By its nature, leadership is future oriented.
Change can only ever be made in the future. The past cannot be restored; the present will vanish momentarily.
In part, leadership in procurement entails responding to an emerging situation, but it also is as much about creating a willed future, about achieving a vision of an improved state of affairs.
All procurement managers need a vision, but no leader can afford to chisel that vision in granite. There must always be objectivity in assessment and flexibility to make such changes as they prove to be necessary or desirable. This, as I have seen, was one of the critical lessons taught by Shackleton.
Vision may be described as imaginative foresight, the extraordinary ability to anticipate events and to drive the attainment of a desired object.
It is exemplified by the famous saying of George Bernard Shaw: “You see things; and you say, why? But I dream things that never were; and I say why not?”
Every leader in any business must first of all sell himself on his vision of the future. This vision gives a sense of purpose and provides meaning and direction for the organization.
However, before turning to the question of vision for the organization as a whole, a potential leader must first have a clear conception of what he or she wishes to be.
Any person that wishes to be in a leadership role must first decide what it is that they wish to lead and to where they wish to take it. Only when these questions have been answered is it possible to begin mapping out a plan of action for the organization itself.
As Mohammed Ali once observed: “Champions aren’t made in the gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them – a desire, a dream, a vision.”
Even though a sense of vision is a necessary concomitant of leadership, there are two aspects of vision that in themselves qualify the scope of any individual leader’s appeal.
First, vision by its nature tends to be partisan. Some individuals are more inclined to be receptive to a particular type of vision than others.
For instance, some people are more inclined towards a statist or collectivist agenda, while others incline towards a more individualistic approach to life.
It is very difficult for a leader of individualist persuasion to appeal successfully to constituents of statist inclination (and vice versa). In contrast, a statist of one particular stripe may succeed in winning the support of statists of an apparently different school, simply because the fundamental thinking of both schools is essentially the same.
The second self-limiting aspect of the appeal of a leaderships vision is this: a vision by itself is no more than a daydream.
In the normal case, a vision must be built not out of whim or fancy, it must be embedded in the values and traditions of the organization, respond to its realities and reflect its beliefs.
Moreover, the leadership team must be able to sell their vision to other people – that is, convince them that there is a compelling benefit to be derived through putting that vision into effect.
A leader can attract such support only to the extent that he or she can convince others that their dream is attainable. Leadership’s vision must be grounded in reality, at least as reality is perceived by those to whom the message is communicated. Thus, it has been said that leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
The communication of vision by a leader has been extensively studied in the business world, in connection with the implementation of a corporate mission statement. Many of the findings that have been made in this area are relevant to or quest to identify the methods and practices of leadership.
Like all leaders, corporate managers need to inspire, captivate imagination and raise the sights of the people they lead.
Stephen Bauld is a government procurement expert and can be reached at swbauld@purchasingci.com. Some of his columns may contain excerpts from The Municipal Procurement Handbook published by Butterworths.
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