Lesson 4: Catching the Vision

Working in a team or living with people in a community is challenging work. This past week I found myself being dragged down by a few negative voices in my midst. As negativity can be quite contagious, I felt myself and the whole group being affected.

I grouped with my leadership team to see what could be done to change the situation. We decided to throw our whole-hearted energy into working with these few individuals. Our hope was to bring a new understanding, a new line of sight that would shift perspective and thus behaviour. For a good week we went at this business. We made some progress, but I felt the efforts were moving too slowly as compared to the increasing impact on the other side. For one, the whole group still felt the burden of this negativity. And two, because I was so focused on addressing it and was not getting the type of response I wanted, my spirit drained. I started to flat-line along with the rest of my leadership team.

The situation required a new tack. A good friend met with us over lunch and issued a stern challenge: “What direction will you take this group? What’s happening now isn’t the answer and you have to decide how you want to lead. Now is the time.”

That morning during some time in reflection I had been thinking that the vision needed to become more real to everyone. We needed to understand the importance and the urgency of accomplishing what we all had come to do. As I mentioned this to my team in the subsequent discussion, a new realization came to light. The vision would provide the answer we needed.

So far, our energy had been drained by throwing water on a fire of problems, but we hadn’t looked around to see that a) most of the place was not on fire and b) many of the people were either helping fight the fire or even better, thinking on issues beyond the fire altogether (to stay with the analogy, this means they were thinking that the fire was actually a very small issue that would eventually burn-out on its own).

What we found was that the key to restoration was to re-center the work of the community on the vision and not the problems that were eating it up because of naval-gazing. Further, we shifted our focus on building up those who had the vision already and celebrated their development publicly. By bringing the vision to the front, we began to see a gentle movement towards looking up and ahead instead of down and in. By working with the visionaries, we felt our own energy rise and the group rally behind some champions who, in turn, took the opportunity to rally their colleagues and lead the way.

It didn’t transform every problem into an answer, but it did demonstrate to me the power of two things: One, the power of negativity and “fire-fighting” to bring things down and to make the scope of seeing and thinking increasingly myopic. And two, the power of vision and affirmation to lift a group to be it’s creative best.

Problems are always with us. Discussing the vision and affirmation can be tasks on a checklist. But if we can lift our eyes to see the vision with a genuine freshness and share it in kind – oh, how the water rises!