Leaders know the critical importance of a vision to guide them and their company to success. They expend enormous resources developing and acting on that vision within their management teams and driving their organization forward.
The most successful leaders are also adept at sharing, communicating, and constantly nurturing that vision with their employees, ensuring that the entire company is focused on that same ideal, navigating always toward the same destination – in the direction of their “North Star,” if you will.
An insightful blog, “What Wise Leaders Always Follow,” posted on the HBR (Harvard Business Review) Insight Center, provides practicable guidance to business leaders about identifying their own North Star and how to follow it.
Author Prasad Kaipa, a senior fellow in the Center for Leadership, Innovation and Change at the Indian School of Business (Hyderabad, India), says that wise leaders “root themselves in a noble purpose, align it with a compelling vision, and then take action… That noble purpose becomes a North Star, giving direction when the path ahead is hazy, humility when arrogance announces false victory, and inspiration when the outlook seems bleak.”
Simplifying One’s Choices
Indeed, as Kaipa points out, “Though it is not always simple to find one’s North Star, once it appears, its guidance helps simplify one’s choices… It becomes their calling, and they service that calling willingly, happily, and infectiously.”
The key word in that last sentence is “infectiously,” because in order to be compelling, a North Star must be infectious in its conciseness, while the leader that communicates it must endow it with real world meaning and enthusiasm.
Employees and line managers sense their leader's passion, and it spreads in the same way that a political cause can suddenly catch fire when a politician succinctly verbalizes a guiding principle that people immediately understand, identify with and latch onto.
Pres. John Kennedy’s admonition that “we choose to go to the moon” conveyed a common desire and, ultimately, a destiny. He gave the nation an ideal to aim for, something that the people could visualize and strive for. Everyone directly and indirectly involved in the space program instinctively sensed his or her role in reaching for Kennedy’s North Star – a destiny that, in fact, out-lived Kennedy. The nation rose to the challenge and succeeded. The citizenry was universally enthused and supportive.
In the case of a business, the North Star is not a fixed, finite point in time or space, or a specific end in itself. Kaipa illustrates his essay by discussing at length the Aravind Eye Care System and the North Star that its founder, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswammy fixed on to start the company: “To eliminate needless blindness by providing appropriate, compassionate, high-quality eye care for all.”
Kaipa says it was a “seemingly impossible dream.” To support it, the founder developed a simple set of principles:
- Turn no one away regardless of ability to pay
- Give everyone the same high quality care
- Don’t be dependent on outside funding sources
Though he doesn’t say it outright, we can infer that Dr. Venkataswammy’s North Star and guiding principles inspired not only his employees, but also everyone it touched. There’s something powerful and empowering about being associated with a cause whose North Star is like that. Your North Star needn’t be so lofty or altruistic, but it should match your desires, affinities, abilities, and reach, including those of your employees.
Touching External Audiences
A compelling North Star and its infectiousness can also serve as an effective recruiting tool, attracting exactly the kinds of people who are inspired by it and thus eager to apply their skills and energies to help the organization attain it. Equally important, it attracts customers and builds brand loyalty.
Communicating your North Star becomes an all-encompassing affair, reaching not just the internal audience but also customers, venders, and investors. People feel more connected to a business when they sense its guiding spirit and want to invest in it themselves, either by buying its products or stocks, or joining the effort as an employee.
Perhaps Apple is the best contemporary example of a company that has identified its North Star and effectively communicated it to its internal and external audiences. Steve Jobs famously said he wanted to “put a dent in the universe” – a new age way of saying that he wanted Apple truly to change the way people lived their lives.
I contend that Apple became successful because it – more especially, Steve Jobs – created and effectively communicated its North Star. More important, Apple established a pattern of breakthrough products and services that repeatedly validated its North Star. Each time it did so, it reinforced its core principles while increasing employee and customer loyalty – which is about as good it gets for a business.
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