Page 146 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

Beginning to Craft Your Vision and Direction 131

we, the upcoming organizational self-diagnosis, and the goals of shared self-
improvement. Determining, seeding, and beginning to establish your vision
for the organization is a major objective during your initial weeks and months
in your new position, and you need the involvement of others to accomplish
these important objectives.
As you got to know your staff and conducted the early familiarization
interviews and discussions, you asked individuals to share with you how
they’d improve or contribute to a higher-performing organization. You shared
with them your determination to improve the organization through mutual
team effort.
At subsequent executive team meetings, department meetings, team meet-
ings, and informal conversations with employees, continue to work on estab-
lishing the belief system of your team or organization—a vision and the
purpose and values of what the organization can become. Talk about the key
goals of the organization as well as problem-solving task forces and cross-func-
tional task forces or teams. Begin to seek opportunities for growth and
improvement. Ask people how they might solve particular problems or iden-
tify business opportunities. Invite their participation in the process. Invite oth-
ers to share, broaden, or further develop your vision. Ask people to work with
you in shaping thoughts and hope into a dynamic view of the future.
Ask your team to help make it happen. Share the responsibility for ensur-
ing the function’s success. Share your excitement, and ask people to volunteer
their ideas with you and others. Affirm that these ideas will help create a highly
motivating and inspiring view of the future. Vision, purpose, and meaning
evoke passion and energy. Visioning should become a deeply felt, strongly val-
ued process in which all of the organization can participate.
This sense of purpose is characterized by ideas and beliefs that bind peo-
ple’s efforts and energies. You must generate commitment to a vision. Such
commitment is necessary because ongoing work must get done, and the
process of identifying or working toward a vision will make extra demands on
the organization’s time and energy.
Three principles will help mold the organization’s commitment to the
process:

1. People must believe that their commitment will simultaneously result in
benefits to the organization and to themselves. People must be able to identify
themselves with a different, better, possibly broader view of the future. The