CHAPTER 3

Inspire a Shared Vision

JOAN CARTER TOOK OVER as general manager and executive chef of the university’s Adobe Lodge when both membership and sales had been severely declining for several years. Faculty and staff were unhappy, the restaurant’s balance sheet was “scary,” and her team was divided into factions.

Joan took all of this in, but what she saw was a dusty diamond. “I saw a beautiful and historic building full of mission-era flavor and character that should be, could be, and would be the place on campus.” In her mind’s eye, she saw the Lodge bustling. She saw professors and university staff chatting on the lovely enclosed patio and enjoying high-quality, appealing, yet inexpensive meals. She smiled as she envisioned her team assisting alumni in planning beautiful, personal, and professionally catered wedding receptions and anniversary celebrations.

Joan could see a happy staff whose primary concern was customer satisfaction, a kitchen that produced a product far superior to “banquet food,” and a catering staff who did whatever it took to make an event exceptional. She wasn’t quite sure how the Lodge had deteriorated to the extent it had, but that really didn’t matter. She decided to ignore the quick fix and set out to teach everyone how unique and magnificent the restaurant could be.

Over the next two years as she talked with customers and worked with her staff, she instilled a vision of the Lodge as a restaurant that celebrated good food and good company. As food and service quality began to improve, smiles became more prevalent among customers and staff, and sales started to rise: 20 percent the first year and 30 percent the next. When a senior university business manager asked Joan how she had turned the finances around so quickly and dramatically, she responded, “You can’t turn around numbers. The balance sheet is just a reflection of what’s happening here every day in the restaurant. I just helped the staff realize what we’re really all about. It was always here,” she said, “only perhaps a little dusty, a little ignored, and a little unloved. I just helped them see it.”

The leaders we interviewed shared with Joan the perspective that bringing meaning to life in the present by focusing on improving life in the future is essential to making extraordinary things happen. All enterprises and projects, big and small, originate in the mind’s eye; they begin with imagination and the belief that what’s now only an image can one day be made real.

To be an exemplary leader, you must be able to imagine a positive future. When you envision the future you want for yourself and others, and when you feel passionate about the legacy you want to leave, you are much more likely to take that first step. But if you don’t have the slightest clue about your hopes, dreams, and aspirations, the chance that you’ll take the lead is nil. In fact, you may not even see the opportunity that’s right there in front of you.

But it’s not just about your vision. It’s about having a shared vision. Everyone has dreams, aspirations, and the desire that tomorrow be better than today. When visions are shared, they attract more people, sustain higher levels of motivation, and withstand more challenges than those that are singular. You must ensure that what you can see is also something that others can see and vice versa.

The most effective leaders in higher education are those who most frequently Inspire a Shared Vision. We asked direct reports how often their leaders engaged in the six behaviors associated with Inspire a Shared Vision on the Leadership Practices Inventory, with assessments ranging from 1 (Almost never) to 10 (Almost always). We also asked them a separate question about the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the statement Overall, this person is an effective leader (1 = Strongly disagree and 5 = Strongly agree). The analysis showed that the effectiveness ratings of leaders by their direct reports increased systematically (p < 0.001) as leaders were observed engaging more and more frequently in the behaviors associated with inspiring a shared vision. There was a remarkable 85 percent bump in effectiveness from the bottom to the top quartile.

CLARIFY YOUR VISION

No matter what term is used—vision, purpose, mission, legacy, dream, calling, or burning agenda—the intent is the same. People who exercise leadership want to do something significant and accomplish something that no one else has yet achieved. What that something is—that sense of meaning and purpose—must come from within. That’s why, just as we said about values, you must first clarify your own visions of the future before you can expect to enlist others in a shared vision. To create a climate of meaningfulness, first you must believe in something yourself. Before you can inspire others, you must be inspired. Your passion is an indicator of what you feel most deeply about and find worthwhile in and of itself. It’s a clue to what is intrinsically rewarding to you.

You can’t impose a vision on others. It must be something that has meaning to them, not just to you. Leaders must foster conditions under which people will do things because they want to, not because they have to. One of the most important practices of leadership is giving life and work a sense of meaning and purpose by offering an exciting vision of the future that could be better than what exists at the moment.¹ Leaders structure environments so that personal values and department, program, or institutional visions intersect. For example, people’s answer to the question about how often their leader “shows others how their long-term interests can be realized by enlisting in a common vision” was strongly related to the extent to which they felt they were making a difference in their organization, as shown in figure 3.1.

In this digital age, people often ask, “How can I have a vision of what’s going to happen on this campus, or in this state, let alone in the grander business of higher education, five or 10 or even two years from now, when I don’t even know what’s going to happen next week or even over this next term?” Here are a couple of ways of answering this question. First, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke poignantly about his dream, but he also said that you don’t have to see the whole staircase to take the first step. So long as you have some idea about where you are going, you can take the next step.

Figure 3.1 People feel they are making a difference in their organizations in direct relationship to the frequency they report that their leader shows others how their long-term interests can be realized by enlisting in a common vision.

Another way to think about this is to imagine you’re driving along the Pacific Coast Highway heading south from San Francisco on a bright, sunny day. The hills are on your left, the ocean on your right. On some curves the cliffs plunge several hundred feet to the water. You can see for miles and miles. You’re cruising along at the speed limit, tunes blaring, top down, wind in your hair, and not a care in the world. Suddenly, without warning, you come around a bend in the road, and there’s a blanket of fog as thick as you’ve ever seen it. What do you do? We’ve asked this question many, many times, and we get the same answers: “I slow way down, turn my lights on, grab the steering wheel with both hands, tense up, lean forward, and turn off the radio.” Then you go around the next curve in the road, the fog has lifted, and it’s clear again. What do you do? Relax, turn the lights off, speed up, turn the radio back on, and enjoy the scenery.

This analogy illustrates the importance of clarity of vision, especially what it takes to move ahead quickly and confidently. How fast can you drive in the fog without risking your own or other people’s lives? How comfortable are you riding in a car with someone who drives fast in the fog? Are you able to drive more quickly when it’s foggy or when it’s clear? It’s obvious, isn’t it? You can go more quickly when your vision is clear.

Discover Your Theme

Just knowing that having a vision is essential doesn’t make one manifest over your head like a light bulb. When we ask people to tell us where their visions come from, they often have great difficulty describing the process. And when they do provide an answer, typically it’s more about a feeling, a sense, a hunch, a gut reaction. After all, there’s no map or interstate highway to the future. When people first take on their roles as leaders—whether they’re appointed or they step forward and volunteer—they often don’t have a clear vision of the future.

In the beginning what leaders on college campuses typically have is a theme. They have concerns, desires, hypotheses, propositions, arguments, hopes, and dreams—core concepts around which they organize their aspirations and actions. Leaders often begin the process of envisioning the future by discovering their themes. What leaders eventually say about their vision is an elaboration, an interpretation, and a variation on those themes. Fortunately, there are ways to improve your ability to articulate your themes, and ultimately your visions, of the future.²

For example, finding your vision, like finding your voice, is a process of self-exploration and self-creation. It’s an intuitive, emotional undertaking. There’s often no logic to it. What we’ve seen is that exemplary leaders have a passion for their departments, their causes, their programs, their students, their subject matter, their technologies, their communities—something other than their own fame and fortune. Leaders care about something much bigger than themselves and much bigger than all of us. Leaders care about making a difference by changing the status quo in some meaningful way.

And emotions are contagious. If you don’t care deeply about something, how can you expect others to feel any sense of conviction? How can you expect others to get jazzed if you’re not energized and excited yourself? How can you expect others to suffer through the inevitable long hours and hard work if you’re not similarly committed?

We asked Kent Koth why he selected a particular project as his Personal-Best Leadership Experience. His answer speaks volumes about how in leading others we discover our own passions: “This was the defining moment in my budding professional life. It was at this moment that I knew what I was born to do. I had found my place in the world.”

Kent wanted to provide an educational and service opportunity for students to engage with issues and people with whom they were unfamiliar. As a community outreach program coordinator, he traveled to San Francisco with a group of students for the campus’s first-ever “alternative” spring break. This group slept on the floor of a downtown church and worked at local homeless shelters. Each night they cooked dinner together and discussed the day’s events as they ate. After dinner they gathered as a group to participate in team-building exercises, talk about social issues related to their service experiences, write in the group’s journal, and prepare for the next day’s work.

His fondest wish for the project, Kent told us, “was for students to return to campus with a new sense of passion and commitment to social justice. I hoped the trip would serve as the spark to ignite a lifelong exploration of commitment to others. I dreamed that these students would come away stronger, wiser, and more compassionate.” Kent discovered his theme: “I possessed a passion for justice that motivated me to construct a project that would raise complicated ethical issues. Everyone is equal. Everyone has a gift to give. Everyone has something to learn. Love and justice can guide us to a new level of awareness.”

Explore Your Past

As contradictory as it might seem, in aiming for the future you need to look back to your past. Looking backward can actually enable you to see farther than if you only stare straight ahead. Understanding your personal history can help you identify themes, patterns, and beliefs that both underscore why you care about particular issues or circumstances now and explain why making them better in the future is such a high priority.

Consider the journey taken by William Hwang, who founded United InnoWorks Academy, a nonprofit dedicated to opening the world of science and engineering to middle-school students from disadvantaged backgrounds; it aims to not only ignite their love of learning but also inspire volunteerism in college students. His passion was sparked when he reflected on his own experiences in high school, when he had attended several special summer programs that were “born from someone’s imagination and hard work…that changed, reshaped, and influenced me in amazing ways. They helped me focus, opened my eyes to new and exciting possibilities.”

William remembered a track teammate who had few role models and was on probation throughout high school; thinking about him sparked, as William explained, “a burning desire to do something to help others who might be lacking the same opportunities.” He decided to devote himself to something that could bring opportunities of the kind he had to underprivileged children who needed them the most, and the United InnoWorks Academy was born. Beginning with a single program in 2003, InnoWorks has nurtured more than 2,400 students at 14 university chapters around the world, and those numbers continue to grow.

As William learned to appreciate, when you gaze first into your past, you elongate your future. You also magnify your future and give it detail as, like William, you recall the richness of your past experiences. So, to envision the possibilities in the distant future, look first to the past. When you do, you’re likely to find that your central theme has been there for a long time.

In addition to identifying lifelong themes, there’s another benefit to looking back before looking ahead: you can gain a greater appreciation for how long it can take to fulfill aspirations. You also realize that many, many paths can be pursued and that there may be new summits that you want to climb.

None of this is to say that the past is your future. Adopting that extremely dangerous perspective would be like trying to drive to the future while looking only in the rearview mirror. From that angle you’d drive yourself and your program right off a cliff. The point is to avail yourself of the widest variety of experiences possible. Broaden your experiences and expand your network of connections. As you do that, your time horizons will also stretch forward.

Immerse Yourself

As you gain experience, you naturally acquire information about what happens, how things happen, and who makes things happen in an organization, in a profession, on a campus, or within an industry. When you’re presented with an unfamiliar problem, you consciously (or unconsciously) draw on your experiences to help solve it. You select crucial information, make relevant comparisons, and integrate lessons you’ve learned with the current situation. For the experienced leader, all of this may happen in a matter of seconds. But it’s the years of direct contact with a variety of problems and situations that equip the leader with unique insight; listening, reading, feeling, and sensing—these experiences improve the leader’s vision. Leaders develop an intuitive sense of what is going to happen down the road—they can anticipate what is just around the corner. They are also sufficiently self-aware to recognize their biases because having experience and expertise can also blind you to new, important information. Exemplary leaders take care to look beyond the data that confirms their initial judgments.³

Remember, if you don’t believe that something can change for the better, you are unlikely to take any action; as a result, you will be right—few things improve all by themselves. To exercise leadership, you must believe yourself before anyone else will believe that they should come aboard with you. Jo-Anne Shibles spoke of this feeling as a “gut reaction” that, in her case, told her that the Student Leadership Institute she was asked to develop was not just something that could be established but that it would make a significant difference for students and others on campus. Jo-Anne, the activities coordinator within the office of student life, believed right from the start that she could quickly and successfully get the institute up and running.

The prospect excited her, and she could visualize in some detail how the program would operate and who might be involved in it. As she told us: “I could see students sitting in a class, listening to a faculty member talk with them about ethical dilemmas and slippery slopes. I could see small groups of students talking about how different cultural backgrounds influence our leadership behaviors. I could see students taking on more active roles in their organizations. I could see how excited students would be to get their certificates at our reception at the end of the program.” From her initial gut feeling—and lots of hard work—came a successful pilot program in which 50 students explored their leadership styles and developed leadership skills. Now, many years later, the project still makes Jo-Anne smile—and it continues on the campus, inspiring an ever-growing group of student leaders.

Like Jo-Anne, many of the people we interviewed mentioned that the exercise of analyzing their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences was enlightening for them: by highlighting critical lessons from the past, they were able to generate insightful road maps for leadership highways still to be explored. The knowledge gained from direct experience and active searching, once stored in the subconscious, becomes the basis for leaders’ intuition, insight, and vision.

Envisioning the future is a process that begins with an inspiration, a feeling, or a sense that something is worth doing. Your vision of the future may be fuzzy, but at least you’re focused on a meaningful theme. You believe that the present situation could be better than it is today. You act on your instincts, and the vision gets a little clearer. You do something else that moves you forward, and the vision gets clearer still. You pay attention to it, experience it, immerse yourself in it. You get the ball rolling, and over time you see more detail in your dream. It’s an iterative process, one that eventually results in something that you and others can articulate.

GET OTHERS ON BOARD

Visions are about hopes, dreams, and aspirations. They’re declarations of a strong desire to achieve something ambitious. They’re expressions of optimism. Can you imagine a leader enlisting others in a cause by saying, “I’d like you to join me in doing the ordinary”? Not likely. Visions stretch people to imagine exciting possibilities, breakthrough programs, and revolutionary social change. Grand aspirations such as these cannot be achieved, however, until they are shared by your constituents—the staff, faculty, administration, students, alumni, donors, or others you want to enlist. This is exactly what Derek McCormack, vice chancellor, told us about the time he was charged with growing the institution. He realized that his job “wasn’t to find a vision myself but to create a shared vision so that we could all go on the same journey together.”

It’s not enough for a leader to have a vision; the members of the leader’s department must also understand, accept, and commit to it. When others shared with us their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences, they made comments similar to Derek’s. People frequently talked about the need to get buy-in from others on the vision. They explained how they had to communicate the purpose and build support for a unified direction. They knew that everyone had to commit to a common purpose. They understood that to get everyone on the same journey, they had to be able to communicate why others should want to join in, what it would mean to them, and how it would benefit them. While you might be able to see how others’ interests are served, if they can’t see how their needs are connected to the larger vision, they will be reluctant to climb aboard. But when they do, the department’s and the institution’s ability to change and reach its potential soars.

Getting others on board means you need to listen deeply. From the conversations you have with constituents, you need to find a common purpose that unites potentially diverse motivations and aspirations. You need to be able to instill a sense of pride in being unique. You need to paint pictures that make the vision come alive, and you need to speak with conviction and enthusiasm about the exciting possibilities.

Listen Deeply

Identifying who your constituents are and discovering their common aspirations are required steps that leaders must take in enlisting others. No matter how grand the dream of an individual visionary, if others don’t see in it the possibility of realizing their own hopes and desires, they won’t follow. You must show others how they too will be served by the long-term vision of the future and how their specific needs can be satisfied.

What this takes is attentive listening so that you can sense the purpose in others. By knowing your constituents, listening to them, and soliciting their advice, you are better able to give voice to their concerns. You can stand before others and say with assurance, “Here’s what I heard you say that you want for yourselves. Here’s how your own needs and interests will be served by enlisting in a common cause.” In a sense, leaders hold up a mirror and reflect back to their constituents what they say they most desire. When people see that reflection, they recognize themselves and can embrace the image.

Appreciating that leadership is a relationship puts listening in its proper perspective. It has been said that no great idea enters the mind through an open mouth. Exemplary leaders know that they need not have all the ideas or all the answers themselves. The origin of a vision does not arise from gazing at a crystal ball; there are clues all around you if you are able to listen for them as they are passed on from students, colleagues, alumni, parents, and donors. There is no shortage of ideas and opportunities for making your part of the institution even better than it already is.

To accurately and faithfully hear what constituents want—what they hope to make you understand, appreciate, and include in the vision—requires periodically suspending regular activities and spending time simply listening to others. Get to know your constituents by visiting their hangouts; go to sporting events, recitals, dining halls, the library, lectures, and classes. Get out of your office and wander into the offices of faculty and staff colleagues. Have coffee, breakfast, lunch, afternoon breaks, or some unstructured time with constituent groups. Find out what’s going on with them and what they are hoping to achieve from their relationship with you and your program.

Discover a Common Purpose

Have you asked people in your department or program why they stay? More likely, and especially if staffing is part of your responsibilities, you worry about turnover, retention rates, and why people leave. Instead think about the vast majority of those who stay and ask them why they stick around. Why do you? The most important reason people give about why they don’t leave or aren’t looking for another position is that they find the work they are doing to be challenging, meaningful, and purposeful.

Academic institutions, on both the faculty and staff sides, have an advantage over many other types of organizations in that our colleagues generally start out with a shared commitment to learning and personal and professional development. Listening with sensitivity to the aspirations of others reveals common values that link everyone on campus. People want a chance to be tested, a chance to make it on their own, to take part in a social experiment, to do something well, to do something good, and to change the way things are.⁴ Aren’t these the essence of what most leadership opportunities are all about?

What people want from their workplace has not changed very dramatically over the years despite economic upturns and downturns. Regardless of profession, industry, or location, people rank “interesting work” well above “high income” as important. And the quality of leadership (“working for a leader with vision and values”) is even more motivating than dollars. Would it surprise you that the most frequently mentioned measure of success in work life is “personal satisfaction for doing a good job”? People cite this between three and four times as often as “getting ahead” or “making a good living.”⁵

Universities have seldom been places where people go to work to maximize their financial gains. There’s considerable opportunity for campus leaders to appeal to much more than material rewards. Great leaders evoke meaning. The values and interests of freedom, self-actualization, learning, community, excellence, justice, service, and social responsibility truly attract people to a common cause. Shared visions are “a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power.”⁶

There is a deep human yearning to make a difference. People want to know that they’re doing something meaningful on this earth, that there’s a purpose to their existence. Work can provide that purpose, and increasingly the workplace is where people pursue meaning and identity.⁷ The best university-based leaders are able to bring out and make use of this human longing by communicating the meaning and significance of the college’s work so that people understand their own important role in perpetuating it. When leaders clearly communicate a shared vision of an organization, they ennoble those who work on its behalf. They elevate the human spirit.

Take Pride in Being Unique

Visions communicate what makes the team, department, school, or university singular and unequaled; they set the organization apart from all others. There is no advantage to working for an institution that does precisely the same thing as the one across town. For students, faculty, staff, or alumni to want to sign up with you, they first must understand how what you are proposing is distinctive and stands out from the crowd. Uniqueness fosters pride. It boosts the self-respect and self-esteem of everyone associated with the organization. The prouder people are of the college where they work, their students and graduates, the more engaged they are likely to be.

For example, when describing one of her most admired leaders, Lina Chen told us, “She made me feel proud; she made me feel that what I was doing was special and made a unique contribution.” Lina worked in the university’s research lab with renowned scientists, but she was neither a scholar nor a researcher. She was responsible for computer support and making sure that all the equipment was up and running without any issues. However, she says, this wasn’t how her leader described what her job responsibilities were:

She began by explaining to me the importance of the research that was being done and how it could impact the lives of many people. Furthermore, the more accurate our results from the research were, the more beneficial it will be to those who are involved because we can help improve their quality of life. To keep the computer equipment up and running is crucial because it makes the researchers’ jobs easier. You are helping them in improving the environment and making the world a better place.

For Lina this “made my job very meaningful and inspiring to be part of a team that is making a difference in the world.”

Leaders like Lina’s get people excited about signing on for their vision by making sure that everyone involved feels that what they do is unique and believes that they play a crucial role regardless of job title or specific responsibilities. Feeling unique also enables smaller units within larger institutions to have their own vision while still being part of the collective one. Although every unit (department, program, or school) within a university must be aligned with the overall organizational vision, it can express its unique purpose within the larger whole. Every function and every department can differentiate itself by finding its most distinctive qualities. Each can be proud of the ideal and unique image of its future as it works toward the collective future of the larger institution.

Invoke Images of the Future

A beacon of light cutting through the fog is an image you can picture in your mind. Leaders often talk about the future with such visual references. They speak about foresight, focus, forecasts, future scenarios, points of view, and new perspectives. Visions are images in the mind, and leaders make them real to others by making them more concrete and tangible. They bring impressions to life by painting word pictures. As shown in figure 3.2, the more frequently that leaders were seen as “describing a compelling image of what our future could look like,” the more their direct reports indicated that they were clear about what was expected of them in their jobs.

Figure 3.2 People’s clarity about what is expected of them in their jobs increases with the frequency to which leaders describe a compelling image of what our future could look like.

In our workshops and classes, we often use an exercise to illustrate the power of painting word pictures. We ask people to think about the city of Paris, France, and to shout out the first thing that comes to mind. The replies—the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Seine, Notre Dame, good food, wine, romance—all are images of real places and real sensations. No one calls out the kilometers, population, or gross domestic product of Paris. The same would be true for your college or university campus. Why? Human memory is stored in images and sensory impressions, not in numbers. We recall images of reality, not abstractions from it.

When you invent the future, you need to get a mental picture of what things will be like long before you begin the journey. Images are your windows on the world of tomorrow. When talking about taking people (your department or program) to places they have never been before, you start by imagining what this would look like. For example, in spreading the word across campus about the new Student Leadership Institute, Jo-Anne helped others imagine it. She emphasized “that the program had not been done before.” She told students being recruited for the pilot project: “This is new. It is going to be great—and you are part of making it great. Imagine being able to learn how to build a team within your club, deal with someone who is sloughing off on their job, or run an effective meeting.” Jo-Anne conveyed vivid images of the concrete skills that students would gain by being involved. She explained how they could do all of this in a few hours a week, in time between classes. By spending time one-on-one and in small groups, she made the vision real and enlisted others in it.

Just as Jo-Anne did, leaders animate the vision and make manifest the purpose so that others can see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, feel it. Leaders make full use of the power of language in communicating a shared identity and giving life to visions. Successful leaders use metaphors and other figures of speech to lend vividness and tangibility to abstract ideas. Leaders draw word pictures, give examples, tell stories, and relate anecdotes. They find ways of giving expression to their hopes for the future. In making the intangible vision tangible, leaders ignite constituents’ passion and develop a shared sense of destiny.

Lori Ann Roth, her university’s director of training and organizational development, told us about another method for conveying a shared image of the future—one that involved not just word pictures but actual pictures. She described how her team developed a literal vision board: They attached their mission statement to foam core poster board, and everyone added pictures, words, feelings, or phrases that resonated with this, then they mounted it all on a wall in a common area. “When you looked at it, you could actually feel the team spirit and emotion that went into creating the vision,” Lori said. “Seeing the vision board every day reminded each of us to do something to move forward toward our vision.”

Leaders like Lori and Jo-Anne teach others the vision. They engage constituents in conversations about their lives, their own hopes and dreams, and how they can see these realized by sharing and participating in the vision. Lori, Jo-Anne, and other exemplary leaders know they can’t impose their personal dream on others. They know that creating a common vision is about developing a shared sense of destiny. It’s about enrolling others so that they can see how their own interests and aspirations are aligned with the vision and can thereby become mobilized to commit their individual energies to its realization.

Similarly, Sean Collins knew he had to engage with others on campus to conjure a unified picture of what could be. When he became director of environment, health, and safety, the campus research and teaching laboratories were not uniformly safe from chemical spills, and there were unlabeled containers everywhere. His vision was to establish and maintain spaces that were 100 percent safe and in so doing to cultivate a culture of safety on campus.

He was confident that the faculty implicitly shared this vision because “no faculty member would want their students to get hurt or their laboratories shut down by inspection agencies.” He knew that he couldn’t make decisions unilaterally, and, moreover, he couldn’t personally be on hand in every lab at all hours of the day to ensure that safety standards were being met. This meant that he had to get others to embrace his vision and want to make their labs as safe as possible for everyone involved. He spent lots of time listening to the people directly responsible for the labs, highlighting their areas of shared concerns and aspirations and collaborating to find solutions that worked for everyone involved. In the end he was able to go from something that was implicitly shared to something that faculty explicitly supported.

Practice Positive Communication and Be Expressive

To foster team spirit, breed optimism, promote resilience, and renew faith and confidence, leaders learn to look on the bright side. They keep hope alive. They strengthen their constituents’ belief that struggles today will produce a more promising tomorrow.

People want leaders with enthusiasm, with a bounce in their step and a positive attitude, because this conveys that they’ll be participating in an invigorating journey. People with a can-do attitude are followed, not those cynics who give 10 reasons why something can’t be done or who don’t make others feel good about themselves or what they’re doing. Naysayers only stop forward progress; they do not start it.

Researchers working with neural networks have documented that when people feel rebuffed or left out, the brain activates a site for registering physical pain.⁸ People actually remember downbeat comments far more often, in greater detail, and with more intensity than they do encouraging words. When negative remarks become a preoccupation, people’s brains lose mental efficiency. This is all the more reason for leaders to be positive. A positive approach to life broadens people’s concepts of future possibilities, and these exciting options build on one another.⁹ In an affirming environment, people become more innovative and see more options. Those who enjoy more positivity are also better able to cope with adversities and are more resilient during times of high stress, which is a vital capacity when dealing with uncertain and challenging times.

The leaders people admire most are energetic, vigorous, active, and full of life. Randi DuBois, one of the founders of Pro-Action, gets people to stretch themselves by engaging in challenging physical tasks. Typically, her clients are nervous, even a bit scared at first. But people of all ages, sizes, and physical abilities have successfully completed her outdoor challenge courses. How does Randi succeed in leading these people? Her secret is very simple: she’s always positive that people can do the course, and she never says never. We have watched her in programs with our students and colleagues as she conveys very clearly that people have the power within themselves to accomplish whatever they desire. (Both authors know this from personal experience, as we have been 40 feet above the ground, leaping off a small platform for an iron ring while Randi cheered us on.)

In discussions on why particular leaders have a magnetic effect, they are often described as charismatic. But charisma has become such an overused and misused term that it’s almost useless as a descriptor of leaders. For instance, leadership scholars note that “in the popular media, charisma has come to mean anything ranging from chutzpah to Pied Piperism, from celebrity to superman status. It has become an overworked cliché for strong, attractive, and inspiring personality.”¹⁰

To better understand this elusive quality, social scientists have observed the behavior of individuals who are deemed charismatic. What they’ve found is that such people are just more animated than others. They smile more, speak faster, pronounce words more clearly, and move their heads and bodies more often. They are also more likely to reach out and touch or make some physical contact with others during greetings.¹¹ Accordingly, charisma can be better understood as expressiveness.

People often underestimate their abilities to be expressive. We’ve found that people’s common perception of themselves as uninspiring is in sharp contrast to their performance when talking about their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences or their ideal futures—or even their upcoming holidays and vacations. When relating hopes, dreams, and successes, people are almost always emotionally expressive. Expressiveness comes naturally when talking about deep desires for the future: People lean forward in their chairs and move their arms about, their eyes light up, their voices sing with emotion, and they smile. They are enthusiastic, articulate, optimistic, and uplifting. Emotions drive expressiveness.¹² In short, people are inspiring! What’s required is being willing to share your enthusiasm with others, rather than locking it away and assuming that expressiveness is somehow “not professional.” Leaders who make a difference on campus have a passion for what they are doing and lead from the heart.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION: INSPIRE A SHARED VISION

Visions give focus to human energy. This enables each person connected with the department, program, or institution to see more clearly what’s ahead of them and what the future will look like when everyone has added their piece. With this in mind, they can contribute to the whole, efficiently and with confidence.

But visions seen only by the leaders are insufficient to generate organized movement. You must get others to see the exciting possibilities. You breathe life into visions by communicating the hopes and dreams of others so that they clearly understand how their values and interests will be served by a particular long-term vision of the future. Speak about your own convictions and the uniqueness of your organization, and make others proud to be part of something special. Be upbeat and expressive and attract followers with your energy, optimism, and hopeful outlook.

In developing your competence in the leadership practice of Inspire a Shared Vision, spend some time reflecting on the following questions. After you’ve given them sufficient consideration, let others know what you are thinking and willing to do.

How have your past experiences shaped the important themes in your life and what you bring to the workplace? Why do you care about the work you and your team are doing? What were you doing or discussing the last time you became animated about your work?

How can you describe the difference you hope to make and why it would benefit others (students, faculty, staff, or alumni)? What hope, wish, or dream do you have for yourself as a leader and for the contributions of your team or department to your institution?

How can you find out from your team members how they explain to their friends and colleagues not just what they do but why what they do matters? What do they brag about to people outside your department or institution? What patterns do you hear in their responses, and can you use this as a mantra for inspiring your department?

When recruiting someone to join your team, how can you illustrate what you do—and why you do it—that makes the work of your unit significant and meaningful?