Attention Leaders: Turn On Your High Beams

Anyone who lives in the country or who has taken long drives in unpopulated areas knows how important the car’s high beams are. This Car and Driver article explains how and when to use your high beams versus your low beams: “The headlights in your vehicle have two modes: low-beam and high-beam. The low-beam mode produces a less intense light that provides a nighttime down-the-road view of about 200 to 300 feet, or the approximate length of a football field. It may seem like a lot, but if you're traveling at 60 mph, it takes just 3.4 seconds to cover that distance. Your high-beams, which are typically activated either by pushing or pulling the turn-signal stalk, are more powerful: They project light about 350 to 500 feet, depending on your lighting system's specifications.”

Your high beams, then, are important for seeing further out ahead on a dark night with no streetlamps, and as such they provide a useful metaphor for leading organizations.?All too often we drive our teams and organizations using only our low beams: this week’s concerns and emergencies; this quarter’s results and the upcoming board meeting; this year’s performance (and the annual view often only as we approach the latter part of the year!).

Effective leaders use both their low beams and their high beams.?They keep their organizations focused on today’s results, but they also make an ongoing effort to flick on the highs and look out at the horizon: Where are we going longer-term??Is there anything out ahead we should be aware of and thinking about??Are we still headed in the right direction?

I do a lot of work with executive teams, and one paradox I see again and again is that the teams, even if experienced and accomplished, don’t spend enough time looking out ahead.?When I ask them to describe, in detail, where their company will be in two or three years, that “envisioned future” (to borrow a phrase from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras ) often varies wildly from executive to executive.?The leaders don't share a common view of where they’re driving the organization to—they’re collectively a bit in the dark.?Similarly, when I ask the members of executive teams to write down the three most important enterprise objectives for the next 12-18 months, their collective understanding of priorities is often alarmingly non-aligned.?If the senior team doesn’t share the same longer-term goals, how can they lead the company effectively?

This need for high-beam thinking is obvious at every size and level of business maturity, but it’s especially critical in startups and early-stage businesses that have little room for error due to misalignment. Recently I led an executive team session with the CEO and co-founder of Stardog , Kendall Clark. Stardog is a company in the enterprise data integration space with huge and exciting potential, and its executive team is small and fairly new to working together. When I asked the team to lay out their 12- to 18-month priorities, they were actually better aligned than I often see with larger teams of more mature organizations, though the alignment was not as deep as Kendall or the team hoped and expected to see.

That exercise led to a great team conversation. “I was excited to see how the longer-term strategic objectives could be operationalized in the near term by asking the right questions, focusing first on the ‘high beams’ perspective, and then flicking into ‘low beams’,” Kendall noted to the team toward the end of the offsite.?The team then committed to using the insights from the exercise to guide their weekly team meetings and decision-making over the balance of the year.?

One of the most important jobs of any leader is to articulate and inspire a shared vision of the future:?Where we’re going and why anyone should care.?You’re going to have a hard time doing that if you don’t use your high beams.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, anytime: [email protected]