Page 141 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

126 Just Promoted!

The combination of vision, purpose, and values works like spotlights on a
runway. It points in a direction and can guide people to a desired endpoint.
Through word and deed, strong leaders who are passionate about their orga-
nization’s beliefs and who model what is important obtain needed resources,
hold people accountable, and recognize and reward people appropriately when
their actions and contributions are aligned with their organization’s or team’s
vision and purpose. Importantly, they enlist the help and support of employ-
ees at all levels in the organization. Employees realize that they are part of the
action, that what is good for the organization can be good for them as well.
Employees who have the opportunity to work with visionary, purpose-
centered leaders begin to share a similar notion of where the organization is
heading and what success means for them and others. They tie their success
to that of the organization. While individual responsibilities and account-
abilities exist, the language of work becomes spiced with the words we and
our as described in Chapter 2. People begin to “own” problems and work
together for excellent solutions.
Most importantly, employees feel that what they do matters and that their
efforts contribute to something worthwhile and valuable. They feel that they
can affect the course of events, and they take responsibility to see that the right
things happen. Employees find that they enjoy sharing in a coordinated,
aligned work effort with common purpose. The feeling is similar to an orches-
tra playing in beautiful harmony or an athletic team executing their plays as
they were designed. This is a form of “possibility thinking,” and it is described
beautifully in the book entitled The Art of Possibility written by Rosamund and
2
Ben Zander. Ben Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic
Orchestra, and he is a frequent speaker on leadership and organization top-
ics. Shared purpose—a vision of what an organization is capable of becom-
ing—can be a powerful and positive force. Some employees have trouble
describing what a vision is, but they all know when it’s there.
Healthy, high-achieving organizations have their heart and soul in their
vision and purpose. Used in this sense, the term organizational vision has been
an important part of leadership lexicon. The idea of creating organizational
vision is not new. The importance of pulling together for a deeply felt com-
mon purpose and sense of the future has served nations, organizations, and
humanitarian causes for many years. Revolutions in the cause of freedom that
resulted in democracies in the United States, Poland, and South Africa are but
three examples. Unified efforts across many scientific communities around