Someone’s Gotta Chart the Course!

In chapter four of The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, The Law of Navigation, John Maxwell tells us that “anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course.” When Cindy and I originally developed Building Buy-in Around a Clear Mission and Vision for our Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank group, which we now offer publicly as a complimentary webinar from time to time, we stressed how critical it is for the business owner or CEO to keep the overall mission and vision for the organization front and center for everyone on a routine basis. But that’s a tall order even for the best leaders!

Something I believe only serves to make that task exponentially more difficult is the mess of terms, the buzzwords, the flavors of the month, and latest/greatest things I’ve seen folks in these roles get bombarded with - all claiming to be the magic pill that catapults their organizations to world-class profitability… Have you ever been told that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is? Yeah, me too!

Interestingly enough, I’ve not only had a heaping helping of many of those flavors of the month, I’ve also seen most of them used in issues they were never intended for. I’ll spare you the painful details of every example, but my favorite (that’s sarcasm, in case you were wondering) was using a tool designed for uncovering large scale quality issues on a parts per million basis for isolated issues that were really tied to behavior; why keep things simple and direct when we can drag them out for months at a time, right…

When we work with business owners and higher level executives to chart their course for the next several years, we challenge them to develop a crystal-clear picture of where they want to be, then we help them back into the action steps they’ll need to take in order to reach their goals. This certainly serves to help them develop a clear course they can steer the ship by, but it can’t just rest with them alone. They’ve got to have leaders around them who can help them share the course that’s been charted with the rest of the team. We’ll dig much deeper into that as we move forward here. First though, I believe it would serve us well to look at a few key phrases that get tossed at leaders routinely so we can define exactly how we can apply the ideas in a way that helps us follow the course we chart; phrases like organizational development and strategic leadership. 

Both can easily land on the never-ending pile of buzzwords but they can also serve us really well if we invest the time into understanding exactly how we can use them within our organizations so we’ll start there next time…