Focus Your Sights: Set the vision, and align every effort beneath it.
[Part #4 of 5 in Essential Pillars of Strong Leadership]
As we move to the fourth pillar of Essential Pillars of Strong Leadership, let’s explore the transformative power of vision. Visionary leadership is about inspiring every member of your team to move in harmony towards a shared horizon.
3 Things to Remember:
- 🔑 Craft a compelling strategic purpose.
- 🔑 Focus on nested goals underneath.
- 🔑 Ruthlessly focus & prioritize.
“Saying that the purpose of a company is to make money is like saying the purpose of being alive is to breathe”. — Jim Barksdale
Setting a clear vision is not just about achieving business objectives; it’s about aligning with a purpose. In your wildest dreams, what would it look like if your organization was as successful as possible? Is this aspirational vision understood and shared? Is there buy-in? If not, everything else is probably at least a little bit out of whack.
A compelling purpose serves as the North Star for an organization. Setting a vision or mission (or both), and of course your values as well as early as possible is crucial to provide clarity, direction, alignment, and motivation to your organization or team.
🎯 The Phenomenal Power of Nested Goals
Nested goals are a powerful way to support achieving these lofty ambitions. Organizations can set long-term aspirations, such as 5 or 3-year goals, and then nest annual goals within them. Within these annual goals, it’s ideal to further break them down by department or organizational focus area. And lastly, for those goals to be divided by quarter or even month or week.
OKRs, which stands for Objectives and Key Results, is a framework popularized by Intel and Google that is exceptional for leveraging this approach.
- “Objective”: memorable, inspirational, qualitative goal.
- “Key Results”: 2–5 specific, measurable metrics to achieve the objective.
After setting higher-level organizational or departmental goals, empower teams to set their own goals within the higher level goals theirs are nested under. This allows leaders to tap into the unique insights and expertise of their teams. This approach fosters deeper autonomy, innovation, and a sense of ownership. Company leaders should ensure that every area is accounted for and there’s overlap in goals where it makes sense.
As a leader, I believe your primary responsibility is to help your team(s) focus by prioritizing and providing context behind your reasoning. In the vast sea of potential goals, projects, and ideas, great leaders are rarely coming up with brand new concepts. Instead, they provide the most support in clarifying and simplifying the goals so the teams can understand and achieve them. Part of this ruthless prioritization involves explicitly stating what is not a focus area, ensuring that teams don’t expend energy on non-essential tasks.
“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act.” — Pablo Picasso
Keep in mind, the higher up in the organization you are, the broader your context probably is. Whenever setting goals, be sure to provide ample context so you improve clarity, alignment, and empowerment. While top-down goals provide direction, bottom-up goals harness the collective intelligence of the organization.
⚠️ Warning: Don’t Stay Focused on the Wrong Goals
It’s always possible that despite your best efforts, you realize a pivot is needed. If a significant change to your goals or roadmap is essential for organizational success, it’s certainly better to pivot than to stay the course on irrelevant objectives or projects. Your goals should fuel your success.
⚠️ Warning: Make Rules for Exceptions
There will always be exceptions to this. For example, bugs, tech debt, and explicit innovation may not be covered by your OKRs. Whenever possible, make the implicit explicit. 20% time or ShipIt are great ways to ensure you’re making time for innovation. Allocating a week per quarter for a Bug Smash and/or 20% of each sprint dedicated to tech debt can provide structure to prioritize and guardrail this work while ensuring it actually gets done and doesn’t feel like a surprise.
🌱 Baby Steps to Implement:
If you’re leading your own small team, you can start by looking to see if your organization already has a mission or vision and the goals already set. Next, try gently implementing these suggestions yourself just within your current team. Consider drafting what you think your team’s goal is if you haven’t been given one. List out 2–5 key, measurable results you could achieve within the quarter or year. Review this with your manager and solicit their feedback and buy-in to focusing your or your team’s work on just those key results. Give it a try and assess its effectiveness!
Are you able to achieve the goals you set? Does this help you push back against distractions and tangents?
If you need some advice, reach out to me to chat. I’d love to help!
Stay tuned for the rest of my Essential Pillars of Strong Leadership series!
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