HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU GIVE YOURSELF FOR VISIONING?

If this sounds like a strange question to you then please read on!  Visioning is THE most important task you have as a leader.  It is the time you give yourself to put away all the cares and interruptions of the day to take stock and to spend some time reviewing your vision for your team or company.  This can be a daily time or at the very least a weekly time but it is a time that you should be carving out of your daily schedule for yourself.  

Make Time For Yourself

You should plan this time for when you are at your "peak".  What I mean by that is we all have a time of day when we get our best work done.  We are focussed and on task and we can get more done during that time than any other time of day.  For me that is usually between four and six in the morning.  For others, they are night owls.  Winston Churchill would write between eleven at night and two in the morning.  What ever the case for you make sure your vision time is when you are at your best.

Just What Is Visioning?

I am sure by now you are asking yourself just what is "visioning?"  Visioning is the action of stepping back and looking at your role, your team, your goals from a distance.  It is the deliberate act of stepping away from the distractions of the day and giving yourself some quiet time to think, review and yes, dream.  Too often we spend our days and the O&G guys put it; "Head down, ass up and in four wheel low!"  Forgive the crudeness but it does paint an accurate picture of what leadership and management can become - lost in the tyranny of the urgent, swamped with minutia and details and fires to put out and certainly no time to step back and take stock.  Taking time for yourself is important.

Scott Barry Kaufman, the scientific director of the University of Pennsylvania's Imagination Institute, and Carolyn Gregoire, a senior writer at the Huffington Post,write in Harvard Business Review about how solitude helps drive creativity.  "Great thinkers and leaders throughout history--from Virginia Woolf to Marcel Proust to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak--have lauded the importance of having a metaphorical room of one's own," Kaufman and Gregoire write.  (Will Yackowicz, In
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How Performance Leadership Helps

This is where Performance Leadership is invaluable.  The key component of this type of leadership is the work of teaching and letting your team or company take on tasks that one would typically consider management or leadership type activities.  As they track their metrics and communicate with one another with regard to results they begin to take ownership of what is happening and part of that engagement means you will have everyone watching out for the team goals and performance and not just you.  The increased communication means that information flows readily to you rather than you having to seek it out and usually issues will already arrive at your desk with solutions.  That is what a high performing team will behave like and what that means is that you will actually have more time to devote to examining and refining the "bigger picture."

The bottom line is that it is not "selfish" or "anti-social" to build that alone time into your schedule.  You owe it to your team or company and yourself to spent that time visioning.  You will be clearer about where you and they need to go and they will benefit from that vision.  Performance Leadership - Think About It!