Page 39 - Develop your leadership skills- John Adair. -- 2nd ed

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30 ■ Develop your leadership skills

Hence leaders at all levels should stimulate and focus a sense
of direction. ‘Vision’ literally means to see where you are
going. Allied with some creative thinking, it can provide a
new direction for a group or an organisation. Change
always brings the necessity to think very hard about your
purpose, as well as your aims and objectives, in the context
of the rapid changes in markets, technology, and economic
and social life. That kind of thinking is the prime responsi-
bility of strategic leaders, but if they are wise they will in-
volve their operational and team leaders in this process as
well. You need to understand the why behind the objectives
you are being asked to achieve (see ‘Checklist: defining the
task’).

Planning

Planning means building a mental bridge from where you are
now to where you want to be when you have achieved the
objective before you. The function of planning meets the
group’s need to accomplish its task by answering the question
how. But the ‘how’ question soon leads to ‘When does this or
that have to happen?’ and ‘Who does what?’

From the leadership perspective, the key issue is how far you
should make the plan yourself or how far you should share the
planning function with your team. Again there is a distinction
here between leadership and management, at least in its older
form. F W Taylor, the founder of ‘scientific management’,
popularised the idea that things went better when there was a
clear distinction between work on the one hand, such as
making widgets, and the functions of planning and controlling