Leadership Vertigo by S. Max Brown

Author:S. Max Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Familius
Published: 2014-09-29T23:19:35+00:00

Keep One Eye on the Future

Although there’s no question that it’s critical for leaders to have a clear understanding of the present-day challenges their employees and organization face, the problem is that most organizations and their leaders do so at the expense of maintaining a future focus, one that helps us to frame how our efforts today will serve us in the future.

To help clarify this point, let’s take a look at the Workflow Energy Model that follows.

In this diagram we can see that, in the best conditions, the present is about engagement, while the future is about thriving. Certainly, many of us are keenly focused on efforts to ensure our employees are engaged while they are at work. However, what most of us fail to do is to make the connection that our employees are engaged in the present work because of what it promises to bring them in the future.

All of us thrive when we have a bright future to look forward to and we can only do so when we’re able to connect what we’re doing today with the process of creating or building that desired future. Likewise, our employees become engaged long-term, not because we provide them with a special activity or event, but because of what we’re helping them build for tomorrow.

The challenge is that we too often fall into the trap of focusing only on the present, possibly content with the idea that our future will be taken care of, feeling we don’t have the time right now to think of the future, or ignoring it all together. This lack of connection to the future makes it difficult to meet today’s challenges and is why many organizations find themselves in a slow downward spiral of surviving instead of thriving.

Over time, this leads to a debilitated workforce that simply doesn’t care about its organization’s goals its objectives.

We need to ask ourselves what we are doing to create something our people can look forward to. Integral to this question is understanding that the present is, to a great degree, dictated by how one feels about the future, because, if we’re feeling good about the future, we’re going to be more engaged about investing in the present.

This mechanism is exactly what we see in financial investing. When an organization’s future is ambiguous, investors are reluctant to invest in its present offerings. But if investors feel good about the organization’s future, they invest in the present.

Leaders need to be mindful of the importance of providing employees with a positive—and personally meaningful—vision of the future that will help them with their day-to-day work.

Flourishing: The Importance of Positive Emotions

However much we resist acknowledging it, we humans are not static. We’re either on a positive trajectory or a negative one. Either we’re growing in goodness, becoming more creative and resilient, or we’re solidifying our bad habits, becoming more stagnant and rigid.

People who flourish function at extraordinarily high levels—both psychologically and socially. They’re not simply people who feel good.

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