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All of the talk about “leadership” often ignores the fact that leadership is powerful at any and all levels—and that you do not need to be heading up an organization to be an effective leader. Some of the most effective business people that I know are in roles that are not supervisory. But they can move teams and individuals better than some (most) managers—precisely because they know when it’s appropriate to lead and when it’s appropriate to follow. Many so-called “leaders” have not mastered this! How would you respond?

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”—Anonymous

If you have ever been on a team with more than one self-styled leader, you have seen dysfunction at its finest. In-fighting, lack of agreement, sneakiness, and outright sabotage cause things to crash and burn. But is anyone surprised? If you’re a “leader” on a team, asking how you can lead or follow, you may have already failed. “Lead or follow” makes it sound like the two are mutually exclusive. Not so. The confusion comes because we don’t know what it means to lead.

“Too many cooks spoil the broth.” It happens mainly when everyone is trying to tell everyone else what to do. That isn’t leading; that’s micromanaging, and it’s not part of the leader’s job.

A leader’s job is to ensure the success of the organization—no matter who reports to whom in any given group. At every moment she should be asking, “Is what I’m doing helping the group to succeed?” Sometimes we think we are helping, but we are just raising the group’s blood pressure with our behavior. You might even ask the group, in addition to yourself. If the answer is yes, you are doing the right thing; keep doing it. If the answer is no, stop! Decide you’ll start being part of the solution, and find a way to bring your basic leadership skills to the fore.

Setting the course

Your basic job is setting direction, not giving directions. If it’s your organization you are working with, by all means make sure to assert yourself in determining the highest-level goals of the group. But if you are in a group where it’s not your responsibility to set direction, then don’t. Only do it if the team has no charter and the team has not previously agreed on direction.

The group was presumably assembled for a reason—that’s the charter. Help remind the group why it exists, but don’t go changing its reason. If the basic charter must change, that’s the job of the group’s sponsor. Of course, in the extremely unlikely event you run across the group with no clear charter and no clear owner, consider it an invite for a land grab. Cram your direction down the team’s throat, and enlarge your empire just a bit more.

Ducks in a row

Another aspect of your job is aligning teams. Usually you align your own team, but nothing says you can’t spread the love when working with others. Once the goals are clear, help everyone match their part of the job. Offer your help to the group, but don’t force yourself on them. If you see someone screwing up big time, ask them questions to explore the link between their actions and their goals. Be humble! Ask with genuine curiosity, “Could you help me understand the link between the insanity you’re engaged in and what you believe to be the goal?”

Sometimes you’ll learn the insanity makes sense, and you’re wrong. They’re doing something you never thought of. Other times, you will find you must ask further questions to help them understand where their plans need shoring up. If they remain dead set on the wrong course, it’s your call: Let them learn or make a stink. In my experience, if someone is smart, it’s usually safest to give them the benefit of the doubt. They may surprise you. If you decide to battle, think carefully. Choose battles wisely, as they’re a poor use of time and, often, issues that seem earth-shattering now just aren’t in the long run.

Is this leading or following? You are certainly following the group charter. You are certainly helping group members figure out how to support the group. And as long as you are committed to the success of the group, you are leading. Even if you aren’t the one giving directions.

Support your mates

The other leadership skill you can bring to any group is support. Toss out the image of leader as someone in the 37th floor office, aloof from the teeming masses. When work is getting done, the leader is the least important team member. Your job is to make it easy for everyone else to get their jobs done. If that means taking out the trash and picking up low fat, low carb, organic pizza for the team so they can work straight through, then so be it. And you can really go the extra mile and (don’t faint) support a team even if it isn’t yours! If that’s what is needed to help the business succeed, go for it. It’s a much needed, often hyped, but rarely practiced virtue called teamwork.
Is taking out the trash leading or following? It doesn’t matter. It’s getting the job done.

So you like control. Get over it. When you’re in a team, don’t ask whether or not you’re leading it; ask whether or not you’re contributing to its success. Stop being dazzled by your own brilliance. Spend your time helping people know where they are going, link their actions to the goals, and support them as they get there. You’ll be perceived as a leader, regardless of title. The team will succeed, the business will succeed, and you can say, “I helped.”

“But wait,” you say, “how will I make sure I’m making a difference that matters if I’m just taking out the trash?” That’s the point. Sometimes, taking out the trash is the most powerful way to lead. Remember, two billion years from now, we’ll all be a frozen hunk of ice, so don’t sweat the small stuff, and fighting over leading a team is small stuff.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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Eighteen months after starting this column, business leadership still hasn’t reached perfection. Haven’t they been reading? Why is good leadership still so rare?

Maybe it’s because we use a whacked-out definition of leadership. “Leader” has become code for “rich guy with an impressive title who orders others around.” But leading by giving orders left and right with no accountability doesn’t work. We’re living in a world of low loyalty, high mobility, and extreme uncertainty. “Push” leadership will push people right out the door. We need leaders who inspire others to follow, who engender loyalty. We need leaders who practice “pull” leadership.

Pull leaders don’t give orders; they create social systems that inspire people to join

They do it using principles that many people in official leadership positions wouldn’t follow if their lives depended on it.

Pull leaders take responsibility for the success of their organization and their people

Responsibility isn’t given; it’s taken. The loss of faith in American business starting earlier this decade has been driven by a batch of CEOs who have chosen not to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, even when the responsibility was required by law. Pull leaders take responsibility voluntarily, even when it’s optional. You want to change how your company does business, but you’re too junior to have an effect? So what! A corporate trainer saw students struggle with the company’s product, so he wrote up the shortcomings, proposed solutions, and sent the CEO a weekly dispatch. He took responsibility for leading a product quality effort, despite being a twenty-three-year-old new hire.

Pull leaders believe that success of the organization is their responsibility, no matter what their job titles are. They don’t have to do all the work themselves, but they have to make it possible for everyone else to succeed. They lose sleep worrying if they’ve done enough for their people to be great in their jobs. They hope they’ve provided the right tools and training. They ask constantly how they can create a culture that helps others achieve.

Because organizational success isn’t enough for them, pull leaders also take responsibility for helping their people succeed as individuals. They learn enough to encourage and support each person reach their goals, even goals that aren’t necessarily about work. Think about it for a minute. If you dream of attending a Red Sox game in box seats and your boss arranges it as a holiday present, wouldn’t you be inclined to be more loyal than if your boss gave out the usual all-expenses-paid trip to the annual cow tipping contest?

Pull leaders work to become attractive to others

In taking responsibility, pull leaders realize their greatest tool is themselves. So they work hard at perfecting that tool! You’d think Michelle LaBrosse of Cheetah Learning would be relaxing on a tropical island after building a highly successful multimillion-dollar business in less than five years. Nope. She reads constantly, attends top-level executive education programs, and is constantly asking how she can get better. Her people love her and she has no problem finding employees.

Becoming attractive isn’t just a matter of reading up on business. Pull leaders work on their interpersonal skills. They get their own lives in order, knowing full well that if they aren’t successful in their own lives, they don’t have the emotional well to draw from to be there for their people. Much to my surprise, in one Harvard Business School panel discussion, several highly successful CEOs mentioned that they meditate for fifteen to twenty minutes a day. They also advocated being socially involved and giving back to the community. By working to become better people, they became better leaders as well.

Pull leaders align and inspire with values

Values are the second most powerful force for bringing people together to achieve great things. Pull leaders know their own values, and demonstrate them when they act. And I’m not talking about impressive balcony speeches on “quality” or “competitiveness” or “valuing people.” Politicians give those speeches and aren’t exactly at the top of most people’s most-respected list. What matters to pull leaders are their values in action. They examine their own actions honestly and without judgment, discover what values they embody, and either change their behavior or choose to stand for the values they already embody.

The most powerful values message is sent when the pull leader is clearly taking a risk to stay true to his or her values. An engineer cared enough about quality to stand up in a department meeting and tell the development team that the decision to ship a low-quality product to meet a deadline was a betrayal of their commitment to quality. Risky? Sure. He could have gotten fired. But once word spread, he received great underground support as a steward of closely-held values.

Pull leaders are stewards of their organizations and employees

Stewardship is a key element of pull leaders. A steward is a caretaker of another’s property. A pull leader takes care of their organization and employees, without stepping over the line into behaving like the owner—even if they own 100 percent of the stock. Stewardship recognizes that organizations are created and maintained by everyone who works there. No matter who owns the stock, if everyone quits, there’s nothing left but an empty room.

In stewardship, a pull leader exhibits humility and appreciation for the organization they’ve started. Robert Cavett, founder of the several-thousand-person National Speakers Association, arrived at his annual conference banquet without his ticket. The new NSA member at the door refused him entrance. Rather than make a fuss with a melodramatic “Do you know who I am?” he returned to his room to get his ticket. His graceful handling of the situation turned the door guard into a lifelong devotee when she later found out (much to her horror) that she had turned away the organization’s founder.

Stewards don’t own the organization, nor do they own its results. Part of their humility is giving credit where credit is due: to the people in the organization who made success possible. You won’t find a pull leader trumpeting his own horn, but you will find him highlighting the hard work and dedication of his team.

Giving recognition is just one way pull leaders take care of their people. Did you catch that four-letter word? Yes, care. It’s a concept we don’t hear much about in business. Emotions are considered somehow undiscussable. Get over it, and start caring. Good stewards want people to succeed easily, not struggle. And they demonstrate their care however they can, maybe just with a birthday card or present. Maybe in much bigger ways. The head of a large nonprofit was also on the board of a local hospital. Employees needing medical care found themselves in a private room, receiving the best medical care available, and get well flowers by their bedside. He was a lousy leader in other areas, but people forgave his shortcomings and remained fiercely loyal when he showed he cared.

Pull leaders architect their social and organizational space

Pull leaders don’t just let space and culture happen. They actively shape the environment in which people act. The most obvious shaping is physical. They decide if an office will be all cubicles, all offices, or a mix of both. They choose whether to kept the walls a pleasant beige—a color that offends no one and everyone at the same time—or take a risk with artwork, edgy furniture, and exposed brickwork in a loft. They pay attention to whether the space promotes the kind of interaction people need to be successful. For engineers, it may mean large open areas for collaborative brainstorming. For personal financial planners, it may mean quiet offices where they can meet their clients in private. Internet bubble companies were famous for foosball tables in funky spaces that attracted the best and brightest employees available. The bubble burst, but the principle remains: space matters. It powerfully shapes culture, and pull leaders use it deliberately.

Actually, I’ve lied just a bit: Pull leaders shape the cultural space as well as the physical space. A critical part of culture is how decisions get made. If a pull leader truly believes in people, there’s no better way to show it than to let those people take the lead in shaping the organization. Let them design the environment, set space requirements, and create the work world that will best lead them to success.

This is where we find the fundamental paradox of pull leadership: People most want to follow leaders who don’t order them around, but rather give them the freedom and opportunity to be an active part in shaping their own lives.

Pull leadership isn’t easy

Not many leaders practice pull leadership because, at its heart, it’s about recognizing that the leader isn’t perfect, and that an organization’s power comes from everyone who comprises it. This flies in the face of America’s deepest cultural image: the Wild West pioneer, staking out uncharted territory and holding it single-handedly. But rugged individualism is nothing more than a romantic myth in a world as complex as ours. If you doubt it, try living with a broken water main or no power for a week.

We can still look to the pioneer for inspiration, however. The pioneer’s greatest quality is the courage to face the unknown—and that we still need in great measure. Developing pull leadership skills demands as much courage as that pioneer had, only this time the territory is mental. Develop the courage to admit you don’t have the answers; the courage to admit your success depends more on others than on what you can do yourself; the courage to trust them; the courage to stand for your values even when it means making unpopular decisions; and the courage to rely on attraction rather than giving orders.

None of this is easy. But it’s how the world works today, and the rewards of becoming a leader who can inspire will be well worth the journey.

Acknowledgements: My thinking about “pull leadership” has been shaped in part by the work of Peter Senge’s systems thinking; Peter Block’s Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest; and Jim Collins’s Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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Most people are not in official positions of leadership and yet we wish to do all we can to help the organization succeed. Bringing leadership skills to the table would benefit all. Since we aren’t responsible for setting the “vision” for the company, where do we fit in? Should we just be extensions of the real leader or is vision something beyond our concern? Should we just focus on issues at our level and perhaps one level above? I loved your example of the fellow who found fault with his company’s product and worked to change it, but I think where I’ve worked that kind of behavior would just get you fired. Is there something a bit more tamed down that you could offer?

You caught me. Sure, you can lead from anywhere in an organization; it’s probably the most common way organizations are led. (Sadly, many CEOs aren’t perceived as leaders by their own organizations.) With command-and-control leadership, it’s all about giving orders, so you need the title. But in most companies, you can be a powerful leader anywhere in an organization by adapting the “pull leadership” principles of responsibility, stewardship, and values.

Pull leaders take responsibility for an organization and the people who make it up

The key to leadership at any level is writing a new job description: My job is making the company, and its people, successful.

Taking responsibility for success is first on your agenda. Don’t confuse responsibility with authority! Responsibility is totally different; it’s an attitude. Want proof? Just watch Ken Lay, who had absolute authority at Enron, abused it, and wholly declines to take responsibility. You can do better than that. Mentally, decide to start acting as a leader rather than waiting for permission or direction.

Believe it or not, this can be leadership’s greatest challenge. The CEO of a company where I was President said (yelled, actually) that I was acting too much like a consultant. After two days in denial, I admitted it was true and asked: “What would I do differently if I owned this company?” The answer flashed up in an instant: fire an incompetent staffer and build a “quick and dirty” system to move us forward. The attitude made all the difference.

Acquire the attitude by asking what you’d do if you were in charge. Imagine yourself in the corner office, writing out paychecks and company expenditures from your personal bank account. With an attitude of responsibility, you’ll be asking if you’re getting your money’s worth? Is the company working on the right projects? Is the culture functional? Just taking the attitude of “I can be responsible for the group’s success” will start to pervade your presence.

If you’re going to take responsibility for the organization, you must take responsibility for the people as well. This is super important if you’re leading from below. A CEO can grind people down and no one calls her on it. She can’t be fired. You can. But you won’t, if you’re taking responsibility for the success of the people, as well as the organization. Decide you’ll start looking out for your co-workers, your boss, and yourself.

Pull leaders are stewards for their organizations and people

Here’s where responsibility becomes action. Take care of your organization. Unlike a CEO or President, you can’t set company direction. But you can take the direction top management sets and make it your job to turn that direction into reality.

Start figuring out how your business works. Read business books. Talk to people from other functions in your spare time. Learn what they do and why. You’ll get a sense for how it needs to be nudged going forward. As the low person on the totem pole, start by making suggestions here and there and offering to help. Do a small project on your own time that benefits the company in a visible way. If people know you’re genuinely curious and concerned about helping things get better, they’ll be inclined to work with you. More importantly, they’ll start looking to you as someone who drives success.

Become steward of your group

Every team you’re on is a chance to be a steward. The teams have a charter or a goal they’re supposed to reach. You can’t set the goal, but you can make sure you understand it and then become the “go-to guy” for keeping things moving. If the team stalls, figure out why and offer to help the team leader restart it. Some people just attend to their own work, and they’re viewed (rightly) as good technical contributors who must be managed to be valuable.

Sample Values to Consider When Matching Yourself to Your Organization

A sales team was not making sales. The more time went by, the more sales weren’t happening. One member of the team finally interviewed everyone on the team and realized that half the team was stalled waiting for input from the other half, while the other half was stalled waiting for input from the first half! He got everyone in a room, had them exchange information, and three weeks later, calls were again being made and the pipeline was starting to fill.

If you attend to everyone’s work, and help the entire team be successful, you’re acting as a leader in a tangible way.

Become steward of your co-workers

It’s not enough to care about the group. Your co-workers’ success is important, even if you don’t like them! What are their hot buttons? What are their strengths? When do they best shine in their jobs? Once you know, start watching out for them. Do you hear of a project perfectly suited for a teammate’s career aspirations? Help them apply and become a champion for them. If they’re running into problems, show concern. Share ideas for how they can overcome their obstacles.

Keep people going by helping them make their job part of a larger success. After all, group goals only matter if they further the company’s overall goals. Keep the connection in mind, and help others “get” the connection. Even a janitor enables a company’s success by freeing people to work without the distraction of maintaining their space. There’s pride to be taken; help them take it!

When you help people find their pride and become more successful, they’ll start supporting you in return. Over time, you’ll find more people taking you seriously. You’ll have the support to make audacious suggestions, have people nod in agreement, and get the attention of the people who can make your ideas happen.

Remember that the boss and the boss’s boss are important co-workers! Know their motivations, hot buttons, and goals. Read your company’s annual report. Be able to talk their language. When your ideas start making it higher in the organization, you want them to be hearing their own success in your words. Without this groundwork, you risk triggering territory wars — not a pleasant prospect.

If you keep a strong link to the company’s success and the success of the people involved, you may find yourself with the authority to match your responsibility sooner than you think.

Lead by living the company’s values

You’ll succeed as a leader only if you’re a living example of your values. What causes do you champion? How do you behave with others? What decisions do you make? Now ask yourself what values your answers demonstrate. If those values don’t align with your organization, change yourself, change organizations, or tone down your leadership aspirations. Values, if clear and consistent in behavior, are a powerful glue that holds an organization together.

It may be tricky to identify your organization’s true values. Values are often unstated, and when they are discussed, the “espoused values” may not match how people really behave. The important values in the workplace often cluster around people, product, and organizational health. See the sidebar for sample values to consider when matching yourself to your organization.

Ethical values are the easiest to identify, make the most powerful statement, and carry the greatest risk. At Stanford Graduate School of Business last week, incoming MBAs were discussing their experiences with ethical issues on the job. Two of the group had taken major ethical stands at their companies as junior employees. One had championed workplace safety, while the other had asked her company to forgo investing in an ethically dubious company. Fortunately, both had been successful in their causes.

That isn’t always true. “Whistle-blowers” may get tremendous respect from our private selves, but they’re rarely appreciated by society at large or in the organization whose secrets they reveal. There’s a fine line between championing values by living them and stepping over the line and “betraying” your company. Oddly, people react more intensely to an employee “betraying” their company than a company betraying its employees (or society!). I don’t know when companies became more important to us, emotionally, than our people and communities, but that’s how we react.

You have to decide where your line is in stepping up with your values. Personally, I’ve taken several ethical stands in my career that haven’t won me brownie points with management. Those stands have, however, led me to be perceived as a powerful leader by the people around me. Was it worth it? Yes. I’m proud of the person I’ve become. But in terms of career growth at those companies? Well… I’m not working there any more.

Leadership isn’t about titles. It’s about behavior. If you live your values, take care of your organization and its people, and step up to the plate with responsibility, you’ll be a leader in the true sense of the word. Your title won’t matter. Your influence, the respect you garner, and the success you bring will be the true proof of your leadership.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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Most founders of a successful family business sell their business to an outside third party. The 39 percent of family businesses passed to a second generation fail. Why don’t these owners plan better for one of the most important events of their lives?

If only it were just family businesses that didn’t plan well for the future. Most businesses woefully neglect the long term. And it’s not just the top executives who fail at farsightedness—few of us anywhere plan ahead. Before we jump into succession planning, there are some intriguing things to know about how we factor time into our decision making.

Think about some future plans you have. Notice how far out “the future” is for you. Are your plans for fifty years from now? Next week? Tomorrow? We all have certain time frames we naturally use when making decisions or thinking about the future. Those time frames drastically affect your decisions.

I awoke at sunrise on a Caribbean cruise and strolled up to the deck to behold row upon row of beach chairs, each with cup holder and ashtray. My first thought: “Great! Everything I need for a tan. Then perhaps a martini, and maybe a cigar. It’s the good life!” But if I took a thirty-year time horizon I might view this deck set-up as skin cancer, liver failure, or an emphysema station. Maybe it’s time to visit the casino, where I’ll lose 52 percent of my money on average at the blackjack table over the long term. The same situation looks very different depending on your time horizon.

Your decisions, your planning, and even how you look back and learn (or don’t) from the past are all affected by your time frame habits. If your time frame is brief, you probably spend a lot of your life in perpetual emergencies and fire-fighting, since, in a brief time frame, consequences of short-term emergencies are more real than the far-off consequences of creating permanent solutions. One of my best friends has such a short time horizon that he can be leaving for an appointment, spot the daily newspaper as he’s putting on his shoes, and spend twenty minutes reading it before realizing he’s just missed his appointment.

Being overwhelmed has driven us to ever-shorter time horizons. With more to do than we can even think about, we attend to the most urgent. That usually means the immediate emergencies. In a world demanding ever-faster results, we compress our time horizons more and more.

Rarer, but just as dysfunctional, is the opposite: a naturally long time horizon. Thinking ahead thirty years is great for insuring long-term success, but you’ve got to solve all the problems between here and there for it to matter. The Perfect Ten Year Plan is useless if you go bankrupt in the first year by not managing the day-to-day cash flow.

We are scared to plan for succession

Most people just don’t have a time horizon long enough to think about succession. If they do look ahead, they don’t like what they see: the day when they’re no longer here. And it’s not just in work; my estate planner tells me most people procrastinate writing their will for years. We avoid it, because in American culture, we’re just not taught to deal with our own mortality. (He’s been nagging me for a couple of years to get my estate plans in order. And I’ll do it—as soon as I’m done writing this article.)

Aside from mortality, there’s ego at stake. Does a founder really want to admit the company can survive without him? Come to think of it, does a founder really want to admit a legacy so fragile that it can’t survive without him? Quite a conundrum. It’s much easier to ignore succession altogether and concentrate on the next six months.

You might be thinking that it’s a leader’s job to do that planning, for the health of the business. Think again—and look in the mirror. It’s everyone’s job to do that planning. None of us want to admit that our companies/teams/families/communities can survive without us. But they can. It’s up to us to make sure that when we leave—and we will leave someday—the transition goes smoothly.

Start planning for succession long, long before you move on. Consider your first job responsibility to be training someone else to take over what you’re doing, so you can put your mind to learning the job above you before you’re promoted. Then when promotion time comes, you can step up with confidence that you have a head start and that your current job is in good hands.

Creating your succession plan

You can’t groom heirs unless you know what you’re grooming them for. Start by identifying all the responsibilities of your current job. Requests are your key to identifying your responsibilities. List all the requests anyone makes of you—customers, suppliers, bosses, employees, the public, even yourself. Each of those requests is a responsibility. Also, list all the requests you make of others. Ask yourself why you make each request. Your answers will be another list of responsibilities.
Now you have it: your real job description (formal job descriptions rarely reflect reality). For each responsibility, list the skills you use to meet the challenge. List the mindsets and attitudes you have, and any specific knowledge you use to fulfill that request.

Now you have a blueprint for bringing a successor—or several—up to speed. You use your real job description to identify who has many of the attributes needed to take over. Discuss the real job description with them, and get their input. Their ideas may differ on how the job can be done. Those differences might suggest alternate skills or approaches that can broaden how you do the job. More alternatives can also broaden the pool of potential successors.
Once you’ve chosen your people, start developing them. In their semi-annual learning and development review (of course you have semi-annual learning and development reviews, even if it’s not mandated by the company), help them choose assignments and experiences that will develop the skills you’ve identified to allow them to step into your shoes.

Juggle many replacements

There’s no reason to settle for a single successor. You can develop several people at once, especially since you can’t count on everyone staying put until you move on. One Fortune 500 company builds succession planning into every job above a certain level. They look for inside and outside candidates, and strive for a 3:1 ratio—three replacements in the pipeline for every job.

Furthermore, don’t assume you’ll be replaced by a single person. When you move on, your responsibilities may be distributed throughout a group, or may be taken over by a team. We all fantasize about being so valuable it’ll take a team to replace us; indulge the fantasy. You can develop some skills in some group members, and other skills in others. Of course, you’ll need to insure the team can work together when it’s time.

One caveat to choosing multiple replacements: Manage the situation delicately. If you tell five people that they’ll all be your replacement, you’ve just introduced competition that might cause four to quit when the fifth gets promoted someday. Simply help them develop, and make it clear to folks that the best way to succeed at any level is ongoing achievement and growth; specific jobs aren’t guaranteed.

Once you’ve got your succession plan under way, start working on your boss’s…with you as the successor. Profile your boss’s job and voila! You have your own development plan. It won’t guarantee you get the job, but you’ll be better and more effective as you move forward, and you’ll have a whole cadre of people able to step into your job when you move up to Chairman.

© 2005 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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You’re so proud of your new vision statement. It sounds nice. Inspiring, even. But the vision is useless unless it can direct action.

Your vision lays out a destination; your destination guides your strategy; and strategy chooses action. It’s action that leads to success. In those moments of action, having clear direction is crucial for building momentum. If your organization is like most, you spent weeks debating every word crafting your vision, mission, strategy, and goals. But no matter how lofty, if they aren’t created in a way that provides direction, those statements are little more than high-priced indulgences.

Every company means something different by the words “vision” and “strategy.” One person insists that “Provide our customers the highest possible quality widgets” is a vision. A friend takes one look and assures him, “That’s a strategy.” Here are some useful definitions that will help you decide if you’ve set a direction that can truly get traction.

Envisioning the future

Vision is timeless. It’s based on who/what you want to do. It’s why you’ve got an organization in the first place. It must be specific enough that everyone can use it to decide if their work is moving the company forward. Progress towards the vision must be measurable. A vision is independent of specific competition, and while it may mention the customer, it must guide even someone who doesn’t know the customers’ mind. The best visions imply whom the company serves, what it provides, and what distinguishes it from other companies providing the same products and services. Vision sets the broad direction. It says, “Go west, young man.”

Wrong: We will provide exceptional products and services that our customers value.

This vision requires knowing the customers’ mind in order to understand what the company provides. It doesn’t distinguish what is unique about the company, since presumably everyone in the market produces something customers value.

Right: We will help boat owners everywhere navigate new seas with geographically based directional products and services.

This vision tells us the market, the product (navigation products and services), the distinguisher (geographically based), and the progress measurement (delight).

The strategy thing

Strategy links the destination (vision) with current reality. Strategy applies to the whole company, and answers the question “How will we reach our vision, given current market conditions, competitive scenario, regulatory environment, etc.?” Strategy is narrower than vision, but broad enough to guide companywide organization structure, hiring, capabilities that must be developed, and so on. Strategy says, “We’re going west, but we ran into this grand canyon. We can go around to the north or south. Let’s choose south.”

For example, a company may have a vision to “provide scientifically proven technology to solve the medical needs of consumers and hospitals.” In the 1950s, the strategy may be doing in-house research, hiring and developing scientists, and a compensation program based on discovery. In the 1990s, the same company may have a strategy of acquiring small drug-making companies and buying and protecting patents from other companies. Both strategies will reach the vision, but they are appropriate for different competitive environments, and they have different organization structures, different financing options, and different operational characteristics.

You know you have a strategy if you chose your current path from many alternatives, all of which would have reached your vision, each of which would have required hiring different people and building different systems. If you didn’t consider many alternatives, or you didn’t choose your alternative considering your competition, your vision, and your current market conditions, then you probably have a tactic, not a strategy. If you can execute your strategy with your current people, reward systems, and organization structure, then it’s not a strategy, it’s a tactic.

The tactics

Tactics are limited in scope, typically just to a part of the company. They’re shorter term than a strategy. They involve executing given the existing capabilities and resources of the company. Unlike strategy, tactics generally work within the current organization structure, rather than changing the organization. Tactics say, “We’re on the south path. Let’s travel two miles today.” Your tactics probably won’t work unless they’re generated from a strategy that lays out a consistent philosophy for how your company will compete/win/attract customers in today’s market.

My article on giving your organization serious traction

“Flashpoints” are those moments in time when traction and momentum are built. For example, a flashpoint in creating a quality-driven organization might be when the CEO refuses to ship a poor-quality product, even though it will hurt quarterly numbers. Flashpoints always happen during a tactical action. That’s why you need a vision and strategy—without them, people at the flashpoint won’t have the guidance to ensure they can move the company forward in that moment of traction.

Your strategy also helps you find flashpoints. If your strategy involves locking up important distributor relationships, your flashpoints will involve reputation and relationship building, creating the perception of value to the distributors, and establishing negotiating leverage to capture an exclusive relationship. If your strategy is to be a low-cost provider, your flashpoints might be times when opportunities for efficiencies arise, or incidents where you can encourage a “continuous improvement” mindset in your team.

At the end of the day, your vision and strategy only exist to drive tactics. And often, the most significant tactics are those flashpoints whose effects are far-reaching. When your vision sets direction and your strategy ties it to your current situation, they provide a compass for everyone in your organization to follow for years to come.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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