Many years ago, I had the honor of attending a lecture on leadership by the CEO Emeritus of a legendary Fortune 500 company. If my memory serves, he was the last member of the founding family to lead the corporation. He led it through countless rides on the global economic roller coaster. I only mention that because to paraphrase Nassim Taleb, his scars told his story. He was no mere theorist.
He told attendees that defining reality is the first principle of effective leadership.
What a profound and radical notion. At the time, I didn’t quite realize just how profound and radical it was, but over the better part of two decades of helping clients level up their leadership, this simple but powerful hypothesis consistently proves its centrality.
The dictionary has several definitions of ‘reality’. For our purposes, reality is certainly the conditions of our environment that we must have the courage to confront. But it is also a concise, imaginative, and sometimes impossible-seeming aspiration that could be actualized with the right investment.
There is a gap between those two realities, between the compelling one that does not yet exist but engages our idealism and the often painful and challenging ones that defy our idealism. Inherent in that very gap is the opportunity to bridge it.
We coach leaders to define reality, i.e., to help their teams understand with abundant clarity what their company’s aspirations are and what elements of our current environment stand in the way. If the leader has done this well – and has built a team of capable and creative people – then clear opportunities for innovation and execution will emerge.
At IGW we developed a simple framework for this: The Focus Equation.
The Focus Equation
A compelling vision of the future
–
a brutal assessment of the current state
=
the organization’s demand on leadership for execution and innovation
Each aspect of The Focus Equation narrows down the set of possible solutions. That’s why we start with vision. So many organizations start with what’s wrong. The English word for that is complaining. Complaints are not completely bereft of value. After all, they do surface problems.
But complaints are limited. While complaints uncover problems, they are free of solutions (and, by extension, accountability). Moreover, a mere complaint offers no gauge by which teams can determine whether or not the problem is worth solving in the first place.
In the absence of a compelling vision of the future, all problems risk seeming equally valuable to solve and all projects equally valuable to execute. Stephen Covey encapsulates this beautifully in what he calls “the activity trap,” as described in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:
“It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”
By providing a compelling vision of the future, leaders offer a gauge as to whether or not a project is worth executing – guidance as to the best wall against which to lean your ladder. The vision rallies the team to commit, to sacrifice, by helping them understand how all of their collective experiences plus all the market dynamics represent opportunities to serve customers in bigger, better, and more valuable ways. Vision is what allows teams to build toward an exciting, aspirational, or maybe even impossible-seeming future.
The Focus Equation starts with vision because the leader who only lives in the brutal assessment of the current state will miss the biggest upside opportunities and will demoralize the team.
Of course, the leader who only lives in the vision will be in denial of broken processes, inconsistent culture, and ever-shifting markets. Vision requires imagination and courage. A no-holds-barred assessment of the organization’s current challenges requires rigor and courage, to characterize the messes, the missing processes and capabilities, the risks, and the setbacks.
The Focus Equation helps a leader tread the line between a compelling vision of the future and the painful insufficiency of the current state. That gap is the most accurate picture of reality.
That gap defines the work.
Your leadership potential is boundless, and we’re here to support you every step of the way. Schedule a complimentary 15-minute strategy call today to see if our coaching philosophy fits you.
