Your Vision in 7 Quotes

Dear Managers and Leaders!

We already discussed a few times the importance for a team leader to have a clear vision and to share that vision with his entire team. Today, I want to share a few quotes about vision with you. Some of these quotes are taken from the book "The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork" written by John C. Maxwell.

I hope these quotes will inspire you to define a clear and articulated vision, to broadcast it around you, and to live it fully.

"To have a vision gives motivation and assurance to team members."

- John Maxwell

"Every soldier must know, before he goes into battle, how the little battle he is to fight fits into the larger picture, and how the success of his fighting will influence the battle as a whole."

- Bernard Montgomery

"Leaders do not need to be visionaries themselves. The vision can come from anyone."

- Ezra Earl Jones

"I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

- Henry David Thoreau

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

- Michelangelo

"The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs."

- Vance Havner

"You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures."

- Charles C. Noble

I hope you enjoyed reading these quotes and found some wisdom in them.

I also want to invite you to a free webinar I'll give on 09/09/09 from 7pm until 9pm EDT. This is part of a larger event hosted by the Leaders Cafe Foundation for the World Day of Interconnectedness. I will present two different topics:

• 3 Complementary Models of a Team
• Symptoms Leaders Cannot Overlook

But the event is a 21-hour leadership presentation marathon If you want to join me or learn more about the other sessions, send me an email at remi@innovachron.com and I'll send you all the details.

Remi Cote

Finding Your Purpose

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I’m back from vacation today. It was good to be out for more than a week, but I’m now really happy to be back to the grind! I’m rested and full of ideas and energy for the year to come! It is great to be with you again!

I think the way you feel when coming back from vacation tells a lot about how you feel about your job. This year feels so great in comparison to the past couple of years. Back then, coming back from vacation was less than exciting for me! All the energy gained back during vacation was gone the minute I entered the office. All the positive thoughts and good intentions I had about work while on vacation suddenly vanished when faced with the barrage of emails and the meetings I faced the first morning. I think this attitude clearly shows the number one problem I had back then: lack of purpose.

When working is “just a job”, when you do not feel energized to go to work in the morning, you should question your purpose. Do you know WHY you do all that work? Are you able to link your actions to some higher level mission or intention? What are you trying to achieve? If you cannot answer these simple (actually tough) questions, you will likely not be really motivated by your work. If, on top of that, you work really hard and are under a lot of stress, then you will face burn out soon.

As a leader, I think it is your own responsibility to find your purpose and then communicate it to your followers. Without purpose, you will not be able to create a vision for yourself and for your group. Without that clear vision, it will be very difficult to motivate yourself and your followers, and drive you all in a good direction. It is essential to have a strong purpose and clear vision to be able to prioritize your tasks and be able to say no in a positive way. Your purpose should always drive your actions. Without purpose, people will drive your agenda and you will lose ownership of your life.

So, how do you find your own purpose? I am reading a book called “In Extremis Leadership” written by T.A. Kolditz and I find one of his ideas really interesting. He says that to find purpose in what you do, think about how your business impacts people’s lives, how you change the life of others by your actions, by the work you do. So, when asking yourself why you are doing the job you do, look for answers in the way your job or you impact the lives of others. You will likely find a powerful purpose and regain motivation. This purpose is what will fuel your energy and secure your focus in tough times.

What about you dear leader, do you feel energized when coming into work in the morning? Do you have a strong sense of purpose for the work you and your team are doing? Do you know how your work impacts other people’s lives? Please share your thoughts with the other readers by adding a comment below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (5)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my five previous posts, I first listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and then analyzed the first four symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting", "Team members are not coming up with new ideas" and ""Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries", and "Team is operating from fear". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the fift symptom: No one seems to know what is urgent, crucial, or at which point we are right now.

As you lead your team, you really want to have all your team members on the same page. You want them to build the same ship, to march to the same drum beat; you want them all to be aligned with your vision. This is what you want. However, reality can be quite different from what you want! Leadership deals with human beings and human beings are diverse, understand different things even when listening to the same source, have their own agenda, and sometimes forget. To succeed in having everyone on your team focused on the same end goal requires your constant effort and attention.

That means that you must always be aware of where your people are really going, not where you think they are going. You must also constantly re-enforce communication of your vision, of where you want them to go.

Signals

So, what are the first few signals that should alert you about an alignment problem within your team? I would say the following should compel you to re-state your vision and priorities to your team:

• Bad priority call by one of your team members – If one of your team members makes a priority call that goes against what you would have made yourself, you should be alerted and try to understand why it happened and align the team member right away.

• Lack of focus, or the focus is not important to attain the vision – When you see people on your team going in all sorts of directions that are not important to the achievement of the vision, you should definitely have a talk with them and re-focus their efforts.

• Team’s ideas are going in wrong direction - In team discussions, ideas brought up by your team members are not going in the right direction. You can see that if you followed them, they would not lead the team in the direction set by the vision.

It is probably impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of signals, but you should understand the general pattern and apply it to your particular situation.

Causes

Causes of this lack of alignment in your group can be multiple. Here are a few possibilities to help you sort out what is happening in your team.

• Lack of vision from the leader – if the leader himself does not know where the team is going, then the team will have problems following the leader. As soon as the vision becomes blurry, you will see the team members actually creating their own vision, consciously or not, and follow this vision.

• Lack of communication of the leader’s vision – if the leader has a clear vision of where the team is going but if that vision is not communicated clearly to the team, then it is equivalent to not having a vision at all.

• Team does not share or embrace the leader’s vision – here we are in a situation where the leader has a good vision of where the team is going and he has communicated that vision clearly to the team. Now, if the team does not share that vision, if the team members never bought into the direction where the leader wants them to go, then the leader will always have to fight with the team to make them go where he wants.

• Vision is clear but the plan is ill-defined – everyone agrees here on a clear, well-communicated vision. However, that vision is far and away and the path to get to the vision has not been clearly established. That means that the goal is defined but has never been actualized. People see the goal but no one knows how to get there. In this case, you are not facing misalignment but rather confusion as to how to make the vision real.

• Leader did not set priorities clearly – if the team is not clear as to what the priorities are, or if everything has equal importance, then it is really difficult for the team members to make the right calls by themselves when faced with a difficult situation.

Solutions

As you can see above, your team will lose its sense of direction when a vision for the team is not clearly established and shared by your team. When team members do not know what the collective vision for the team is, they will define their own vision and act upon it. This might not be conscious, but this is what will happen because a certain vision needs to be created before action can take place. You cannot really hammer a nail if the shape of the house to build is not well defined in your mind. The problems come when people building the house together do not have the same vision of the shape of the house. The house will likely never be finished if everyone working on it had a different vision of the completed house.

Leading a team is like building a house. The team needs to share the same vision of their end product or destination otherwise nothing will be achieved despite all the effort put into it. The team needs to share a collective vision. As the leader of the team, you own that collective vision. You are responsible to make sure that the collective vision is created, shared, communicated, and acted upon.

Note that I’m not saying that you need to define that collective vision on your own. Please do not get me wrong here. It is OK, even preferable, for the leader not to create everything himself. Have your team help elaborate the vision! Have your team find solutions to their own problems as a team. This is actually extremely powerful! If you have your team participate in defining the collective vision of your team, you will see that people are suddenly engaged and the vision will be automatically shared by everyone on the team. On top of that, your team’s vision will then be anchored in reality because your team members are on the floor every day. They are connected with reality.

What about you dear leader, does your team have a clear collective vision? Do you have all your team members acting in concert and going in the same direction? Also, if you see other causes, other signals, or other solutions, please share them with this group so that everyone can benefit from your experience!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: InnovaChron offers a series of workshops and programs that help teams work together to create their vision, solve their problems, or improve their performance. To find out more, please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

PPS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Everybody’s Working For The Week-End... - Loverboy

Dear Managers and Leaders!

It is Friday today and it makes me think about work-life balanceJ! You know, the week-end is coming! Do I have to remind you? Of course, weeks are too short. Of course you were supposed to do a lot more than what you actually accomplished this week. Weren’t you supposed to close all your action items this week? Weren’t you supposed to return all your calls, read ALL your emails? I know too well this little voice inside telling you to do more and more, and to work over the week-end. I can hear it say: “At least, over the week-end you don’t get constantly interrupted!”

But isn’t this a bit crazy and dangerous? We all know the importance of resting, no? We all want to spend quality time with our loved ones.  Why are we always pushed to work more and more? I can see a number of reasons that could explain why leaders are often hard workers. 

      (1) Drive

To go through the promotion cycle in large companies or to manage your own company requires a lot of drive. Someone in a leadership position normally wants to succeed and attain always larger goals. S/he will deploy a lot of energy and work very hard to succeed in achieving these large goals.

(2)    Purpose, passion

Good leaders have a deep sense of purpose and will be really passionate about the work they do. They are so motivated to achieve their goals that they can forget that there are other things around them in the world! This is extreme, but I have seen that!

(3)    Crave for recognition

Some people simply work hard because they want the recognition that comes from success. This crave for recognition is the only thing that drives them. They are ready to do whatever it takes to get that small bit of recognition that a successful project can provide them.

I’m sure we can extend the list even further and I hope you will post comments if you have other ideas on this topic! But the fact is that there are always great reasons to work harder and harder.

The funny thing is that people really seem to be lacking non-working time! When I look at the Internet these days, I see so many people selling packages to make millions on the Internet while sitting on a beach or traveling the world! If so many marketers are selling that dream of constant party, then it must be that A LOT of people are actually dreaming about it (and buying their silly packages)!

So why aren’t we living our dreams? Especially as leaders, we should be able to create a vision of where we want to go and achieve it, no! Isn’t that what leadership is all about? So, let’s all picture our lives with less hard work and more smart work. Let’s take a great, work-free week-end to create and experience that vision! 

Have a GREAT week-end!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

Leadership: The Need to Succeed!

"It is no use saying, 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary." (Winston Churchill)

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I like this saying of Winston Churchill so much! I see two important elements in it. First, how should one react in front of a failure situation? Should someone ask for forgiveness by trying to prove that s/he is doing his/her best? Does that make it a lesser failure? Maybe it makes you feel better to think that you did your best, but it remains failure anyways. As a leader, I think it is better to recognize that things are not going in the right direction and then correct the path.

What I discovered in my few years as a manager and project manager is that it is OK to go through tough times during a project. No one expects that your project will go entirely smoothly, that there will be no hick-ups, no painful moments, or no issues encountered. People will not measure your success by how much or how little pain was felt during a project. You should not use that measure either! People will measure success by looking at the results, your results in what is necessary!

And this brings me to the second point Winston Churchill brings in the quote above. “You have to succeed in what is necessary”. In fact, defining what is necessary is exactly what is so tough! Finding the quintessential elements of an enterprise is not easy. This is why we see so many projects wandering from left to right with a real lack of focus. Focus is really important for success, and it needs to be applied on the right things!

As leaders, we must absolutely have a clear vision of what is essential in the projects or enterprises we are leading. This actually defines success for the enterprise. It is a very powerful leadership practice to define the minimal success criteria at the start of a project. It will then guide the entire project in the right direction and ensure effort and resources are spent at the right place.

And please communicate the minimal success criteria to your team at the beginning of the project. Make it visible! Create a banner with the essential points written on it and post it in a central place in the office. Add it to your email signature!

Make it clear to your team that failure is not an option for the essential elements of a project and that you will always be there to help if a problem occurs in those areas. It will greatly improve commitment of the team and increase focus where it counts.

And what about you? Are you defining a project’s success criteria at the beginning of every project you lead? Do you have stories of un-focused projects that you would like to share? How do you feel about success and failure as a leader?

Until next time,
Remi

Brainstorming State Forever...NOT

The situation I’m in at the moment is quite incredible. As you know, I’m starting a business at the moment. Most of my time is spent developing my coaching product for managers and leaders. This is great, but boy is it hard to keep the focus! I’m overwhelmed by ideas:

“Oh, yes, I could do this. But look, there is this other thing that can be done! And oh! I need to do this as well but then this idea is soooo interesting!”

Well, you now see the picture! It is so easy to get excited about lots of things and in the end accomplish nothing! One can generate thousands of great ideas and do nothing about them. What will that person gain in the end? That person will gain nothing, of course.

The fact is that it is OK to be in a brainstorming state for a while, but at some point, you need to get out of that state. If you remain in the brainstorming state forever, then you know you will get a lot of brainstorming data that will sit still, not helping you accomplish your goals. But how do you get out of that state? How do you make sure that your brainstorming ideas turn into a real acomplishment at the end?

There are several ways you can go about getting out of the brainstorming state. But I think it all comes down to the following recipe. First, after all your thinking and mental wandering, you need to re-state your goals and objectives to make sure that you will be going in the right direction. It is possible that your brainstorming allowed you to see your goals more clearly or even change them altogether. So re-state your objectives to create that focus that you need and to add perspective to the set of ideas that you have in front of you.

Second, you need to clean up the vast amount of ideas that you generated while brainstorming. Some of these ideas that you had in the middle of the night either do not make sense anymore (even though you thought they were sparks of supreme intelligence that night J) or are simply not aligned with your goals. You need to toss them away and keep only those ideas that bring you closer to your objectives. And for the good ideas, you will need to put them in order. Maybe some are useful now; maybe some will be useful later. Maybe some ideas are good but need to be refined.

Third, the goal now is to come up with a vision of where you want to go and how you will get there. You have to look at all your good ideas, the ones that you kept, and come up with a mental picture of how they will play together to achieve your goals. This is the crucial step. You are creating the framework for your plan.

Once you have that clear mental picture about where you are going and how you will get there, capture it somewhere. This is your new vision of the future. It defines your focus for the future. You are now out of the brainstorm state if you stick to your plan. Of course, you will likely have to refine your vision, adapt it to the reality of the day, and create a realistic plan to achive your vision. You might even find yourself going back to a brainstorming state for a while as you refine your plan or adapt it. But you should do it in the context of this original vision to make sure that you move forward instead of constantly spinning your wheels standing still.

A good trick to make sure that your plan will stick is to come up with a list of short term goals. This will give you an early sense of accomplishment! But... this is a topic for a later post as this has the potential to become a very long discussion!

So, do you also feel that getting out of the brainstorming state is important? Do you usually find it tough to get out of that state and keep focusing on the task at hand? Do you think that this plan for getting out of the brainstorming state would work? Please let me know what you think!

Shaping The Future!

Dear leaders!

My daughter has been playing the violin for five years now. Every night, I sit down in her room while she practices her scales, studies, and various pieces. Last night, like every night, I was helping her with a concerto she is currently studying. She had problems with giving the right character to the piece. She was playing the notes, but she was not able to go beyond playing the notes. She was really struggling with that!

I then asked her if she had an idea of what the concerto was supposed to look like at the end. I asked if she was able to hear in her head what she had to play. She admitted that she had no clue. This was precisely her problem. She was trying to follow the indications written on the music sheet, but she did not have a clear picture of what the end result should look like. So, instead of struggling with the music, we then started to create that vision of the concerto and made it a fun event!

I think we can look at that event and place it easily in the context of leadership. At the basis of any action, there needs to be a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished. There just cannot be successful action without clear vision of the result. To be called a leader, someone needs to be able to create a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished. If that vision is not present, then there cannot be a concerted effort towards a common goal.

A leader can thus be seen as someone who is shaping the future! Having a clear idea in mind as to what the future should be, he or she can create a sound plan of action to successfully attain this goal. I personally feel that having a clear picture in mind of the future is what distinguishes good leaders from poor leaders. With a clear vision, someone can really move things and people to attain it. “Faith can move mountains” as they say. The vision becomes the power of the leader!

And you, dear leaders, do you have a clear picture in mind of what you are trying to achieve? Please share your thoughts with us by posting comments here!