Leadership Vision and How to Find Your North Star

Leadership vision is a clear picture of the end state plus the direction that gets you there. It works the way a North Star works. You do not walk to it. You use it to know which way you are facing, so every decision underneath can be checked against something fixed.

Last summer I was sitting by the campfire at the ranch on a moonless, star-filled night. Away from the light pollution I do what I always do, I look up, find the Big Dipper, then find the North Star.

Here is the problem. Most people cannot tell you what north is, in the sky or in their business. Far too many are marking time. Working hard with no direction, doing nothing to make themselves better and nothing to make the world better, because they do not know their north.

That is a growing problem and it is the one this page is about.

What is leadership vision, and how is it different from a goal?

A goal is something you arrive at. A vision is the thing that tells you which goals are worth setting.

If you know which way north is, you can orient the map, because north is always up. More practically, if you know which direction north is, you can choose the direction you actually need to travel to get where you want to be.

Plenty of people have great work ethic and no idea why they are working. They know hard work matters and they just do it. Without a direction you will never get there, and you will always be where you are.

Where the vision comes from is the subject of its own page. Purpose creates hope, and hope becomes the vision. That chain is in purpose driven leadership.

How do you find your North Star?

The literal version first, because the method is the point. If you did not learn this in Boy Scouts like I did, here it is.

1. Find the Big Dipper.
2. Find the two pointer stars on the dipper pot, the ones away from the handle.
3. Extend your arm fully, put the tips of your first two fingers over the pointer stars.
4. Go five of those lengths out from the pot. That is the North Star.

It takes about eight seconds once you know it, and you can do it from anywhere with a clear sky. Now do the same thing with the business.

1. Write the end state. What does it look like when this is finished, in specific enough language that everyone will know when it arrives.
2. Find your two pointer stars. The two things that reliably tell you which way the end state sits: the customer you want, the work you want to be doing, whatever they are for you. They have to be visible from where you are standing right now.
3. Check your current direction against them. Not your effort. Your direction.
4. Name the one goal that moves you along that line this year.
5. Put a measure on it that you control, and a second measure on how you feel about the work, which is the one most people skip.
6. Tell the team the end state, not the route. People who know the end state will find a route when the first one closes.

Why does one goal beat ten?

Because only one thing can be most important, and pretending otherwise is how leaders end up bouncing between categories all year.

I saw a video suggesting a new hire write down ten goals for the next twelve months. Ten. At first glance that is not many for a hard charger. It is.

We teach life categories for managing your life, and inside all of that there is still only one thing that can be number one. I have had this conversation with team members and clients for years. If you are not clear on what is most important, you bounce from area to area.

Ask whether one category of your life supports or depends on another. I would bet it does. It reminds me of the chapter on personal values in Brené Brown's Dare to Lead, where her mentor talks her down from six or more values to two, because everything else turned out to be a subset of those two.

It may not be obvious yet how this year's goals all rest on a single one. I would bet they do. There is one goal that, if you hit it, drops the others into place, and one that, if you miss, means you did not succeed. Make that one the priority of effort and the priority of work. Do not get lost in an equally weighted, unmanageable list.

What kills a vision?

Distractions disguised as opportunities. Every one of them arrives looking like a good idea.

I had more good conversations at Shot Show than I can count, and the subject that stuck with me was focus. A good friend looked me in the eye, asked what my priority is, and pushed me to pick A or B. That is the useful kind of friend.

Later that day a company representative told me she was worried about alienating potential customers with comments some people might find controversial. I used to think the same way, until I worked out that the people likely to be offended by something I say are, in all likelihood, people I do not want to work with.

The same thing came up on return on investment. Potential clients sometimes ask about the ROI of the Green Beret Leadership Program. I struggled with that question for years. The ROI of leadership is infinite, and people who do not understand that are not people I want to work with.

When your focus and your priority are aligned with who you are, you are happier and you are more successful. That is easy to say and it is one of the hardest things to do, because we want to please everybody and be liked by everybody. Once you accept that no matter what you do not everybody will like you, things get clearer. The distractions dressed as opportunities keep coming regardless. Stand like a rock the ocean keeps crashing over.

How do you measure progress toward something that big?

By working backward from the feeling to the number, instead of starting at the number.

We all say we want to improve. I read books on personal and business development. I work out most mornings and take short walks through the day. I log my wins and keep a gratitude log. Good habits, and without a target they are spray and pray.

So take fitness. One measure I use is the scale. Not the best measure, and it is a measure. Another is how I feel through the day, tracked on a simple one to ten. That is fine, and it still begs the question of what I am measuring toward.

One of my life categories is Bad Ass Green Beret, which covers health and fitness. Now I have a category I can manage, and I still do not have an outcome. Back to weight, and the easy answer is 205, because I know how I feel at that weight and I sleep better. Easily measurable. It also does not pull me to action on its own.

So what is the real why behind 205? It comes back to what I can do. Can I go on an elk hunt at ten thousand feet for ten days? Can I handle the manual labor around the house and the ranch? Those are the real measures, and they are hard to track unless you are watching your performance and how you feel day to day.

Run the same sequence on a business goal. The revenue number is the 205. The why behind it is the elk hunt.

How do you keep going after opening day?

By accepting that nobody wins anything looking the way they looked in the first week.

I have been a Texas Rangers fan my whole life, which has been a long road. What that has taught me is that every spring we can win the World Series. Every season opening carries hope that this is the year. As my favorite American philosopher Yogi Berra put it, life imitates baseball.

What gets lost, usually right around the All-Star break, is the drive to keep going through the hard work. A hundred and sixty two games is a long regular season, and you still have to win thirteen more to take it all. That is a real test of sustained effort and improvement. No team wins the World Series playing the way it played on opening day. The team that wins works hard and improves every day.

That is the foundation. See what your success looks like, do the hard work to get there, and keep adjusting so you can actually achieve it. Hope is the fuel, and hope is also what leaders sell to their tribe. Hope of victory. Hope of winning the World Series.

What happens when you reach the top?

You celebrate, because you put a load of work into getting there.

Then you notice something, and this came up during our Veteran Business Leader Mastermind. Because you spent that whole climb improving your effort and performance, you can now see the next mountain you want to scale. You could not see it from the bottom.

In life the mountain tops are infinite. That is the good news, as long as you take the celebration first.

Where to start

Pick the one goal. Not the list, the one. Then write the end state in a sentence your team could repeat to a customer.

If the honest answer is that you do not have a north yet, start with purpose driven leadership, because the direction comes from there.

When the vision is clear and the problem is execution, that is what a Fractional COO is for. When the leadership team is not pointed the same way, an Executive Offsite is the fastest way to find out. The Green Beret Leadership Program is how the leaders under you learn to hold the direction when you are not in the room.

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