Aim High, See Far

Posted: Tuesday March 17, 2009 under Lead Individuals

In our training courses, we tell leaders their job is mostly about creating change — positive, progressive, forward-moving change — in, and through, people. Simple idea, right? Why lead people to stay in one spot?

The changes we lead can be simple or complex, evolutionary or revolutionary, incremental or profound, small-step or giant-leap. Either way, we’re only successful when we connect people to the change we want. Of course, we connect other people only when we, ourselves, connect first.

The key to leading people (ourselves included) toward a specific change?

• Step 1: See It (get it in our head)
• Step 2: Believe It (embrace it in our heart)
• Step 3: Achieve It (put it in our hands)

I will introduce Step 1 in this article and save the other two for a later date.

SEE IT. What does that mean? In great leaders, it means we set high expectations for ourselves and others. We look for opportunities and we see possibilities. We refuse to settle for the status quo or the easy road or the good-enough result. We dream big and aim high.

Some of us look at a rock pile and see a rock pile. Some of us look at a rock pile and see a cathedral.

We’re all looking at the same thing, but we see something very different. An old Charlie Brown cartoon demonstrates the same notion:

One day Charlie Brown and his friends were lying out on the lawn. Lucy looks up at the clouds and says to her friends, “What do you see up there when you look at the clouds?” Schroeder, who plays the piano, looks up and says, “I see Beethoven seated at a piano, playing one of his great symphonies.” Linus looks up and says, “I see Genghis Khan mounted on his white charger, leading his troops into battle.” Lucy says, “Well, I see Martin Luther nailing the Ninety-Five Theses onto the door at Wittenberg. What do you see, Charlie Brown?” He says, “I was going to say I see a horsey and a duckie, but I’ve changed my mind.”

One of the reasons high expectations are so important is that they are often self-fulfilling. If we expect less, we often get less; if we expect more, we often get more. People respond to what we expect from them, and the same goes for what we expect from ourselves.

Is it possible to set expectations that are too high?

Although expectations should always be constructive — we don’t want to be like those over-demanding parents who chain their child too tightly to a textbook or a soccer ball or a violin — we should not be timid in where we want to go and what we want to achieve.

Step 1 of leading… SEE IT. See it for what it is, and, more importantly, see it for what it can be. Aim high and see far, and see how far that takes you. My guess is it will take you to Step 2… BELIEVE IT, which we’ll talk about next time.