04 Feb TSLH #005: 4 Steps to Crafting a Strong Leadership Vision
Read time: 4 minutes
The best leaders I met and worked with had a leadership vision.
This is because they had high self-awareness.
Self-awareness means that they had a clear understanding of their values, strengths, self-limiting beliefs, and that they were able to align with them to produce a vision they had for their leadership.
For instance, my own value system includes daring, learning, courage and this forms my leadership vision, which is about “Empowering people to get beyond their self-limiting beliefs and fears, and dare to take action, learning in the process, and without any fear of failure.”
If you don’t work on your own value system and understand what it is, you won’t be able to craft a leadership vision that you can articulate and communicate to your team.
This could be a strong leadership derailer!
Here is the process I recommend you use to dig into your self and identify your core values, those that really resonate with you and that are aligned with the authentic leader you aspire to be. Once you have done this, you can craft your leadership vision.
Let’s start with it!
The peak experience. Think about a peak experience in your personal life or at work. This should be a moment when you were at your best, when you experienced the most satisfying time ever, when you felt strong emotions.
This does not need to be something spectacular, like “I went to space!” Your peak experience can be an event that created something special for you. Recently a friend of mine described his peak experience as a moment in a choir concert where his singing felt perfect and lighted something in him.
Once you have identified your peak experience, stay with it for a moment and then, ask yourself these 3 questions:
- What made this moment a peak experience? What was present?
- What are a few keywords/values that come to mind and that were honored during this moment?
- How did you feel when you achieved that peak moment?
Write down everything that comes to mind. When you can spot a value in what you write, highlight it. If ideas only come as short sentences or groups of words, this is fine too.
The disappointing moment. Think about a moment at work or in your personal life when you felt disappointed at yourself or others, or by a situation. Again, this does not need to be the greatest disaster that ever happened to you, but do pick something where you felt down.
This was a moment where most likely you had negative feelings like anxiety, stress, frustration, anger. Then, ask yourself these 2 questions:
- What values were not honored in this situation and were missing for you?
- What are a few keywords to describe the situation, your negative feelings? What would be the contrary of these words, described as values? For instance if something you disliked in the situation is aggressiveness, maybe the value that would counter this and be important to you is respect.
Again, write down anything that comes to mind.
Putting it all together. Combine your 2 lists and work on identifying values from these two experiences and rank them in order of importance for you. Don’t focus only on your leadership role as you work this out.
Really dig deep into you and get out the core values, the ones that drive you in your personal life and work. For instance, if family is a core value, write it down. Don’t think “Family should not be on that list because it has nothing to do with leadership.” This is not the right way of looking at this. Again, if family is important to you, it should be important in your leadership role too.
Once you are done, look at your values and focus on the top 3 or 4 of them. Would you say that these values represent the values that you cannot compromise on as a leader and that you want to see expressed in your authentic leadership? If so, write them down on a separate piece of paper. If one value is not passing the test, eliminate it and continue going down your original list until you have a solid top 3 or 4 values.
Reflect on your core values. Take the time needed. Now, work on crafting a statement that will form your leadership vision. Ideally, it should be a statement in the form “I am [ACTION] who [DOES THIS] so that [RESULT].”
If I take my leadership vision, this is how I built it:
“Empowering people [This is the ACTION] to get beyond their self-limiting beliefs and fears, and dare to take action [This is the DOING], learning in the process, and without any fear of failure [This is the RESULT].”
Don’t expect to come up with a leadership vision statement in one try. Even after some years, mine is probably still not fully complete. This is OK. This is a living statement, that’s expected to evolve with time and with your experience of leadership. What is key is to start somewhere.
Communicate your leadership vision. Last but not least, once you have a statement, or at least a set of core values, start communicating about them, with your manager, your team, other stakeholders.
You have plenty of opportunities to spread your leadership vision:
- 1:1’s with your direct people
- Townhalls, group meetings
- Every casual conversation
- Emails
- Social media (a great way to also build your leadership brand)
If you communicate, you will demonstrate and/or create clarity, consistency, trust, understanding.
For yourself, going through that exercise will increase your self-awareness and make you a much more authentic leader. This is because your leadership behaviors will be fully aligned with your core values and what you believe in.
Let me know how the exercise went for you and send me your leadership vision. There is no right or wrong answer!
Have fun with this and let me know about your progress.
TL; DR (Too Long, Did not Read)
4 steps to crafting a strong leadership vision
- Dig out values from a peak experience
- Dig out values from a disappointing experience
- Putting it all together
- Communicate your leadership vision
Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
1️⃣ Work 1-1 with me to step up as the authentic leader you aspire to be.
2️⃣ Hire me to help you build a high-performing team.
3️⃣ Start with my affordable digital courses on Mastering Difficult Conversations for Leaders and Goal Setting