Chapter 2 continued…
Oh yeah, the vision part.
Hmmm. This is tough. What is vision? How do you get one? How do you know you don’t already have one?
Vision is another $50 cottage-industry-spawning buzzword. There are lots of good definitions. I like “the ability to see,” “an image or concept in the imagination,” and “the ability to anticipate future events and developments.”
At its core, your vision is simply your mental image of how things could or ought to be. In general this should be fairly high level, so that you don’t have lots of visions. If you do, it’s fairly likely that what you really have are secondary goals related to a single overarching vision.
For example, my vision for high performance computing is to remove the barriers to access in order to encourage scientific discovery. In plain English, this means is that I want to make high-performance computers so easy to use that the scientists and engineers using them can focus only on what they want to do, not how to get it done. Some of the goals around this vision include creating a desktop interface to the high-performance computers in my center and creating a suite of programs to perform expert data analysis of simulation results automatically.
At its core, my vision involves transforming the way in which people use high-performance computers. Changing the way things have been done for the past thirty-five years. In general, visions are like this; they are stretch goals, not the next logical step in the chain, but a big leap over to a new chain of logical things entirely.
If you’re still in school or recently graduated, the odds are fairly good you don’t have a vision. If you’ve just recently started to lead as a part of the executing team in your organization, the odds are still good you don’t have a vision, even if you and others think you do, or at least they think you should. This is fine. A vision is the crystallization of what you want to accomplish during your leadership tenure. One of the necessary conditions for creating a vision of your own is being able – either by virtue of training, natural ability, or time in a position of sufficient seniority—to see the big picture and then to see what’s wrong with that picture and imagine how it could be better. When you are just starting out, you don’t see the big picture. You may not even know there is a picture. You’ve got your head down, getting “the job” done. But eventually someone—hopefully one of your mentors—will ask you to pick your head up a little. They’ll ask, “You know, our code-revision system is really pretty old and seems kind of clumsy to use. Could we manage the code base more effectively? What do you think?” And you’ll look around at the landscape of one particular problem, and see part of the picture. As time goes on and your experience and level in the organization grow, you’ll naturally see more and more of the picture. Then, if you are paying attention to what you see and trying to stay out front—to create the future—then eventually you’ll start to see the flaws in the image. Once you see these flaws, and come up with a new picture, then you’ve got a vision.
Incidentally, not all visions are unique. Probably very few are. I certainly am not the first person to have my particular vision for high-performance computing, and I’m not even the only one who cares about it right now. Lots and lots of people all over the world share this vision. The important point is to contribute something unique, not that the vision itself be unique.
Take your time
Creating or finding your vision is a journey. For the most part, you can’t just sit down on an arbitrary Wednesday during your first week at work and come up with a useful vision (I know, I tried). And your vision changes, evolves, becomes more than it was originally even when you do ultimately find yours. You have to remain flexible in making your vision reality, which is again why it’s useful to focus on a fairly high-level picture. The details—the how—aren’t important.
When you become the leader of a larger organization, you will feel some pressure to have and act on a vision right away. You may want to put your mark on your organization or industry, or to change the way things are done. Resist this pressure. Do not simply cobble together a collection of goals over the weekend following your first week on the job and call that your vision. Take your time, and let it come to you. Here’s the reason: if you are leading, if you are fulfilling your obligation to shape and create the technologies of a bountiful future for the rest of the world, then eventually you’ll have a sound vision. They can’t all be big, mine isn’t, and yours may be fairly small too. But it will be sound, you’ll believe in it, and be able to convince others of its value by virtue of your belief. If you’ve already shot out of the gate with a few goals you scribbled down and called a vision twelve months ago, you’re going to take a serious credibility hit when you introduce the new, real vision. Implementing a vision is a big undertaking that sometimes takes whole careers. Often the whole organizational focus and way of doing things must change to make it a reality.
Change
In general, people are averse to change. Changing their big picture, and then changing the fundamentals of what they are doing and why, is something you want to do only occasionally, and usually only in ways that in some way relate to your previous directions. You want people to see a logical progression, so that they can understand where you’re going and help you get there. If you routinely change the big direction, hopping from fad to fad and vision to vision, you’ll come across not as visionary but as reactionary and unable to think on your own. Your organization will fill with resentment of your inability to settle on a course, and they will eventually lock up and resist any further change. The result is logjam.
It took me almost two years to come up with the fully formed image of how I wanted things to be, my vision. Even now there are corners that are fuzzy, and that’s the case even with my picture from ten thousand feet. I started with some individual goals, projects that seemed interesting and good ideas that I felt we should consider. Over time it became clear to me that the things I cared most about were related, but it wasn’t clear how. I kept paying attention to patterns in my reactions to new ideas and technologies, and kept examining the picture as it was handed down to me, searching for what was slightly wrong about it. Then, slowly, the core of my vision took shape. Once this was clear I was able to spend some quality time refining it, and two years later started implementing.
Is this a long time? Maybe. During those two years we still started the projects that made sense. We made tremendous improvements in the way we provide our services and conduct our business. It’s not as if we were just sitting still. We addressed many operating deficiencies, and even now the center is better equipped for the future than when I came. A successful start. During this time, the team has become familiar with me, my core values, and the way in which I make decisions. They are in general considerably more empowered than when I took the position. And now we are ready to go to the next level and start working on something big. Because I am the leader of my organization, the big thing we are working on is my vision.
Say, that sure is a long way to fall
I should note that there is some risk for me here, and there will be risk when you come up with your vision, too. As we’ve already seen, one of your big jobs is to inform and infuse your vision into the organization. Everyone is going to know about your big picture. And the whole organization is going to have to come together to make it a reality. But that’s a lot of visibility. What if you fail?
Earlier we talked about the freedom to fail, and creating an environment for your team wherein failure has value and is allowed. This applies to you, too. Your vision, as originally conceived, might be off base. Perhaps it’s not possible with current technology, or perhaps a little way down the road you realize that this particular road isn’t going where you thought it was. Adjust. Adapt. Don’t hide from the problems, continuing blindly on what will become a “vision death march” just because you don’t want to make a big, public mistake. The only failure here is not learning from your bad choice and taking corrective action. By trying to achieve your vision, you will have put your organization in motion. You know from your physics classes that the coefficient of moving friction is often less than the coefficient of static friction—in other words, once you get something moving, its easier to keep it moving. Refine your vision, inform and infuse it, and set off again.
Paralysis by committee
When you mention that you are working on a vision for your organization, it is almost inevitable that some helpful wag will say that you need buy-in on the vision and that the only way to get that is to have a committee help you form the vision. This sounds like a good idea.
The reasoning is that by having representatives from your whole organization on a committee that sets the vision, you have built in ambassadors for the final product who will go out and evangelize the new direction. You will have automatic buy-in from everybody, because nearly everybody was involved in making it.
I disagree. In my experience, and I’ve been through committee-driven vision exercises three times, the final product of committee visions needs substantial revision to work up to mediocre. The three exercises I have been through each took many talented, excited people and produced a bland, lifeless, meaningless “vision” with the added bonus of having wasted at least two weeks of “real time” in vision exercises and two months in documenting and break-out meetings that never came to anything.
The visions I have seen work, including my own, have been visions that were ultimately created by the leader. The leader listens, judges, coalesces, tests ideas, and draws out opinions. Then, he creates a vision. The picture from the mind of a single person can be bold and inspiring; a stretch goal for the entire organization. This is the kind of vision that’s really a vision.
However, a vision created this way starts as the property of the leader, and is completely identified with him. It might be a bold vision, but it ain’t going to become reality until it gets informed and infused. Before I talk about how I infuse a new vision, this is a good time to stop for an object lesson. Having a vision—the future of the entire organization—identified solely with the leader takes a lot of leader courage. If the vision fails, everyone will remember it was the leader’s (your) idea. The failure becomes yours. I think the fear of this public failure is one of the primary psychological drivers that cause so many people to use committees to create visions. If the vision fails, no one can point at the leader, because he can point at the committee. This is weak; torturing an entire organization with a lifeless vision because you are afraid of failure is inexcusable (the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and all that). If you are the leader, lead. Sometimes it’s really fun, and sometimes it’s stay-up-all-night scary. Good or bad, it’s your job all the time. Suck it up, and do the right thing.
So, back to the infusion. I go about this by meeting with progressively larger circles in my organization. Starting with my most senior team, I spend a long time sharing my vision and getting feedback. The vision at this point isn’t set in stone, because it really is important to listen to the concerns of your closest leaders. They are usually your brightest folks and the folks most acquainted with the big picture, so their insight should be particularly valuable. One or two sessions seems to be enough to get to the point that the top team can buy in to the vision. I always (forcefully if necessary) insist that everyone participate in providing feedback. To get buy-in you’ve got to get all those niggling thoughts out of your top team’s heads and on to the table, where they can be incorporated or dismissed as appropriate.
After this first round, I broaden the attendees at the vision-evangelism sessions to include first-line managers and team leaders, and explain the vision to them. In this session, I again ask for some feedback, but I am less forceful about insisting on input from the team and I am more reluctant to make changes. The top team is also invited to this meeting, and here’s why.
Remember we talked before about the need to educate your team about your vision in order that they can have the knowledge they need to make their own decisions. Your top team needs the most complete understanding, and the need for completeness diminishes as you get further away from the top team. As my circle broadens and I work down the organizational chart with my vision-evangelism sessions, the participants from the meetings farther up the chart attend every meeting on the way down the chart. This has the effect that by the time you have your final all-hands meeting to share the vision with your entire organization, the senior leaders have heard it many times (four in my case). I have found that it takes at least three sessions to grok a vision presented in this way.
I continue the process of expanding the audiences at the vision-evangelism sessions and reducing the opportunity for input until I reach the final session in which everyone hears the vision. At this point everyone in the organization has heard the vision at least once, and while I take less input as I work down I always encourage and answer questions in every session.
Note that you may be tempted to be very democratic in your evangelism and ask for input all the way down. I recommend against this practice, because too many cooks spoil the broth. Ideas don’t generally get better as they are edited again and again by person after person in successively lower levels of the organization. Organizations do get healthier as more and more people have new ideas, and this is always to be encouraged, but editing will eventually suffocate the life force in any good idea. You may as well start off with a committee to form your vision in the first place and get to failure right away.
Recognition, reward, accountability, and responsibility
We touched a little bit on part of this concept already when we discussed the need for everyone to perform. If you do everything we’ve talked about so far just right, have your teams set up, and take the time to empower them to make decisions, but you do nothing else, all your work will be wasted.
You have to close the loop and evaluate what is being accomplished. Everything gets evaluated fairly and honestly, with no sacred cows. Even if, or maybe even especially if, the cows getting evaluated are your pets.
Every time you take an initiative or make an assignment, periodically assess the health of that action. Is the project on time? Is it going to go where we thought it would? Is Sally making appropriate progress toward her ability to make the right decision? Monitoring progress in this way creates a culture of accountability. People know when they are asked to complete an assignment or develop a personal skill that you or part of your senior team will be assessing progress. This makes assignments more relevant—when no one checks it can appear that no one is interested, and your team starts to feel as if all they do is busy work. But it also keeps just that little edge of pressure on people that can keep them moving forward when human nature would encourage them to sit still and enjoy the view.
Success
When you find success, for example a project ahead of schedule or a person taking initiative to enhance your operations, recognize it. It always surprises me how effective recognition is, and there is tremendous variety in how you can give it. I have a hierarchy of recognition that I use depending upon the magnitude of the accomplishment. For the “everyday” attaboy, I’ll try to run into the person casually (like in the hall) and speak a word of thanks. If it’s not someone I run into routinely, I’ll seek them out, and possibly follow-up with an e-mail. This only takes a few minutes, and might be one of a hundred e-mails you send in a day. But it might be the only “thank you” that the recipient has had all month, and it can be a powerful motivational tool.
For accomplishments that are a little more substantial, I send an e-mail with a cc list that is appropriate for the magnitude of the deed. For example, the recipient’s chain of command should be cc’d. For issues of significant impact I’ll also cc my boss and peers in the organization that I interact with (hey, I want some recognition, too!).
At the next level are accomplishments for which I’ll write a personal, handwritten thank-you note on nice stationery. I actually bought some of my own stationery so that the overall affect is more personal than that that of simply using the company letterhead. I don’t write many of these personal notes because I want to maintain their value by their rarity. Handwritten notes are noticed precisely because almost no one writes anything longhand anymore, and the effort is often more appreciated because of it.
At the next tier is the official letter of commendation. This is a typed letter, sent formally into the recipient’s chain of command on the organizational letterhead. These letters typically make it into employee files and become part of the official record of that employee’s performance. This type of recognition often pays off at review time in the form of the best of all possible bonuses: the raise.
Above this tier is recognition with an artifact. My options here are cash awards (bonuses) and plaques or certificates, and I use them all depending upon the circumstance and the individual employee’s personality. Some people are motivated more strongly by public recognition than money; for them, a plaque is the way to go, and I usually find a function at which I can recognize the accomplishment in front of a wide audience. Also, the employee gets something to hang in his or her office as a conversation starter, leading to a benefit that can keep delivering years after your fifty-dollar investment in the plaque itself. The plaque option is also a good one when you want to recognize members of your team that don’t work directly for you: subcontractors, for example. Often you won’t have a direct path to affect their pay, but you can certainly offer them a plaque or certificate.
Some people, however, are more strongly motivated by money. For these folks, cash it is. An option to create a more public recognition from what is usually a private action (in most organizations salary actions are not discussed openly) is to create a certificate to go with the bonus and present that in an appropriate public forum.
Whichever option you take, you must take it swiftly. In order for the reward to stimulate further similar action it has to be close enough to the original act that the person associates the reward with the action. If you wait until the end of the year and have one big awards day when the accomplishment happened the preceding January, the recognition will be of little value in creating more of the good behavior you are acknowledging.
Finally, a tip about recognition. I keep a log (actually, it’s an Excel spreadsheet) with details about all of the individual recognition I deliver during the year. Every time someone gets an e-mail attaboy or a $2,500 bonus, it goes into the log. During the year I can review the log to make sure that I’m spending enough time looking for and rewarding excellence in the organization. And at the end of the year when it comes time for my boss to evaluate my performance, I have documented evidence of the positive actions I’ve taken for my staff.
Problems
When you find problems, take swift but appropriate action to correct them. Just as rewards and recognition must be delivered close to the accomplishment in order to reinforce the behavior, corrections must also be delivered in close proximity to the offending behavior in order to be an effective deterrent.
Projects or people heading in the wrong direction need to be quickly assessed and corrected or terminated, as appropriate. A problem ignored grows quickly, and may become a problem that cannot be easily addressed at all.
The tips we discussed above for defending your core values also apply here. It is important to be direct and honest—there should be no question when you are finished where you stand. It is also important to do some homework and get the facts ahead of time. Talk to all the people involved, and never act on hearsay. Make sure your actions are measured and, when dealing with people, in scale with the behavior you are addressing and the past history of the person in question.
