vision

Your ideas suck. Now what?

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Since my last super-optimistic post on the importance of having a vision, I have been taken down several pegs and come to a few realizations.

  1. It is not enough to simply have a vision. You have to successfully communicate that vision and get buy in from the right people.
  2. Unlike your friends, the right people may not be overwhelmingly interested in hearing your vision. In fact, they may leave the meeting at lunch time, when you’ve wasted the whole morning discussing reports, before you get to talk about your vision at all.
  3. Colleagues and work buddies will not always be as enthusiastic about this whole vision thing as you’d like them to be. Sure you’re fired up and ready to go but for everyone else it’s the same old boring meeting agenda that they always check out of. And don’t even think about asking questions in that setting. Not even the crickets will respond.

It’s exciting to have an idea that you think is great and will push the team in new, progressive directions. So it can be tough when your boss effectively says your brilliant new progressive idea is barking up the wrong tree. Ouch.

Hurt feelings aside (scrape it off and move on, this is business) it’s a great real life example of leaders being able to say we’re hacking away at the wrong forest. One silver lining in that cloud of ‘ooh, bummer’ is learning what kind of forest to look for when you’re at the top of that ladder swiveling your binoculars around. The uncomfortable experience of sharing an idea and having it critiqued is a powerful lesson in zoning in on the key issues.

For some people, I know, criticism makes them shut down immediately and not offer up any more ideas. But for me, I’m so eager to learn I don’t shy away from being wrong. In classroom settings I always attempt an answer, even if I’m not sure about it. Especially when I’m not sure about it. In the professional world I’ve been a lot more cautious about voicing my ideas. But I’m coming to realize that just like in class, getting things wrong can be a great way to learn how to get them right.

Visions (but not like, the high kind)

Robyn, , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Lately I’ve been feeling really stressed out at work. Proper stress: headaches, stomach aches, feeling like I was about to explode from internal pressure. I was freaking out about my work responsibilities which seemed to loom ever larger in my paranoid imagination, but in reality were only so intimidating because I was setting the bar so very high for myself.

I started listening to this podcast a few months ago. And while it’s a kick-ass repository of career advice and entertaining conversations on how to be awesome at your job, it was also setting me up for failure. Every new technique I learnt, I wanted to start doing immediately. I judged my own growth against concepts and ideas from more experienced professionals and found myself painfully lacking. I threw myself into a fit, trying to ‘catch up’ and ‘do it all’. My control freak tendencies came out full force.

And week after week, my job resisted all attempts at micromanaging. Shockingly, people are impossible to control. I know this is breaking news to you guys, so maybe take a second to get used to this epiphany. Patients do whatever the hell they want, responsibilities and priorities shift all the time, colleagues do not share your work ethic, etc etc.

Mercifully, the culmination of all this stress was a breakthrough and not a breakdown. Driving home on the verge of tears for the fifth Monday in a row I let my thoughts swirl around the car interior like angry wasps. Then among the wasps, wisps of remembered conversations and podcasts snippets coalesced to remind me of a word I had forgotten in my desperate scramble to control.

Vision.

I didn’t have any. Or I had too much. I didn’t know, because in the middle of all this over-thinking and I had never actually stopped to think about what I wanted to make happen. I was furiously building a boat on dry land without ever having dreamed of the sea.

So I started dreaming, and I started writing things down. I wrote quickly, more concerned with getting the ideas out of my head before they exploded my head. I edited after, because I have standards.

And incredibly I felt lighter. The stress had shifted from an angry hornet’s nest to a more manageable ball of barbed wire. I knew what I was aiming for now, what the end result should look like, and I had something I could show to other people and ask for help so I’d feel less alone. It was incredible.

In his seminal work, Stephen Covey talks about how important it is for a leader to have vision. He makes the analogy of a group of people in a forest working to clear a path, with managers directing the machete-wielders to chop down the right set of trees. But the leader is the one who climbs up, looks around and yells, ‘Wrong forest!’

And honestly, I understood that when I was reading it. Yes, obviously vision is important. 2+2=4. Duh. But I didn’t really get it until I had finished mapping my own visions and realized, with great humility, that this was the most important part of the job all along.