Putting the 7 Perspectives into Action
While most leaders readily grasp three to four of these seven perspectives, very few see all of them with the same level of clarity.
Cheryl was a vice president in a global firm when we first met her. Cheryl, with her coach providing the Outsider’s perspective, developed muscle and competence in each of these perspectives. She needed the most help with Vision (Perspective Two). Once she got help there and saw a clear and compelling future, her career really took off. She began to see what others didn’t, and the executive leadership in her organization gave her a path to move up to a divisional president. Today she oversees a large international division. How did she get clarity on Vision?
It took Perspective Seven (the Outsider) to help her home in on Perspective Two. Once she developed some real strength in Vision, she began to execute better in Strategic Bets (Perspective Three), and she started getting improved results. As the team gained confidence in her, her influence and effectiveness increased.
Do you know the areas where you’re strong and where you need work?
When we began this journey, I noted the interlinkage of each of the seven perspectives. They’re connected to one another. If you have weakness in any of these perspectives, if you don’t see them clearly, then you may have real trouble making sense of the other perspectives. One weak link in an otherwise strong chain can still snap and wreck the whole thing. The clearer we see and the better our understanding of each perspective grows, the better our decision-making and influence will get.
In other words, this framework creates a leadership ecosystem.
In the classic movie The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi begins teaching karate to young Daniel LaRusso through a series of seemingly simple, unrelated tasks (painting a fence, washing a car). None of the tasks, by themselves, would have much effect; but during a training session, Mr. Miyagi shows Daniel how to combine the moves into a powerful sequence that begins to unlock his potential.
The same principle holds true with the seven perspectives. If you focus on only one of them, you won’t get much help; but when you put all of them together, magic happens.
If you want it all to come together, then work on the muscle in each of the seven perspectives. Think of it as a choreographed dance, a synchronized move. When we move in and out of each of these perspectives with intentional curiosity, with regularity, with discipline, and with rigor, we become immensely more effective as leaders.
First, you need to know where you are. To assist you here, we’ve created an assessment to help you see where you are today with each perspective. Keep in mind that nobody has a perfect score in all seven perspectives. But once you answer the series of questions, you will be better equipped to see where you can improve. You can access the assessment at www.7Perspectives.com/assessment.
We created the assessment by looking at the competencies, disciplines, and best practices of some of the most effective leaders we’ve coached over the past few decades. The series of questions will provide you with insight and will show you how to reorient your thinking and your calendar in order to improve your effectiveness.
Once you see gaps or opportunities, you can clearly identify the appropriate next steps.
Adopt these perspectives as your leadership operating system. Regularly refer to them and make them a part of your leadership language. Get the seven perspectives fully ingrained in your culture and remember that this happens only if you adopt them. Speak them, live in them, and teach them.
To build this discipline in a practical way, start using this framework when you create the agenda for your strategic offsites. By engaging your leadership team in discussions around each perspective, you will not only ensure that the team has all the information it needs to lead the business but that it also focuses on the right areas to deliver the greatest value.
Are you the CEO? If so, you are in a unique position. You have optics that others lack. Your leaders come to you with great understanding of their areas of responsibility but often limited insight into the other areas of the business. What insight they have into those other areas often comes through targeted conversations or collaboration opportunities. Use this as your opportunity to bring all that you see and experience as CEO to your team members so they can connect the dots and understand the greater context needed to make the best decisions.
When you make big decisions, you must understand how they will impact the other perspectives. Use these perspectives as filters through which you can run these decisions. If you want to make a big investment involving a new customer engagement, or you intend to customize something, or you decide to create a new product, run it through the filter of Current Reality, Strategic Bets, and Vision to make sure you won’t outstrip resources or lose your way. Does this opportunity, new program, new offering, or reactive decision move you closer to your vision?
Many leaders fail because they say yes to too many opportunities. By doing so, they compromise the capacity required to execute the core strategies, those Strategic Bets that will move them from Current Reality to a desired future state.
When you look at big decisions, be crystal clear on Perspectives One and Four. Do you have the bandwidth in your current reality to add one more thing to the machine? Can the business actually execute on it today? Do you have the cash? Do you have the personnel? Do you have the technology? Run it all through the filter of Current Reality. Then, get the perspective of the Team to make sure that you see it clearly.
Leaders can be the most optimistic folk in the bunch, and we almost always think it can be done, which explains why we often find ourselves in our roles. We tend to see what many others don’t. We have a high degree of optimism—a gift to the organization—but if reality doesn’t offset that optimism, we can find ourselves failing in execution and losing people because they lacked the capacity.
The best leaders invest the time needed to build leadership capacity. They see coaching their team as one of their greatest opportunities and responsibilities.
If you use the 7 Perspectives framework, you can coach your people in a way that makes sense to everyone involved, something that can quickly make this a standard in your culture. You can coach your teammates on how to improve in executing Strategic Bets, or how to better glean input from the Team, or how to develop a clearer and more compelling Vision. As you coach your teammates in the various perspectives, the framework will become the norm in your organization.
To build substantial leadership capacity, not only should you take the assessment but have your direct reports take the assessment as well. Anyone who leads a team in your organization should take the assessment and then use it in their own development plans.
Share the results of your assessment with your team, have them share the results of theirs, and together as a team co-create your development plans.
Afterward, establish team accountability to show how you’re improving in those plans.
The best businesses speak a language that everyone in the business understands. They have an operating system, a framework, and a language that influences their culture. The clearer you are about this framework, the clearer your team will be. The clearer your team is around what matters—ow they make decisions, how they communicate, how they treat and influence others—the better, stronger, and more effective your organization will become. These seven perspectives will help to ensure you all focus on the right things, together.
Once you consistently demonstrate intentional curiosity, and once you have a team of leaders that displays intentional curiosity in each of these seven perspectives, you can enjoy a common mantra:
Now we know,
and we can go.
The better decisions you make, the more influence you will have. That’s leadership effectiveness.