Leadership Lessons: How to Build the Right Vision
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Let’s say that you’re the coach of a team in the last moments of the championship game. Your team is behind with little chance of winning. You can choose to say, “It looks like we’re going to lose, but do your best out there!” or “Team, we’re mere moments from victory. We’ll win if we go all in!”
If you think about it, both statements are true. While the team is more likely than not to lose, they could also be just moments from victory. How you frame the conversation will determine how the players see it.
Building the Right Vision
In David J. Schwartz’s timeless classic The Magic of Thinking Big, the author tells readers to “Promise victory and win support. Build castles, don’t dig graves!” Schwartz implores readers to anticipate success and to speak about it as if it were imminent. He stresses that great leaders focus on the expectation of a positive outcome, even if a bad outcome is more likely.
Setting the expectation of success allows people to believe it is possible. This is true both for your team and the business as a whole. If you tell your team that they’ll never get above 50% participation in the Ethics and Culture survey, they won’t be inspired to push the business and to work with the Communication department to come up with innovative ways to get people interested in taking the survey. Likewise, if you tell the business that data breaches are inevitable and a cost of doing marketing, they are less likely to come to you to try to figure out how to stop them before they happen.
Speak positively with conviction that the best outcome is not only possible, it’s probable.
Reframing the Situation
If you find yourself in a difficult situation…
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