Achieve Long-Term Goals Through Transformational Leadership
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Achieve Long-Term Goals Through Transformational Leadership
Long-term, big picture goals can take years to make happen. And they are worth the investment. They are the type of goals that continually take organizations to the next level, and prevent the hamster-wheel effect that can so easily happen when the world around us is ever-changing.
However, with a constantly shifting world, how can you actually stay the course?
As a leader, how can you inspire your team to align with a long-term vision, while maintaining day-to-day productivity?
How do you effectively communicate a long-term vision to shareholders and stakeholders, especially if they’re pushing for short-term results?
What role does transformational or visionary leadership play in navigating market disruptions that can come up at any time?
In this article, we’ll explore:
- What is transformational leadership?
- How can transformational leadership impact long-term goals?
- Visionary strategy starts with a FULL vision
- Accept the dip in favor of long-term profitability
- Creating and maintaining momentum
- Talent retention during transition and transformation
- How to communicate with shareholders and/or stakeholders
- Why none of this matters if you don’t do THIS
What is Transformational Leadership?
Transformational leader is an approach rooted in relationships, trust and accountability. It can be key to future-proofing your organization by preventing stagnation, driving motivation, fostering an innovation culture, and reducing turnover.
A cornerstone of transformational leadership is that it is:
- As hands-off as possible in trusting people to do their jobs, follow their intuition, and even take risks;
- Deeply hands-on in terms of providing support, ensuring people have everything they need to succeed, and removing or mitigating potential roadblocks.
Rather than a unique style, transformational leadership is a blend of leadership styles, which allows the approach to be adapted to the needs of the organization.
You can dive deeper into transformational leadership here.
How Can Transformational Leadership Impact Long-Term Goals?
When long-term goals are years out, there are generally two things you’ll need in order to reach them:
- The ability to navigate short-term circumstances, while staying aligned with long-term goals;
- A team with the motivation, engagement and agility to see things through.
Relationships are at the heart of transformational leadership. Part of that is getting to know what drives people, and using that knowledge to help guide their career development. Specifically, in ways that align with big picture corporate objectives.
Yes, you need broader messaging to keep the big picture in focus, and it’s great to create a sense of shared purpose. But, when you can also meet the individual where they are at, and guide each person to contribute in ways that drive them on a personal level, you’ve hit paydirt.
Two common reasons for long-term goals failing are undefined responsibilities, and ineffective resource planning. Essentially, not having the right people on the bus, and/or not being clear in what’s expected of those people.
Transformational leadership addresses those issues and provides a framework for keeping the momentum and focus going until the goal is reached.
Visionary Strategy Starts with a FULL Vision
A transformational leadership approach always keeps the big picture in sight in order to guide people to grow into the company in ways that drive them.
A full, complete vision also plays a critical role in aligning your short and medium-term efforts, so that you can respond to market changes, trends, etc. while staying on course.
When we coach clients to create their own big picture vision, we encourage them to visualize it fully. What does it look like? Feel like? What are your relationships like? How do you spend your time? What does your environment look like?
Do the same thing for your organizational big picture. Even better if you get the whole leadership or executive team involved. Imagine having already achieved your goals, and ask yourselves:
- What does this look like for us as a company?
- What do our relationships with clients/partners/suppliers/vendors look like?
- What does our workforce look like?
- Where are we positioned in the market/compared to competitors?
- What does our corporate culture look like?
- What else becomes possible when we achieve this?
A great resource to help guide you in this exercise is the book, Vivid Vision, by Cameron Herold. Not only does this exercise give you a clear vision to work toward, it also keeps your vision from becoming too rigid. If you need to be flexible at any point – which WILL happen – you can look to that vision and know right away where adaptations are possible.
When an engineer needs to make adjustments mid-project, a detailed blueprint will show what areas can be altered and what areas will compromise the integrity of the structure. A clear detailed vision is the same idea.
Accept The Dip in Favor of Long-Term Profitability
The notion of “the dip” was first popularized in Seth Godin’s book of the same name. Bumps along the way are the norm, not the exception. When an organization sets out to make changes, it’s common to experience things like:
- Employee turnover – People who aren’t on board with the vision or the changes needed will likely leave. This is a good thing.
- Loss of revenue – Depending on the nature of the changes – changes to a product line, service, way of doing business, etc. – you may experience a temporary loss of revenue and customers. Anticipate this.
- Negative press – When Apple first entered the smartphone space, plenty of people thought the iPhone would be a failure. We all know how that turned out. Naysayers are part of the game. Whether it’s major news outlets, industry experts, or local reviewers, anticipate at least some bad press.
Organizational resilience and sustainable growth are both about long-term results. Part of creating that – of preventing stagnation – means not letting short-term setbacks or “growing pains” throw you off course.
Accept that the dip will likely happen and make a plan for it. How will you sustain morale? How will you keep momentum going? How will you respond to pressure to produce results faster?
Creating and Maintaining Momentum
In her recent book, CEO of Your Life founder, Melissa Dawn wrote about momentum tunnels. Momentum tunnels occur when our actions continually move us in a particular direction. Small actions, over time, create focused momentum, which can be a powerful force.
These momentum tunnels exist whether we create them intentionally or not. Unintentional momentum tunnels are made up of all the patterns, habits and “norms” in daily life. This is true on an individual level, and an organizational level.
This is why change can be so difficult. The force of existing momentum tunnels – especially if we aren’t open about them – is just too strong.
So often, we hear about big picture visions that got derailed because people, teams and even entire organizations slid back into old ways of doing things.
What’s the solution? Step one is to recognize that you already have momentum built in a particular direction. Get real about it. Say the hard things that need to be said. Be candid about where that momentum is taking the organization.
Creating and maintaining your new momentum demands that access to the old momentum tunnel be cut off, which means everyone needs to be able to recognize it when they feel its pull.
What might this look like?Let’s say you have a long-term goal around retaining customers. You know this must include spending more time on customer interactions. For years, quotas have been the norm, with employees and their managers rewarded for keeping calls as short as possible, and responding to more emails in less time. Creating new momentum and cutting off the old might look like openly recognizing positive customer interactions, rewarding repeat business, or having leaders take shifts in the department to set the tone and gain a better understanding of the department’s challenges. Maintaining momentum could mean keeping up these initiatives for as long as it takes for the new to feel like the norm. It could mean having some kind of visual counter of repeat customers, or a celebration after a certain number. Recognition is a powerful thing. Don’t let up until you feel that new momentum tunnel gaining force, or until your goal is reached! |
Think of momentum like riding a bike. You need a big push to get it started, then you need to keep pedaling to build momentum. Once you’ve established optimal speed, you can ease up on the pedaling, but if you abandon it all together, you’ll lose that momentum and stall.
Talent Retention During Transition and Transformation
We mentioned earlier that you may lose some people initially, and that it’s a good thing.
Strategic innovation always involves some level of risk-taking, including employees choosing to leave. If they leave because they’re not on board with changes, they prefer the status quo, or some similar reason, it’s ultimately a good thing for both parties.
You do, however, want to focus on retaining your top talent – the people who are going to see the vision through.
Transformational leadership is rooted in relationships, trust and accountability. When it comes to keeping your top talent while realizing long-term goals, it can be a powerfully effective approach.
What are the best practices for retaining top talent through visionary leadership? Here are strategies to consider:
- See yourself in a servant role – Strive to be hands off in terms of people doing the work, but hands on in terms of ensuring they have everything they need to do it. This gives people the autonomy they need to feel engaged by their work, to experiment, to learn, to be creative, to solve problems, and so on.
- Be an agent of positive influence – How you are matters more than you think.
- Embrace bounded optimism – Bounded optimism is being really optimistic and positive about the present and future, while being realistic about circumstances. This ties in with accepting the dip. We go deeper into this in the next section.
- Put the WHY before the HOW – If you’ve never seen Simon Sinek’s TED Talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action, we highly recommend checking it out. Engage and motivate with the WHY and trust that together, you can co-create the HOW.
You may also consider research-backed tools like Hogan and TALENTx7 Agility assessments to guide you in developing talent in ways that empower the individual and the organization.
How to Communicate with Shareholders and/or Stakeholders
With years-long initiatives, it’s really common for enthusiasm to wane, especially if and when the dip comes along.
Hopefully, you’ll have done the initial work to accept the dip, and will be prepared. However, you may also get pushback from shareholders and other stakeholders.
Calm confidence and bounded optimism will be the name of the game in this case.
Calm confidence is about staying firm in your big picture vision, knowing your goals will be worth it, and communicating this calmly to people who may not be in a calm state. Don’t match their energy; be the one to set the tone instead.
Bounded optimism means being realistic and not shying away from truth, while maintaining your optimism. That might sound like, “Yes, revenue has dropped and that’s not easy to see. We anticipated this, we prepared for this, and here’s how we proceed from here.” Or maybe, “Yes, some people have left. We chose a new direction because we know that’s where the market is headed and this is how we thrive. We knew the new direction would not work for people. It’s a parting of ways that needed to happen for progress to be possible. Here’s the plan moving forward.”
Above all, remember that even the highest-level stakeholders and shareholders are human. There are some powerful mindset shifts you can make to ensure these conversations go as smoothly as possible. You can read about them here.
Why None of This Matters if You Don’t do THIS
A harsh truth is, you can know everything about leadership and achieving long-term goals, but if you don’t do the work to lead yourself first, none of it will matter.
We repeat this in almost every article: what happens in one area of life will impact other areas.
It’s hard to show up with calm confidence when you don’t feel it inside. Here are some practices, strategies and insights that may help you lead yourself first, so that you can step into your full power as a transformative leader:
- Stay grounded in your values; tough decisions will need to be made, and they need to be made with your values and vision in mind
- Learn how to practice certainty through uncertain times
- Get ahead of any feelings of guilt that may impede your path
- Develop your self-management skills
- Build habits and practices to protect your energy
- When it feels like everything is riding on outcomes, practice non-attachment from outcomes (trust us, it works!)
- Be intentional about how you show up and the impact you want to have; tune into a personal leadership statement to guide you in this
The Bottom Line
Long term goals take years to realize, and in a fast-paced, constantly changing world, those years become the biggest impediment to success.
Clarity from the outset is key. The dip will happen and you must be prepared to weather it. Motivation and engagement have to be prioritized throughout the journey, not just at the start. Most importantly, the end result will be worth it.
If you would like support and guidance in making big picture objectives happen, we would love to connect with you.