LEADERSHIP Series: Planning. Collaboration. Prosperity.

Leaders plan: one could probably posit that planning is elemental to leadership.

I like Philip Crosby’s definition (The Absolutes of Leadership):

“Leadership is deliberately causing people-driven actions in a planned fashion [emphasis mine] for the purpose of accomplishing the leader’s agenda….planned fashion means actually laying out a sequence of events that lets people know what is going to happen and what they are supposed to do.”

One way to “let people know” is to clearly express your vision – then share it; publish your mission (which includes your reason for existence - what you do, why you do it and for whom); and promote the values that give shape and meaning to the way you do it.

Leaders build all of this (and more) into planning – note: it is not The Plan – but planning – a dynamic, collaborative process that includes measuring the results, comparing them to the plan and evaluating the variance from the “plan.”

Good planning, in other words, takes hard, collaborative work. The focus is always on results. Shortcuts most often focus on a declaration of success or failure. Remember, you ALWAYS succeed…in producing a result. That success-failure-get-it-now attitude leads to disaster.

What kind of results are you producing? What do those results say about your planning, and work?

Proverbs 21:5 Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty.


Copyright ©2009 by P. Griffith Lindell