Stew Friedman writes a great post titled “Define Your Personal Leadership Vision” in which he provides some guidance on how to go about defining your personal leadership vision. He describes a personal leadership vision as…
“… an essential means for focusing attention on what matters most; what you want to accomplish in your life and what kind of leader you wish to be. A useful vision has to be rooted in your past, address the future, and deal with today’s realities. It represents who you are and what you stand for. It inspires you, and the people whose commitment you need, to act to make constructive change towards a future you all want to see.”
The personal leadership vision is comprised of the following four components:
- A compelling story of the future is engaging; it captures the heart, forces you to pay attention. Those who hear it want to be a part of it somehow. And they are moved.
- What does your future look like – what’s the image? If others could travel into the future with you, what would they find? A well-crafted leadership vision is described in concrete terms that are easy to visualize and remember.
- The story of your future should be a stretch, but it must be achievable, too. If it were not achievable, you would have little motivation to even bother trying.
- Finally, future simply means out there – some time from this moment forward, but not so far away that’s it’s out of reach.
A personal leadership vision provides an anchor for uncertain times. Without out a clear leadership vision we are too easily tossed to a fro by every wind change. Finding it difficult to make progress and distracted by unnecessary work.
- Is your personal leadership vision clear?
- What dies the future look like?
- Is it achievable and future-focused?
Technorati Tags: Vision, Leadership, Future, Management, Business, Leader
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Leadership is not always directly related to management, they can coexist in the same person or can be two separated things. Leaders often find themselves in the impossibility of performing managerial tasks as they are repetitive, while managers find difficult to do leadership as they require inspiration, charisma and personal involvement in day to day activities of people. Combining the two requires either a natural talent either an good self discipline as to not let any of the two sides overwhelm the other. Leading people means you should look more into the future, inspire them to live their dreams, managing means to look at the process and improve it, not always relying on people but rather on the organizational setup. Balancing the two mentalities should be the focus of any person trying to lead a team because teams need leaders but also good managers.
An opposable debate around management being the same as change management is the concept of management as being a repeatable process and a measurable one. Management should be governed by a common seed, surrounded by adapted activities to different contexts. The seed should be the same for some time, in order to evaluate the eficacity of the management process. In this point of view, management is a rotating circle while change management is a process of transformation from one state to another which is not always reversible. Management processes should last as long they provide value to the business, while change management should be activated when value is no more provided. Value should not be seeked when changing management and should be regarded as an invested energy to move the system from one state to another. This is equivalent to physics where to move a system from an stable equilibrium to another state of stable equilibrium necessitates kinetic energy. Management is stable equilibrium and change management is the process of transforming between two states of stable equilibrium.