Create a vision
Some people in town are afraid to think big when it comes to creating a vision.
So when Mayor Frank Jackson came to Nance and other local leaders and told them he wanted the city to contend to host the 2008 Republican National Convention, everyone thought he was nuts.
“He said, ‘Yeah, I want the Republican National Convention here. I want your businesses to put in the resources. I want you to loan the executives, and we’re going to go after this,’” Nance says. “We thought, ‘Are you kidding?’ He galvanized the business community to do it.”
But it took his vision to get people excited. Initially, Nance and other leaders thought there was no way Cleveland could contend because there wouldn’t be enough hotel rooms compared to larger cities. But that’s where the out-of-the-box thinking comes into play. In reality, the criterion was a certain number of rooms within a one-hour drive of the location. This puts Akron, Lorain and the rest of the region into play.
“We have plenty of hotel rooms,” he says. “We said to ourselves, why is the criteria one hour? Because, then again, in front of our face, something most of us take for granted that in 90 percent of the cities in America, because of the gridlock and because of how bad the traffic patterns are, it takes you an hour to get in 20 miles outside of the city.”
But you have to take the blinders off and be able to recognize these kinds of things and create a vision. While Cleveland lost to Minneapolis in its bid, it energized leaders across the city and got them thinking about greater possibilities and what united the region, and that’s the first step to creating a vision for your own organization.
“I think that many organizations have sometimes suffered from getting into a rut of always doing things the same way and people inside the organization saying, ‘Well, we’re not going to do that because we’ve never done it that way before,’” he says. “While there’s a certain distinctive behavior that causes people to do that, what leadership is about is getting people to break out of those ruts and sometimes take a risk and do things differently. There might be a higher objective or a better way of achieving the goal, and I think, particularly in today’s economy, the ability to influence or inspire people to do things differently … (and) encourage people to be innovative and to think of a new way of doing things before others do, is what distinguishes many businesses.”
Get your mind in the right place to be able to think of a grand vision.
“It’s the mindset of whether to go after it, whether to take a risk and do things differently and have a business culture where you reward risk-taking and where you have leadership that’s going to be responsive to trying to do things differently as opposed to, ‘Go away, don’t bother me with that crazy stuff, we’ve never done that before,’” Nance says. “I think companies that are on the cutting edge of moving into the new economy have that type of culture where that sort of risk-taking … is rewarded with additional resources to pursue it and rewarded with individual recognition.”
When you’re thinking big, put the pen to paper and actually create a formal vision.
For example, when the Greater Cleveland Partnership formed, it was the merger of Cleveland Tomorrow, the Greater Cleveland Growth Association and the Greater Cleveland Roundtable. While these organizations had all worked separately, they all had similar goals in making Cleveland better. Now they needed to create a unified vision.
“One of the things we did was we had the constituent groups that were eventually merged come together and identify common interests — what is it that we are trying to accomplish,” Nance says.
They also looked at the past.
“What had worked and what hadn’t worked?” he says. “Why did it make sense to come together and look at some of the mechanical things? How do we meld these organizations together?
“The way you identify those objectives are to look at your past,” Nance says. “What has been successful? What hasn’t been successful? And you don’t necessarily keep doing what was successful or not do what wasn’t, but you look at that and take into account the future. How are things unfolding or what is going to be the direction or the emphasis in the economy or the industry going forward — and then try to position yourself to be a leader and to be successful based upon how things are developing.”
You also have to take into account two other factors in creating your vision.
“There’s the internal — What does my company need to accomplish? — and then there’s the (external) — What should we accomplish in the region?” he says. “Hopefully you figure out a way to make the two dovetail.”
And lastly, you have to think of others and not of yourself in creating your vision.
“There needs to be in leadership and in creating a vision an element of selflessness, meaning you have to believe in the
vision enough that the mission, the institution, is more important than the interest of the individual,” Nance says. “And I have seen this again and again, particularly in some of the volatility of companies and firms going out of business and failing in these turbulent times. In order to be successful and thrive, you have to have a culture where the vision is articulated in a way that everybody understands that the goal of the collective institution is more important than the interest of the individual.
“If you don’t run your organization that way, when times get tough and you face serious challenges, you’re going to be a lot less stable than if you’re in an organization where everyone believes that, no matter what, we have to make sure that the interest of the institution is above the interest of the individuals. It is the differentiator between those that survive difficult challenges and those that don’t.”
In the case of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, it decided that the common vision was to move the region forward on an economic-development basis so it could participate in the new economy, attract talent and resources, and get the region’s young folks to stay here after they graduated.
Nance says, “Ultimately, it was the recognition of a common desire or common need to take all of these marvelous resources that we have that were in different places and put them together and get everyone to understand that creating the opportunity for economic development here meant that we had to have a strategic plan that required a planning process.”
