Define Your Personal Leadership Vision
For the past couple of years, I’ve had the good fortune of speaking at the Broad Advantage conference in New York. Part of Janet Hanson‘s amazing organization, 85 Broads, this weeklong program offers an array of speakers and experiences for about 100 college women who are interested in business careers.
A few days ago I asked each member of this year’s group to sketch and then describe to the rest of us her personal leadership vision–a compelling image of an achievable future. Leadership vision is an essential means for focusing attention on what matters most; what you want to accomplish in your life and what kind of leader you wish to be. A useful vision has to be rooted in your past, address the future, and deal with today’s realities. It represents who you are and what you stand for. It inspires you, and the people whose commitment you need, to act to make constructive change towards a future you all want to see.
Let’s look a bit more closely at the four key components:
What contributions to our world do these young women dream of making? The whole group heard from a few members and then we broke up into smaller groups so everyone could share theirs. The leadership visions of these young women were inspiring. Most are driven to succeed not only in their careers but also in cultivating loving families and in making meaningful contributions to society. A few examples: healing political rifts among nations now set on destroying each other, finding creative and practical ways to feed the hungry, and strengthening our increasingly fragile environment.
Riding the rails back to Philadelphia, I felt optimistic that the next generation of business leaders is bound to exert greater energy and attention than mine to making the world better than the one they’ve inherited.
What’s
your personal leadership vision? How does it compare with the life and
career aspirations of these future business women?
Stewart D. Friedman is the Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School. The former head of Ford Motor’s Leadership Development Center, he is the author of Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life, Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family, and Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. For more, visit www.totalleadership.org, find him on Twitter @StewFriedman, or on LinkedIn.
Define Your Personal Leadership Vision
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