Create The Future - Your Primary Leadership Responsibility

A guide to crafting tomorrow through effective leadership choices

You create the future for your company and any organization you lead by each decision you make – by each choice you make. Your job as the leader is to create the future.

You are creating the future when you decide how your company will compete in the marketplace and how it will make a profit. You are creating the future when you decide to launch a new product and commit to new financing. You create the future when you establish cultural norms, credit terms, and compensation incentive plans.

Believing you can and will create the future is essential for successful leadership. Communicating your vision for the future is a core leadership responsibility. Your leadership team, employees, customers, investors, and partners will be motivated, or not motivated, by the vision you convey to them of where the organization is going. 

I entitled my new book, Create the Future, to explicitly connect your decisions today to your vision of where the company will be tomorrow; it will be your handbook for managing the decision-making process when choosing the path forward for your organization. Your leadership job is to make decisions and also to manage the decision-making process you and others will use to choose the path forward. 

When a great opportunity or threat suddenly emerges, don’t rush toward your first instinctive response. Pause, step back, and invest time in choosing the path forward most likely to lead to the future you want for the organization you lead.

You could be the final decision-maker or a board of directors or executive committee member who will make the final decisions. I recommend that you engage with a small number of trusted advisors as well as decision-makers. These could be your leadership team or outside advisors who, in effect, become consultants/advisors to the decision-makers.

Guide your team – and yourself – through the five-step decision-making process: Define the Challenge; Imagine Success; Create Options; Evaluate Barriers; and Choose the Future. Give yourself the best chance to make the right decision for your company considering where it is today.

Engage with your leadership team and key advisors to define the challenge – the opportunity or the threat. Solve the right problem.

Imagine what success could look like. What is your aspirational goal if you fully take advantage of the opportunity or counter the threat? What are your operational goals – how will you measure success?

Guide your team through a creative process of imagining different options to reach the goals you have set. All ideas are good ideas.

Be realistic about the execution barriers and their risks. Execution is where the most value is created.

Once you have realistic options on the whiteboard, manage the process of choosing the best. What decisions must be made, and who will make them? Be clear about what you are assuming will happen and will not happen. Where do you want to be on the risk of failure scale?

How will the options you are considering impact the organization, employees, shareholders, customers, community, and others? What values do you want your decisions to express or not violate?

Be fully open to new ideas that may challenge your thinking. Use the Ask, Discover, Learn, and Decide decision-making approach to every challenge. Ask questions. Discover what you know and do not know. Learn from what you Discover. And then Decide.

Finally, you must decide. You must choose.

The future will not be exactly what you imagine. But you will set the organization on a path toward the future you choose.

When you must make an important decision, put yourself in a frame of mind where optimism, determination, and generosity are the core values driving your decision-making.

Choose the path forward – create the future – that best matches your goals, risk preferences, and values.

Rick Williams, the author of CREATE THE FUTURE: Powerful Decision-Making Tools For Your Company And Yourself, is an internationally published author. He is a frequent speaker and writer on best practices for leadership and decision-making.