Leadership and Vision

Sydney Finkelstein has an article in the Harvard Business Review called Secrets of the Superbosses. These are leaders who building exceptional organisations by spotting, training, and developing a future generation of leaders. The are able to delegate to these people, because they understand their vision.

Superbosses articulate uncompromising visions that they expect employees to internalize and follow. During the execution of work tasks, employees enjoy extraordinary authority over everything except the vision. The Superbosses generally stay clear, intervening only to ensure that decisions employees make support their visions and don’t conflict with them.

This is yet another reason why every manager should craft a compelling vision for their teams, no matter where they are in the corporate hierarchy.

Jesus that operated is the way. He spent time with the twelve and the seventy making sure that they understood his vision for the Kingdom of God and how it will come:

• go in pairs to a place and stay there
• heal the sick and cast out demons
• proclaim the good news of the kingdom
• stay in the house until the people who have decided go follow Jesus understand the vision and the method for sharing and can do it themselves.

Once they understood this vision, Jesus sent them out to do it in pairs, with no direct supervision. They experienced great success.

Paul grabbed this vision and ran with it, without Jesus needing to control him.

The modern church seems to have lost this vision, and replaced it with control and failure.