VISION AND LEADERSHIP

Vision is a short, succinct, and inspiring statement of what the organization intends to become and to achieve at some point in the future, often stated in competitive terms. Vision refers to the category of intentions that are broad, all-inclusive and forward-thinking. It is the image that a business must have of its goals before it sets out to reach them. It describes aspirations for the future, without specifying the means that will be used to achieve those desired ends.

Warren Bennis, a noted writer on leadership, says: "To choose a direction, an executive must have developed a mental image of the possible and desirable future state of the organization. This image, which we call a vision, may be as vague as a dream or as precise as a goal or a mission statement." It outlines what the organization wants to be, or how it wants the world in which it operates to be a long-term view and concentrates on the future. It can be emotive and is a source of inspiration.

Strategic leadership refers to a manager’s potential to express a strategic vision for the organization, or a part of the organization, and to motivate and persuade others to acquire that vision. Strategic leadership can also be defined as utilizing strategy in the management of employees. It is the potential to influence organizational members and to execute organizational change. Strategic leaders create organizational structure, allocate resources and express strategic vision. Strategic leaders work in an ambiguous environment on very difficult issues that influence and are influenced by occasions and organizations external to their own. The main objective of strategic leadership is strategic productivity.

Another aim of strategic leadership is to develop an environment in which employees forecast the organization’s needs in context of their own job. Strategic leaders encourage the employees in an organization to follow their own ideas. Strategic leaders make greater use of reward and incentive system for encouraging productive and quality employees to show much better performance for their organization. Functional strategic leadership is about inventiveness, perception, and planning to assist an individual in realizing his objectives and goals.

Strategic leadership requires the potential to foresee and comprehend the work environment. It requires objectivity and potential to look at the broader picture. The EASIER approach for transformational leadership is, which stands for Envision, Activate, Support, Install, Ensure and Recognise. The first three words deal mainly with the soft aspects of management: the last three cover the hard side, the systems and administrative tasks. Successful implementation depends on getting all six stages right.

1. Envisioning: process of developing a coherent view of the future in order to form an overarching objective for the organisation. It blends the leader’s view of external opportunities with the way internal competencies and resources relate to these opportunities.

2. Activating:Activating is the task of ensuring that others in the organisation understand, support, and eventually share the vision.

3. Supporting: Supporting is about motivating and inspiring people to achieve more than they otherwise might have believed possible, by providing the necessary moral and practical help to enable this to happen.

4. Installing: process of developing detailed plans to enable the strategy to be implemented and controlled. There is nothing unique or special about the instruments such as plans, budgets, critical path analysis, Gantt charts or other tools which have to be developed to ensure that nothing is overlooked, and everything is coordinated.

5. Ensuring: Plans, structures for implementation, and policies may be formulated, and on paper the organisation may have covered everything. But this is not enough, and consideration must be given to the monitoring and controlling processes that will ensure that actions are correctly undertaken and results are as expected.

6. Recognising: Giving recognition to those involved in the process.Recognition may be positive or negative, and should be used to reinforce the change, and to ensure that obstacles to progress are removed.