In chal­leng­ing times, most lead­ers spend the major­ity of their time play­ing defense.  This means time spent review­ing cash flow, sales reports, and finan­cials so they can make the best reac­tive and tac­ti­cal deci­sions in order to sur­vive.  Cost cut­ting, expense con­trol, layoffs…..ugh! 

Deal­ing with these very real sce­nar­ios can really bring a leader down.  And the unfor­tu­nate thing is that, if he spends too much time each day focused on these activ­i­ties for too long, he and his team will begin to lose sight of why they do what they do.  They will lose sight of the mis­sion, they will no longer see oppor­tu­nity, and they will lose hope. 

Ulti­mately, if the leader has both eyes down on the data, the organization’s health and cul­ture will suffer.

For the last few years, I’ve been say­ing that the best lead­ers have what I call bifo­cal vision.  They have the abil­ity to keep one eye down look­ing at real­ity while keep­ing the other eye up look­ing at the future.  They do spend time man­ag­ing to the very real chal­lenges of today.  But they also spend time play­ing offense, shar­ing vision and exe­cut­ing plans that will help them and their teams to see the light at the end of the tunnel. 

I know from per­sonal expe­ri­ence that this can be very dif­fi­cult for a leader.  But with­out bifo­cal vision, I have seen lead­ers kill their orga­ni­za­tions — long before they ran out of cash.

Action Plans:

1. Sched­ule time to review your key reports or score­card.  Weekly is usu­ally enough, but dur­ing times of cri­sis you may need to see the data daily.
2. Sched­ule time weekly to review your vision.  Dur­ing times of cri­sis or real chal­lenge, you might need to review it daily.
3. Share a por­tion of your vision with your team weekly.  This can be done by dis­cussing a con­vic­tion and its cor­re­spond­ing behav­iors dur­ing a weekly team meet­ing.  Or you could com­mu­ni­cate one key ele­ment of what you see the orga­ni­za­tion or team becom­ing in an email mes­sage (or for even greater impact, try record­ing a short video from your desk).  The pur­pose is to keep the team bal­anced between deal­ing with the very real and some­times painful changes of today, and remain­ing pas­sion­ate and engaged with the pos­si­bil­ity of tomorrow.

Keep one eye down and one eye up!

Related posts:

1. Belong, Become, Build

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Tags: Bifocal Vision, Crisis, Culture, Leadership

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 11:04 am and is filed under Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.