Carving Your Own Path

There has been many articles and books written about taking charge and leading the way.  This is a respectful theme and has a lot of merits.  People that take the lead are usually looked upon as the leader.  So what's the big deal?  Why is this an important subject and why now? 

The big deal is that you may be leading your team in the wrong direction without knowing it; This discussion is important because you may not realize that you are.

How can you tell if you and your team are on the right path?  Ask yourself these four simple questions:

1. Do I know exactly what the Vision of my organization is?
2. Are the Goals of my team aligned with this vision?
3. Can every Action that my team performs be tied to a specific goal and are the deliverables acceptable to an owner?
   
4. Are the Results that my team's producing directly contributing to the vision and goals of the organization?
   

If you can not answer all of these questions, then you need to quickly re-evaluate the path your are on.

In the past, I have had some very smart and experienced leaders tell me that although they are not sure of the vision of their organization, they should still keep moving forward by setting goals, taking action and producing results.  So I ask them the simple question: How do the results you produce tie back to the vision and goals of the company.  And of course the answer is that they didn't know, but they thought it did.  They thought they knew enough to effectively to move forward.  They assumed that the organization was a VMM level 2 when they were probably only at a level 1 or 0.

Here is the mistake that most of us are making.  We get frustrated with the communication that is coming from our leaders, the CEO's, the Boards, the Executives...and we take it upon ourselves to "carve our own path."  We get great results, based on our belief's, and feel good about it.  STOP IT NOW!  The results probably don't align with your companies vision. If they do then you just got lucky.

Get Vision, Get results!