd in front
of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, his words and deeds helped crystallize
a nonviolent civil rights movement. Christopher Reeve (1999), the
58 Discovering the Leader in You
actor-turned-advocate for biomedical research and spinal injury patients
said, ''So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem
improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become
inevitable'' (p. 300).
Dreams of smaller scope can be equally inspiring, and they don't
have to be entirely original. King borrowed from Gandhi, and Jefferson
borrowed from the philosophers of the European Enlightenment. As
the song in the Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow (Harburg and Saidy,
1947) put it, people will ''follow the fellow who follows the dream.''
Take a moment now to jot down what you've been daydreaming
about lately, and remind yourself for the next few days to remember
what you were daydreaming about and how that might help you
develop a leadership vision:
• Are there common themes in your daydreams that reflect on your
vision or aspirations as a leader?
• As you think about your past successes and failures as a leader, are
there connections you can make between these past experiences
and your current daydreams?
• If you could write your own daydream of yourself exhibiting
exceptional leadership skills, how would it go?
• If your leadership scenario indicates you feel stuck, bored, pressured,
or similarly unhappy, what solutions are you pondering in your
daydreams?
• If money were no object, where would you work? What cause or
passion would you pursue?
Look for Trends and Patterns
Another way to bring your leadership vision to light is to look for
patterns in events you have experienced, behaviors you have engaged
in, attitudes that you hold. We're not suggesting that you synthesize a
complex map—only to look for repeating or similar themes when you
play back part of the tape of your life experiences. Patterns are not
always neatly labeled, and they may be more obvious to people around
Your Leadership Vision 59
you than they are to you. So feel free to seek the guidance of family
members or close friends and colleagues as you document key life trends
and patterns.
Start by noticing broad patterns. In the past, what things have you
repeatedly paid attention to, gravitated toward, or chosen to do in your
work and personal life? For example, one leader we know had chosen as
a teenager to attend an all-girls' high school and found there that girls
naturally stepped into leadership roles when they were not competing
against boys. This experience was the start of her interest in women
and leadership, and her later choices throughout her life reinforced
the early pattern. Look at your experiences and the passions that hold
you, the books you choose to read, the television shows you watch,
the quotes or stories that resonate with you. As you think about these
early experiences and choices, do you see any connections to your
leadership work?
Next, note the important events that you have experienced during
the past year or two—especially key projects, activities, and relationships
at work. What trends and patterns might you notice in how you spend
your time, and what kinds of work attract you?
After you've reviewed some of the broader themes in your experiences, you can more closely examine your behaviors and the roles you
play in groups. There are two kinds of lessons for you to gather at this
stage. One has to do with how eagerly you engage directly in leadership
roles and what kinds of leadership roles you embrace; the other has
to do with where you typically try to lead the groups you are in, from
whatever roles you play.
Consider the following questions:
• When did you have success, and when did you have setbacks? What
were some contributing factors?
• When were you happiest?
• Which situations did you find easy or hard to deal with?
• What kinds of projects or teams are you asked to join?
• Which of those really interested you? Which do you avoid?
60 Discovering the Leader in You
• A number of factors could be making certain activities successful,
enjoyable, easy, and attractive for you. What's the underlying theme
in these situations?
• What do they have in common that produces the positive
experience?
Incorporate Lessons from Role Models
When we ask people about their role models, we're also asking them
about their own aspirations. A person who names Bernie Madoff as
a role model has a very different vision from one who names Nelson
Mandela. Role models can be real or fictional, famous or private, public
figures or personal acquaintances. The important feature of a role
model is that you have thought about that person's image and found
something attractive in it. That's the element you want to examine for
clues to your leadership vision.
This isn't about picking a hero. Ask yourself a series of questions
about why such a person interests you so much:
• Do you name Bill Gates because he is bright, because he is among
the richest persons in the world, or because of his vast philanthropic
activities?
• Do you admire Nelson Mandela because he overcame adversity,
because he became a national savior, or because of the way he
performed in office?
• Is Muhammad Yunus your role model because he won the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2006 for developing the microfinance model or
because he commands the attention of world leaders?
• Is one of the reasons you admire your Aunt Charlene that she
travels all over the world and doesn't ask anyone's permission to do
anything?
One executive told us what he learned from one role-model boss in
his career, the chief financial officer at Esquire magazine:
He would never let anybody go unless he was satisfied that he had
done everything that he could to make that person work out in
Your Leadership Vision 61
the position. He was essentially telling me that I needed to take
as much responsibility as the other person and do everything that
I could to make a situation work. That's a large, transcending
statement. People look for the easy way out, but there has to be a
lot of personal ownership in leadership.
Make a short list of the role models you've followed in life. For each
of them, ask yourself the following questions:
• Why is this person a role model for you?
• How are this person's admirable characteristics similar to and
dissimilar from yours?
• In what ways did this person exhibit leadership?
• What is this person's leadership vision? How was it communicated
and put into practice? What made it compelling to others?
Assess Your Perspectives on Power and Conflict
Leadership entails using power on occasion. In fact, leadership is
about the power to make things happen. Because power has many
negative connotations, people often talk about it as influence, impact,
or effectiveness. But power itself is neutral. It is the outcomes of using
one's power, and whether those outcomes are perceived as good or
bad, that determine how effectively power has been used. As Abraham
Lincoln noted, ''Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to
test a man's character, give him power.''
How do you feel about having and using power? Where is power in
your leadership vision? What part does it play? How does your power
affect your ability to relate to other people?
With power comes conflict—no question about that. Like power,
conflict is an inevitable part of life as a leader. Across many studies
conducted at CCL on the topic of executive derailment, the ability to
handle conflict effectively is a key factor that differentiates leaders who
don't derail from those who do.
Conflict is inevitable when two people in positions of power or of
leadership don't agree. If you embrace conflict as a common element
62 Discovering the Leader in You
of work life, it can be highly informative and a stimulus for bringing
transparency to core issues such as vision and values. Conflict can draw
out what you and others hold valuable and are willing to advocate for,
defend, and protect. If you understand the effect that values have on how
people respond to different situations, then you can better understand
the root causes of a conflict. And in understanding root causes, you will
also gain insight into the way values affect your vision for leadership.
For some people, leveraging power and managing conflict in pursuit
of a leadership vision can be an anxious endeavor. Some never planned
to take power, so when conflict arises, as it will in any opportunity to
lead, they fall back on old scripts about the importance of modesty,
fairness, and not stepping on toes in pursuit of control and influence.
This sort of interference isn't easy to sort out, but it's worth your time to
try if you find yourself uneasy with power and conflict. If you can view
your interactions with others as an opportunity to share and leverage
power for a higher purpose, your effectiveness as a leader and the
effectiveness of your group are likely to increase.
You might encounter power and conflict in a variety of situations.
For example, have you ever been in a situation in which you thought,
''Enough is enough!'' and insisted on breaking with the status quo?
Have you ever lost a leadership position because you believed that the
direction that was being taken was wrong? Have you found yourself in
a prolonged debate about the merits of a decision or strategy? Have
you told someone in a senior position that doing it your way wasn't just
better but a lot better, or maybe even the only way to succeed? Consider
these questions on power and conflict:
• How does power fit into your conceptions of yourself and your
vision for leadership? What do you like and dislike about power?
• How have you used power effectively and ineffectively?
• When you admire others' use of power, what do you admire about
them, and what does that convey to you about their leadership
vision?
• What does misuse of power look like?
Your Leadership Vision 63
• How do you feel and act when you don't have power?
• What ideas or goals have you fought for in recent years?
• What have you gone to the mat about? What does that say about
your values and your vision for leadership?
• How well do you handle conflict?
• In various conflicts you have with others, is there a theme or pattern
in the content of the disagreement?
• Do you tend to get in conflict with a particular group of people?
• How does conflict affect your vision about how you want to lead?
Make Note of Your Creative Involvement
Where you expend your creative energies tells you a lot about your
passions and interests and can inform your leadership vision. With
respect to the relationship between creativity and vision, creativity is
like a fingerprint. It can be what makes your vision for leadership
unique. Part of discovering your leadership vision is noticing how you
use your creative capabilities. Perhaps you love coming up with new
product ideas or improving existing systems. Perhaps you love the power
of the written word, and you spend extra hours writing. Perhaps you
love helping people solve problems and can easily spend hours listening
and thinking about their problems rather than attending to your own.
A leader's creativity can show up in connecting existing ideas that
others have not previously connected. It can show up in metaphors
and analogies that reinterpret old problems or in some entirely new
approach. No matter what form it takes, being creative doesn't happen
by chance or without expenditure of desire and effort. People who are
perceived as creative will tell you that it takes preparation and hard work
and can be pursued in deliberate ways. Central to it are a heightened
form of focus and energy and a deep involvement with whatever you're
doing.
If you have an area in your life that you consider creative (maybe you
play a musical instrument, paint, write, engage in outdoor adventures,
or play sports), explore what that activity says about your vision for
leadership. You may find that your creative outlets tell you quite a
64 Discovering the Leader in You
bit about your passion, desires, and energy regarding leadership. Ask
yourself the following questions:
• When do you feel most creative as a leader, and when do you feel
most at ease or in the groove?
• When are you so absorbed you lose track of time? Does this ever
happen when you are leading? Whether it happens or not, what
does that convey to you about your vision for leadership?
• When is leadership creative? When it's not, why is that?
• Does your organization encourage your creativity? If not, is this
why you feel a sense of drift?
• How do you as a leader encourage the expression of creativity
among others, and what might you be doing that thwarts it?
• How do you use your creativity outside your job or leadership role?
If there is a gap between your creative level at work and your
creative level outside work, what do you attribute that to?
Follow Your Intuition
While we believe that developing a leadership vision requires deliberate
thought and collection and analysis of data, we also believe that
intuition is a source of insight into developing a vision for leadership.
Why? Because leaders often lack the data they would like to have to
make a decision or articulate a vision. In such moments, tapping into
your intuition can help you move from analysis to action. Intuition
requires:
• Bringing both creative and analytical approaches to an issue
• Looking at the horizon, not just what is in front of you
• Seeing patterns that can inform your assumptions about how issues
will play out in the future
• Drawing on your own and others' experiences to inform future
decisions
Some of us rely a good deal on intuition and use it to help make
decisions. Both intuition and vision are based on parts of ourselves
Your Leadership Vision 65
with which we're not fully aware. Both provide insights into what makes
sense or what feels right. If there are areas in which you have found your
intuition to be particularly valuable, those areas are likely to show up in
your vision. Some people trust their intuition when selecting employees.
Others trust it about which products will sell or how fast to expand a
business. For others, intuition is the primary driver for their vision of
leadership.
Consider the following questions about how intuition might influence your leadership vision:
• What does your intuition tell you about your vision for leadership?
• How does your vision for leadership resonate with other people?
• Do you value and trust your intuition? Why is that?
• What has happened when you have acted on your intuition in your
roles as a leader?
• In what situations has your intuition seemed most reliable? When
has it been off-base? Can you discern what factors differentiate
between being on target or off target with your leadership intuition?
Look Beyond Yourself
Finally, we strongly suggest you talk to others as you develop your vision
for leadership. We believe that leadership is as much about collective
activity as it is about an individual leader, and thus your own leadership
vision is also connected, implicitly or explicitly, to the vision that others
hold. As such, it's important that you be open to and seek input from
other people. Our colleagues at CCL, Bill Drath and Chuck Palus,
frame it this way.
Our constructs of leadership, it seems, have been built up around
... the powerful individual taking charge. This aspect of leadership is like the whitecaps on the sea—prominent and captivating,
flashing in the sun. But to think about the sea solely in terms of
the tops of waves is to miss the far vaster and more profound phenomenon out of which such waves arise—it is to focus attention
on the tops and miss the sea beneath. And so leadership may be
66 Discovering the Leader in You
much more than the dramatic whitecaps of the individual leader,
and may be more productively understood as the deep blue water
we all swim in when we work together [1994, p. 25].
As you think about your vision for leadership, consider the extent
to which your vision aligns with and is influenced by the people with
whom you work and serve and those you admire. Also consider the
following questions:
• What inspires you about visions that others have about leadership?
• How can you build on and expand the vision held by others and
make it your own?
• What is it that they want to accomplish, or what problem do they
want to solve?
• Where does your vision for leadership fall short of the potential of
the groups and teams with which you work?
In addition to looking for connections between your vision for
leadership and the vision of members of collectives in which you
participate, think about how and where you choose to concentrate your
efforts in working with other people. Where and what you choose to
focus on (or not) indicates something central to your priorities and to
your leadership vision.
WHAT A CLEAR LEADERSHIP VISION
WILL DO
At the start of this chapter, we defined vision for leadership as an
ideal picture of what you might do as a leader. Therefore, as you
develop a clearer vision of leadership, you'll clarify your direction as
a leader—where you want to go, why, and what you'll do when you
get there. You will make better decisions about the paths and options
presented to you. You will know when you can and cannot compromise.
You will better understand your passions and priorities. You will be
Your Leadership Vision 67
better able to move toward roles that will allow you to express what you
have to offer as a leader. You will know what you'd like to test or learn
from future leadership opportunities. You will also find that clear vision
lends a confident, steady sense of identity amid chaos.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, novelist Milan Kundera (1984)
suggests that for everyone, there is an ''Es muss sein!'' (''It must be!''), that
is, an overriding necessity that governs a person's life. This necessity
will drive you toward a pattern in your ideas, needs, and passions. This
necessity will also inform the way that leadership plays a role in your
life. Through this process, you will gain insight into why some people
find their way to leadership roles and others do not, by either choice or
happenstance.
For some people, a desire for leadership forms part of a broader
vision they have for themselves as humans. It's important to distinguish
your desire for leadership from desire for simply power and influence.
In Good to Great, Jim Collins (2001) writes about ''level 5 leaders''—those
who concomitantly hold as values a burning desire to succeed and a
measure of humility (that is, they can attribute success to the contributions of others). In our work with many leaders from different sectors
of society, almost without exception, the most effective leaders have
combined a compelling vision with a burning desire to lead and a desire
to assume responsibility for a higher purpose.
CONCLUSION
By now you clearly recognize the importance of a leadership vision to
guide you through your choices and decisions as a leader. Reflect on
the following final questions to see where you are in developing and
articulating a clear leadership vision:
• What are you trying to accomplish through your leadership?
• What would others say about the guiding force for your leadership?
• If you were to outline the elements of your leadership vision, what
would be included?
68 Discovering the Leader in You
• Are the elements of your vision compatible or contradictory?
• How does your vision for leadership contribute to the success of
other people, your team, or your organization?
• How does your leadership vision connect to your overall personal
vision?
• What obstacles impede your enacting your vision for leadership?
New events, ideas, and ways of thinking will cause your vision to
shift over time. At times of important transition in your life, you may
wish to revisit the sources of your vision of leadership.
In Chapter Four, we move to motivations and values for
leading—the third component of the Discovering Leadership
Framework. If you still don't have a clear leadership vision, a look at
your motivations and values will certainly help. Examining them will
also give you more insight into why you feel adrift