A leader's job is to cast vision. The speaker uses the lead dog principle from dog-sled racing: the lead dog's pace sets the speed for everyone behind. He outlines a framework: a 10-year vision, annual reviews, and a 1-year plan. His company's 10-year vision to impact 10,000 recruiting leaders drove them to launch podcasts, write a book, and create a coaching class.
Leaders who lead should cast vision. Okay, I find that most leaders don't. So if you're a leader, you really should be looking into the future and deciding where you want to go. Where do you want to lead your team? Inside my house, one of the principles that we have that we talk about all the time with our kids is we call it the lead dog principle. And the lead dog principle is this, is that when you understand how dog sled racing takes place, there's only one dog that's at the lead of that pack, and that pack never goes any faster than the lead dog goes. And so one of the things that I'm aware of is that if you're in a leadership role, the people that follow you are never going to go any faster than what you lead them. They're never going to go any further than the vision that you cast. And so I would dare say in a lot of my seasons of being under leadership that I wasn't being inspired. I wasn't being challenged. There wasn't a big vision being cast for me, for the people around me in the direction that we were going. It's our jobs as leaders to cast that clear, that clear vision. So just establish that. This is a great time to look at the next decade. Like our company has a 10-year vision and every single year we sit down and we look at where we are in relationship to that 10-year vision. And we set a 1-year vision, a 1-year plan of how we're going to further the vision and what are we going to accomplish in that year. And so we just went through this process. We have a new vision for 2020 that's completely aligned with the 10-year vision that we cast in 2017 when we started this company. So the 10-year vision for this organization was in year 10, we wanted to impact in that 1 year 10,000 recruiting leaders. Now that vision has been propellant for a lot of things that we've done. It's been a propellant for this podcast. It'll be a propellant for a second podcast that we're launching in 2020. It's a propellant for a book that's been written. It's a propellant for a number of things. It's propellant for a digital record— it's a recorded coaching class that we're working on right now. There's all kinds of things that are looking into the future to say, how do we actually get this this message of we believe that recruiting is simple. How do we get that message to 10,000 recruiting leaders in 1 year? We would never be doing those things if we didn't have a large vision. That's, that's the power of vision, the power of being able to look in the future and see where you want to go, and then making plans for today that actually take action on where you want to be in 10 years. It forces you way outside your comfort zone. It forces you to do things that you wouldn't normally do. So vision should be a big part of what you're thinking about and what you're planning around for the upcoming decade and specifically the upcoming year.
