One of the biggest challenges that Dr. Helene Gayle faces as president and CEO of CARE USA is trying to balance decentralization with integration.
As a 12,000-person organization that fights poverty in 66 countries, she faces the unique task of trying to unite everyone through common goals while also allowing for the flexibility that’s required to adapt to the local needs in each of those countries.
In order to accomplish this, she says you have to first come up with a shared vision across your entire organization.
“By working to develop a shared vision, you have something that pulls your organization together,” Gayle says.
Then you have to use that vision to drive the work, but involve people in the process so it allows for flexibility in executing the vision.
Smart Business spoke with Gayle about how to both create a shared vision and how to carry it throughout your business.
See everything. One of the things that you have as a leader of an organization is you’re the one person, generally, who has the whole organizational overview. So people come with ideas based on where they sit and their particular perspective. As a leader, you have to be an integrator and be able to take all of that and be the person who both understands the external environment, understands the internal, and can look across the whole organization and integrate that.
It takes judgment and the ability to analyze and think about what’s the best course forward. I rely a lot on my senior management team. It’s also important that other leaders in the organization play a role in helping to define the vision and direction forward.
Involve people. It can’t be my vision. It can’t be a top-down vision. It has to be a vision that really embraces the things we do as an organization and pulls a diverse group of stakeholders together to work on building that. It has to be a vision that reflects the realities of our work, so having it be an iterative process that both looks at where are we today in the globe, what are the key challenges, what’s the external environment in which we work, but also what are the local drivers that define our work? It’s this iterative process of looking at the external or global environment but also at the same time have the pieces bubble up that reflect the challenges on the ground.
Get enough of a cross section of viewpoints to bring to the table that it does reflect the different realities that we work in. You can’t have everyone at the table, so you try to figure out a mix of people at different levels in the organization who can make contributions to that and also have external stakeholders who are critical in having you define the external terrain in which you work. … External stakeholders give you an idea of what your opportunities and challenges are. The internal stakeholders are better at helping you define how you address those. You use them for different reasons and different aspects.
