One Thing to Do That Will Make You a Better Leader
The most important thing you can do as a leader is to make sure you understand the difference between a vision and a goal. Goals are tactical. Vision is leadership. Here’s how I define the difference.
In any organization, the metrics of accomplishment tend to focus on measurable things. There is nothing mysterious about looking at charts looking at increasing or decreasing slopes. Plenty of industries would have you believe that metrics are the most important thing. But metrics are simply goals. The difference between managing goals and leadership can be understood by looking at a typical customer service operation.
Every product or service has a department assigned to field calls, emails, or text messages from customers. Paying customers for your product or service are the people who already believe in your product or service. Yet a typical call center is often outsourced to contractors or staffed by the lowest paid employees. They are typically managed by people who focus on easily measurable goals; the number of customers handled, time to resolve an issue, number of complaints, number of compliments, etc. And the goal? Reducing labor costs.
But when the inherent goal is to reduce the budget of labor on customer service, it results in a ton of effort in managing phone systems, support tickets, routing…
