Tuesday, February 7, 2017

How to close the vision gaps?

Top leadership roles are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise, envisioning and leading the business towards its future.


The best vision is insight, the most-wanted vision is foresight, Being a visionary is a character or perspective. Leadership is about the future and change, innovation and progress. Leadership vision is not just about zooming in but also stepping into the future proactively. The vision thing is, in fact, the precious leadership trait to bridge the industrial age and the digital era; the local and global, the business reality and the future of the organization. A clear vision will enable digital leaders today to lead businesses toward the uncharted water or blurred digital territories confidently. So, how to close the vision gaps and make a leap of digital transformation?


Closing the vision gap is in fact to close the leadership authenticity gap: Being a leader takes one to have a desire to do better than others in certain domains, leaders can foresee the trends or capture the insight others can not. Leadership vision is built on the leader’s authenticity, supplemented with knowledge, expertise, understanding, and consciousness or superconsciousness. The vision and intention of becoming a leader are to facilitate and encourage, as change is often an uncomfortable, yet necessary part of reaching the business pinnacle and maintaining success. Leadership is fundamentally about telling the truth of who we are as individuals and in relationship to each other. When we can create a space where trust is a foregone conclusion, then individuals and teams will take the ownership of their own work. In this way, we begin to see ourselves as the authors of our own expertise, experience, and life stories and enter into collaboration with others to not just wait for the future coming upon us but to co-create the future with the open chapter of progression and innovation.


Any C-level position needs to be a visionary: Every C-level leader needs to be fluent in multidimensional thinking and must participate in creating and shaping a company's vision, in order to lead effectively at the age of digital with “VUCA” characteristics. A visionary leader changes the course of the business by seeing beyond what all other see or by charting new revenue or growth through the creation of a new product/service/business model/market share, etc. Vision is an integral part of the leadership or directorial role because the essence of leadership is to guide direction via removing the obstacles or breaking down the outdated things either hard or soft, visible or invisible, in order to lead forward. C-level roles are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise, envisioning and leading it towards its future. If they're not doing that or not allowed to do that then they aren't C-level. Vision doesn’t have to be exclusive or externally focused. In most cases, it must be a shared, collaborative vision. The business management process is fundamentally an act of trust, mutual respect, and cooperation to achieve the organizational vision.


Vision should be set in clarity: Everyone in the leadership team has a gift and the future business is very complex. Setting a vision that isn't high enough doesn't challenge the organization to excel. But establishing a vision that is based on unrealistic expectations will either discount the value of even creating the vision or disenfranchise stakeholders. To put briefly, the vision should be attainable; however, the vision shouldn't be a fixed target. It should be stable enough to make it worthwhile to make a concerted effort to attain it and dynamic enough to be able to react to any change in business direction or context. This is particularly important because business models and technologies are changing very rapidly nowadays. No one person is able to deal with these complexities and speed. "Team Leadership" is able to set the vision with clarity and build the future business by taking the step-wise approach, more importantly, to react very quickly and manage both opportunities and risks accordingly.


Therefore, closing the vision gap is in fact to close the digital leadership gaps; some visions are tunnel-like, other visions are short-sighted; but the best digital vision should be circular and foresighted, inspiring and reachable as well. The digital leader has to have the capability to look ahead and imagine what is possible for his/her organization as part of the whole, then execute the right options as part of the overall vision for the company via logic steps. Hence, filling the vision gap is also about filling innovation gaps, change gaps, and talent gaps in order to lead digital transformation seamlessly.



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