Effective Leadership Practices, Part 4

Periodically over the preceding weeks, I’ve summarized the effective practices of servant leadership as described by Kent M. Keith, in The Case for Servant Leadership.  Those practices include self-awareness, listening, changing the pyramid, developing your colleagues, coaching (not controlling) and unleashing the energy and intelligence of others.  (If you’d like to review the posts, the links will take you back to each). The final effective leadership practice that Keith describes is foresight.  Foresight in this context is identical to what is more commonly called “vision” and I will use the terms interchangeably here.

Foresight is the ability to visualize the future, to anticipate the needs of your organization and industry, as well as to envision the impact you want to have.  In The Servant as Leader, Robert Greenleaf (the originator of servant leadership) speaks of foresight as the leadership skill.  He believed it was so important that he considered a lack of foresight to be an ethical failure because it prevents the leader to act for the good of his team or organization (Greenleaf, 2008).  Without it, he believed the leader is not leading, she’s reacting.  Leadership without vision and foresight is management. 

Greenleaf was not alone in seeing vision as the sine qua non of leadership. If you Google “vision and leadership” and you will receive a host of references, blog posts, books, and other exhortations of leaders to develop vision. 

So the natural next question is, how do you develop vision?  Kouzes and Posner (2009) note the importance of taking time out from pressing work matters to think and ask questions of yourself and your environments.  The leader must keep principles at the forefront, asking who do we want to be as an organization and as individuals?  What needs to change within the scope of our influence and what’s our role in bringing it about?  The visionary leader must listen to others and plug into her professional environment, seeking to constantly understand it (and predict it) better.  Finally, reflection is critical to vision.  None of the previous activities are worth the time if there isn’t a period of reflection in which they can all be synthesized. 

Do you agree with the idea that vision is the central characteristic of leadership?  Why or why not? 

How do you find time to withdraw and reflect on your own vision? 

Greenleaf, R. K. (2008).  The servant as leader. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Kouzes, J. M. & Posner, B. Z. (2009).  To lead, create a shared vision.  Harvard Business Review.  Retrieved from http://hbr.org/2009/01/to-lead-create-a-shared-vision/ar/1