Speed of Vision
August 26th, 2005What’s more important to your organization”s success – micromanaging the issue of the moment or strategic planning for the future? What’s the speed of vision for your leadership?
Executive leadership has had to speed up and become more responsive to daily demands. The down side of this is that many have become so focused on real-time speed that they have lost the art of long-term planning. Vision statements that don’t last out the year don”t instill confidence or motivate workforce engagement and productivity.
While short-term project goals are certainly important, leadership must re-develop the capacity to move into the future with informed long-range planning. A grasp of the immediate, no matter how important, is only one part of leadership strategy. Immediate or short-term strategic focus that becomes habitual and exclusive will almost inevitably result in poor decisions. Time will not have not been made to gather relevant information, analyze it, and make decisions for long-term goals.
Move forward bit by bit, rather than in sweeping, sometimes meaningless, changes. Form a long-range planning team of talented visionary leaders from different departments. A collaboration between colleagues will be easier to hammer out (and then to communicate and implement) than a “new plan” that hardly gets going before a new one is proposed.
Waste less. Move forward with clarity, and at a speed that is a little more deliberate and careful than real-time.
An organization can make short-term profits and still lose it all because no-one remembered to step back and look at the big picture. If you want the whole organization to move forward and to thrive, it simply isn’t enough for a few top leaders to be able to bail out with golden parachutes when the short-term gains runs out their course.
- Opinion by Dr. Heidi
