Leadership is DIRECTION.
Setting direction.
Giving direction.
Reachable
A leader understands what is reachable, and how to reach it.
Solvable
A leader understands what problems to solve and how to solve them, but importantly the why.
Agile
A leader knows how to deal with change effectively, including what change to ignore and how to be adaptable.
Environmental
A leader understands the culture, the external and internal environments.
Minimal
A leader understands that moving minimally without excess baggage, fluff and things that do not matter, is lighter on everyone
Maintainable
A leader understands that anything we do must be maintainable
Extensible
A leader knows how to extend capabilities and be extended by others
Vision, Strategy and Planning
What is the most important problem you need your organisation to solve?
This is not an easy question to answer.
Some would say, it is gain more customers, or make customers happy. Although these are not mutally exclusive, it does require different values and behaviours.
Some may say it is market share, or become more modern or streamlined.
Vision must align with the problems. If the vision is not aligned with problems we can see, it is subject to scrutiny, it may be whimsical or driven by ego. Asking others in your organisation what they perceive the problems to be, goes along way in discovering the right vision.
When you set a direction, you have a vision of the future. The direction could be easy, hard or even treacherous. Strategy is a method of persuing the direction, whereas planning is understanding what the direction terrain may bring and planning for when you encounter it.
AMMERSE helps you focus in on what is important.
With AMMERSE, you can ask he rigt questions, and build alignment. You can even reason about goals and objectives, targets and metrics.
Culture and Inside out leadership
The idea of top down, or command and control is widespread, however, increasingly we want to feel inclusive, valued and a part of something greater than ourselves. We no longer stand for tyrannical leaders, rude and powerful people with little respect for their organisation. We have also discovered that an organisation is a system of values, values that come from its people. Alignment of values, sense of worth, happiness, direction and all the emotional and ethical stuff matters.
Everyone in the organisation should be part of driving the vision. They should be enabled to make decisions that align with the direction.
When someone makes a decision and it does not fall inline with the vision, it is the fault of the leader, the vision was not expressed well enough and it was not clear how the decision impacted the vision.