Question: We have a wonderfully gifted Executive Director. She is a real visionary and has endless ideas for what she wants our organization to become. I guess I should be grateful, but there is a downside to her gifts. That is, the rest of us only share in the vision, if it's the same as hers. I almost get the feeling that it has become a vehicle for her ideas, where it used to be an organization to express the vision of all of us who formed it. Do you understand my feelings? Can you shed any light on this?
Answer: To answer your question properly it's necessary to make the distinction between what is strategic and what is tactical. Besides that, we have to make sure we are talking about the same thing when we speak of "vision".
It is an important part of the answer to the basic strategic question, "What services shall we offer to which people in which places and in what order of priority?"
Answering that question is the job of a governing board, not your Executive Director. To be sure the Executive Director has a major role in assisting the board to scan the environment to stay current with the real needs of the target group your organization serves. But it's still the board that must distil all that information into a strategic plan, of which the Vision Statement is a very important part.
A Vision Statement is a component of the strategic plan of an organization. It is a view of what we want the organization to look like 20 years from now - beyond the planning horizon. The Vision challenges the entire organization, drawing its people into the future, motivating them to achieve more than they imagine is possible.
If what you mean by her "vision" is the formulation of the Vision Statement, then I'm afraid your board has defaulted its responsibility to a charismatic leader. The two main consequences of that are that the board and staff may not own the vision, since they did not create it. Second, the next Executive Director may have a very different vision and the organization will feel like a yo-yo.
On the other hand vision may also mean creative thinking regarding "how" to achieve the mission that grows out of that vision. That is tactical and answers "how" the staff will realize the organization's vision and mission within the limits of its mandate and resources.
If that is what you are experiencing, then it is more a case of the Executive Director missing out on the power of the ideas of the rest of her staff. In either case, it does sound a little like your Executive Director might favor a more authoritarian style of leadership. I guess it's a feeling of being left out that I hear you expressing in your question.
Probably the most helpful thing you might do is to schedule some time with her and to discuss your feelings and thoughts directly with her. Ideally, the result will be that the organization will still benefit from her creative strengths but that others will be able to give expression to theirs as well.
And certainly, the board must take control of the strategic planning process, if it hasn't already. Failing to do that will clearly result in a loss of control of the most important aspect of the organization: it's vision and mission.
Les Stahlke, President
| 
