Leading Ways: Developing and Using Vision

For a while now I have used a basic leadership formula that my friend and colleague George Sweazey and I develop more than two decades ago. The formula is Leadership occurs when you mix Vision with Task and the right amount of Relationship, or L=V*T*R; all necessary and none sufficient.

Vision is what we typically think of that is distinctively leader-like; a relationship is always about two-thirds of the relevant action and task is what we default to when the vision is murky or the relationships have begun to replicate open warfare or we need the organizational therapy of just doing something.

Lately, most of the leadership work I’ve been doing has been focused on a relationship or task concerns and I realize I’ve gotten a bit away from vision work. So, this month’s missive is a review of some practical points about the vision for leaders, how to develop it and how to use it.

What is it?

There are many ways to define the vision, but basically it is a coherent direction for an organization, unit, project, team and even an individual. Humans like to understand things and we have evolved a strong taste for order and predictability, this comes from our skill at pattern recognition. Vision helps us value what lies ahead because we can see it in our minds. And when needed, it can also help us detach from the current pattern and take up the new innovative one.

Vision does three types of work for the leader. First, it defines. Vision helps us understand what we do. How what we have done is changing or must change as the world around us shifts. It clarifies and holds up our values, oftentimes needing to show how the values take on new looks as times change. Vision also defines the strategies that will take us in the direction we need to go.

This definitional work is essential to the next function: alignment. For most of us we are aligning the work of a particular unit, department, clinic, or function to the overall organization.  A vision also aligns the future work of the organization to be consistent with that vision. It becomes a reference point informing future actions of individuals and, perhaps more importantly, making the collective action of teams and workgroups easier and more effective, because a common direction, purpose and motivation have been established. It is also a signaling mechanism to external stakeholders about direction, strategies and values. It lets them know if they should cast their lot with us.

Vision must also motivate and inspire action. Several elements need to be combined to move the projected image into action. Future goals should be practical and imaginable; not distant and farfetched. John Kennedy’s classic vision of sending someone to the moon and bringing them home was an outlandish projection, but it was done in a way that made it seem possible that it might be successfully engineered. To be inspiring the vision must also connect to the underlying culture and values of those that must be moved to action. To get most individuals engaged with the work of a team or organization it is essential for them to know how they add value to the work that is being done and that they understand and believe in the ultimate value of the work.

Visions are usually about change. Humans change because of fear or lust. Good visions combine these two with the right balance for your particular challenge.

There are five elements that go into having a vision.

Mission – The mission is the leader’s understanding of the purpose of the organization. Often found in a mission statement, it is actually much more fluid than many people would like to think, and it can take several forms. There is of course the generic conventional mission.  A pharmaceutical firm might exist to make a return on investment for its shareholders. A state agency might exist to serve the health care needs of the citizens of the state. A more telling response to mission is the one that has been lived by a particular organization to meet that conventional mission. In our examples, the traditional mission for a particular pharma firm might be to bring “innovations to drug discovery through the latest developments in biological research” and a state agency might “provide comprehensive health care through a network of trusted provider partners.” The third dimension of this work might be called the aspirational mission, a bit more on this later as we see how mission evolves and inform vision.

Environmental awareness – An essential part of a leader’s vision is her ability to understand what is happening around the organization: environmental awareness. Different from the more immediate and tactical situational awareness, perspective into longer-term and more global developments shape environmental awareness. Too much focus on the here and now creates organizational myopia and the leader will miss opportunities and threats that are coming their way. Too broad or far-reaching and the leader’s pronouncements become more hallucinogenic than helpful, because few, if any, will be able to see themselves or the organization in the cloud cuckoo land that seems like pure fantasy. So, balance is key to good environmental awareness and this comes from seeing the issues, but also understanding how they will be understood by the incumbents in the organization.

Some leaders do this dimension of visioning easily, they are naturally curious about the world and how it is changing. Their challenge will be how to interpret these opportunities or threats so that they get traction and how to translate them into actionable plans. They need not do this themselves, but they will need to empower others and, at times, cease and desist with the big new ideas and blinding insights and let things get done. The leadership obverse to this is the individual who is great at the actionable plan, lives in the immediate world, but may not be blessed with constant epiphanies. They will need to use their leadership position and role to convene others in settings where these insights can be gleaned. They do not need to have the vision themselves, but they do need to recognize its essential value and ensure that it is given time and resources to be present.

Vision reconsidered – I will grant that it is odd that one part of this vision definition in five parts is called “vision reconsidered” but let me explain. Each of these elements is one dimension of what it takes for a leader to be thought of as successfully visionary. Vision reconsidered is the same thing that I referred to earlier as the aspirational vision. These are the steps to developing this.  First, ask the question: what have our mission and values been conventionally and traditionally? Second question is, how is the world around us changing, what is most important among these changes and how will they impact what we do and how we do it? Final question: given one and two, how should our mission and direction change, anchoring enough in the past for continuity, but tacking into the challenges of the future in a way to still be valuable.

The consultant’s story of how the railroads missed the automotive and aeronautical revolutions because they were still set on a mission as a railroad company is a way to see the value of the aspirational vision. Or, more contemporaneously, how Microsoft got too wedded to being a software company, Walmart too taken with being a big-box retailer and Apple too concerned with the tool in your hand and not the array of life-changing services that are accessed. All of this disintermediation from cars to the cloud was out there for all to see, but leadership of the established institution missed them because they were in their “mission” bubble.

Strategy – It is one thing to get the vision correct and another to be the leader that can also set and sequence the strategies to turn the organization to meet the new opportunity. Without strategies to move forward the vision will be seen as a failure.

There are many ways to develop and share strategies. There can be content-oriented such as program change, finance, human resources or technology. It often makes sense to divide strategies into short and long-term. And while it is important that strategic directions be formalized so that they can be full understood and accountabilities assigned, it is essential that they be recognized as evolving. General Eisenhower once observed that the “plan is nothing, planning is everything.”

Working with Bobbi Kimball during the nursing shortage in the late nineties, we develop a four-part division and sequence for strategies that I still like. In any situation there are short-term strategies that meet immediate threats, offer quick turn arounds to engage the organization. They may not have staying power, but they are essential. A lot of organizations never make it out of this limited horizon or as we called them “scramble” strategies. In the nursing shortage these strategies would have been things like giving students larger stipends and tuition waivers to attend school or quickly moving LVNs to RNs. No dramatic change in the structure, just a quick fix, but if leadership can hold these to under 60 percent of the overall strategic effort, then they have been heroic.

Next along the curve in terms of time and effort are the strategies to “improve.” Some dimension of the organization isn’t working, but still is essential, it takes time to enhance the way it is working, but the pay-off is likely to be longer-term and more impactful as well. For the nursing shortage this might have involved examining the teaching-learning process to make sure that students had the best chance for a successful completion of the program.

Beyond improvement is “reinvention.” This involves some fundamental reorganization or reconsideration of the standard process. For the nursing shortage of that era, the creation of re-entry masters programs for those with non-nursing baccalaureate degrees is a prime example. If both improve and reinvent can hit 30 percent combined with your strategic effort, then you get advanced leadership standing.

But that leaves 10 percent. This final category we called “start-over” and in the nursing shortage it would focus on ways that nursing care and service might be performed by patients or families, ways other hospital services might be substituted for traditional nursing care and ways to use technology to extend the work of other health professionals to provide nursing care. This is a long-term strategic investment but should never be more than the 10 percent of the overall effort.

I think that as a part of vision the best strategic plans are a mix of the emergent and intentional, are nimble, adaptive and opportunistic, have clear goals and expected impact on the organization and are continuously assessed, reshaped and redeployed as needed.

OPS – You don’t usually see a sub-heading for operations in a discussion of vision, but I think it is important for leaders to understand the role that a visibly and meaningfully integrated operations plan supporting the strategies, that support the vision can mean to the overall organization.

I sometimes refer to this as the “vision or strategy cascade.” Someone new to the organization, a potential new partner or an old hand in the organization should be able to hear the messaging from the mission and vision, point to relevant changes in the environment, recognize the deliberate and emerging strategies and assess the operational plans that are being pursued and what is left on the shelf and see a coherent whole that cascades from one level to another. This type of organization coherence is powerful because it makes the vision real at all levels and it informs the actions of everyone throughout the enterprise.

Having “vision” is not one thing, but a mixed bag of knowledge, insight, perspectives, and actions.