7 Steps to Formulating Your Vision

Tags

A Step A Day, Organization vision, team building

If you were to see the many things that people all over the world have in common, one that stands out is that we humans work best with a goal at hand. This is much more meaningful than working in a vacuum without a direction. In a recent assignment, I was asked to help an organization work towards formulating their vision.  Simply stated, a vision is an idealized description of a desired outcome for your organization. It reflects what you would like your organization to be. It includes all that would inspire and energize you to achieve that outcome.

An interesting exercise that we often conduct is to have groups of executives work towards determining their vision for their organization or team. In the form of questions, here are my 7 Steps to Formulating Your Vision:

Advertisement

Recognizing & Developing Strengths

Tags

A Step A Day, developing self-confidence, team building

In a workshop I facilitated, there was a need to develop the self-confidence of the participants. Self-confidence comes through feeling good about ourselves and our capabilities.

Here is an activity, you might like to try to build self-confidence in your team.

This is best done in small teams. A max. of 5 is perfect.

Team Building

Tags

A Step A Day, team building, team roles

The recent Twenty20 match between India and Australia was awaited with much excitement. You couldn’t have asked for a more one sided match.The Aussies walked all over the Indians – bowling them out for a paltry 74 and winning with 9 wickets to spare. Skipper Dhoni said his players forgot their roles and responsibilities.

This post is not about that match. It is to highlight key steps in team formation- relevant for teams in both sport and business. By the way, isn’t sport particularly cricket becoming more like business and less like sport these days?

Here are a few points I find very important for success:-

• The team must be clear of their goals and objective
• Every player must be conscious of his/her role and responsibilities and how they affect the overall team
• Team members performance should be constantly evaluated
• Communication between leader and team members and between the team members themselves should be open and issues raised without fear of reprisals
• Regular and clear feedback should be given on improving individual and team performance
• The team should periodically re-visit their goals and see how they can better results by learning from past experiences.

Time and time again, events prove that individual brilliance cannot make up for a lack of team work. Ultimately, a leader is as successful as his/her team.

You can subscribe to the A-Step-A-Day series using RSS at https://bprao.wordpress.com/category/a-step-a-day/feed

This is the 62 nd of the “A Step A Day “series : To provide perspective and provoke thought to facilitate self-development across a wide spectrum of issues- big and small- crucial for executive success.

CEO Evolution Phase 3.0

Tags

team building, Warren Bennis

Writing in the New York Times, Nelson Schwartz asks whether the time has come for a new type of CEOs.

The key need for today’s CEO seems to be that he/she must be a team builder. Says Prof. Warren Bennis, University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California and a thought leader on leadership: “It’s someone who can assemble a team that functions as smoothly as a jazz sextet,” .

This view is echoed by Michael Useem, William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania & Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management there. Says Prof. Useem: “The academic research says if you want to predict what the future financial performance over the next one to three years will be, you need to know the top team”.

Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for executive programs at the School of Management at Yale, says the style of today’s best chief executives differs from both the empire builders and the cleanup specialists.

Business schools are also opting for the 3.0 approach. At the Yale School of Management last year, Mr. Sonnenfeld said, the dean and faculty threw out the old first-year curriculum that emphasized individual disciplines like finance and marketing and replaced it with a team-oriented approach, with professors teaching these subjects jointly. In addition, he said, “We have students, faculty and staff assemble their own teams as part of their training to be future execs.”