A theme I have come back to over and over is “less is more”. If you would like to browse past posts around this theme, visit this google search link here and you will see pages of past posts (out of my more than 1800 daily posts here, this is one of the themes I do keep coming back to).
Now, one of the very first posts on this site was “Keeper of the Vision“, a short post I quote in full here.
I’m about to give you the sum total of all my learning on leadership from many decades of devoted work, research, curiosity etc
Want the secret to great leadership? The role of a leader is a one-line job description : Keeper of the Vision
That is it. Simple. Nothing you do is more important. Everything else is meaningless without this. End. Of. Story.
That vision must be distilled down to one word, or, at most, a short phrase, I’d say four words or fewer. Less is more.
As I write today’s post, I am going over the thoughts of a client that they have been developing for some time around the upcoming transformative change for their organisation that they have asked me to support them with. That document is a capture of all of their thoughts on what they need to do and how they will do it. It is very well written and thought out, and it also comes to over 4,000 words,
A key element of my role, then, is to coach the client to distil those four thousand words on what and how into no more than four words that capture the why.
Oh, and once we do that, the next step before taking that vision out to people is to choose a story that makes the point. As my mentor, Ed Percival always taught me (and often repeated), “never make a point without telling a story“. As Lincoln said: “In order to win a man to your cause, you must first reach his heart, the great high road to his reason.” Stories touch the heart, then once you have the heart, you can connect people to the why.