Vision and strategy

Vision and strategy raise the question of levels. Lots of people get trapped in the everyday business of doing their work and managing their unit. From time to time it is really important for the leader to move to a higher level and to think about strategic matters and to check that you are still living out your vision. This diagram illustrates this:

So most of your time will be spent at the operational or detailed levels. Trivia will be avoided, and there will be periodic visits to the strategic level and rare considerations of vision.

‘Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. ’

Sun Tzu

Developing your own approaches

You have to develop your own approaches of leading and managing. This takes us to an extremely important leadership concept, that of authenticity.

This, too, is pretty commonsensical but it's been legitimised of late by the work of Goffee and Jones who asked the question: Why should anyone be led by you?

Their answer was that people want to be led by someone real, that they wanted someone who was authentic. Two further quotes:

• "Try to lead like someone else - and you will fail."
• "Be yourself - with skill."

Which means, of course, that you have to find ways of being authentically yourself in a wide range of different situations. Two ideas may be helpful here:

• your job isn't necessarily to do things, it is to make sure that things get done
• you will have personality and team preferences, and it may be helpful to know more about these.

The Bennis list included lots of different things and you were asked to consider which ones just didn't feel right for you. It may well be that there are other members of your team who could do some of these things better than you. If so, this could release you to do other things. And they don't, in fact, have to do things better than you; they just have to be able to do them to an acceptable level. Your time is especially valuable because there are some things that only the leader can do, there won't be much time left after you've done all these.

Task Think about the jobs that only you can do. Sometimes this is because of your experience or expertise, but others can develop these. More fundamental would be some of the high-level strategic or interface issues. Your university or your funder will expect to talk to you about strategy, or financial matters, or sensitive HR issues. So identify these key items and delegate the rest.

Some tasks sit better with people of different personality types. An obvious example is the difference between getting a research centre going, and then running it once it is established. They need different skills and different personalities.

Finding out more about your own personality type and team role preferences can be extremely insightful and helpful. Your institution may well have someone trained in the use of psychometric tools, such as MBTI or Belbin, and talking to them could be very valuable. And doing such exercises as a group can be a powerful way of developing both understanding and a team ethos. Talk to your local staff or organisational developers.