Here’s a clear sign that the leadership in an organization lacks vision and purpose:
They launch initiatives. A lot of them.
Leaders with vision and purpose don’t require initiatives. They already know what is important.
They’ve already identified the direction that their organization is headed.
They know what needs to be done.
They already have a plan.
Initiatives are launched by meandering managers and useless leaders who read a book, listen to a podcast, or watch someone speak and think, “Yes, that’s what we need to be doing! Let’s do that!” or “She has a great vision! I think I’ll make it my own, too, on top of all the other visions I’ve also adopted as my own!”
Years ago, a superintendent in my school district would subject us to a new initiative every year because they had spent the previous summer reading a book or attending a conference and had become enamored with a new idea.
None of these ideas were aligned with one another. None of them, when lined up end to end, created a cohesive philosophy of any kind. They were simply new, shiny objects that got the superintendent excited, so they became organizational necessities, even if they didn’t produce lasting change.
And of course, they came along with the inevitable unpacking of this and workshopping of that. Teachers were subjected to training, meetings, and lectures on initiatives that would usually be forgotten in a year or two.
This isn’t to say the ideas were all bad. Any one of those initiatives could have been productive, but the endless stream of initiatives produced very little in terms of lasting impact or direction because, when combined, they created an initiative salad of nonsense and waste.
A leader either has a well-defined vision and purpose, developed over a career of experience, introspection, and insight, or they latch onto the newest, brightest baubles and serve them up on an endless series of platters, much to the dismay of the people subjected to this awful feast of ideas.
Adopting new ideas is easy.
Vision is hard.
This is why outstanding leadership is so hard to find.
