Bruce is the only man I've known to have a good percentage of a hard bitten sales-force shed tears - not from fear or pain, but from pure emotion. I can't tell you everything that he did, but I can share an essential part of his leadership skill.

He had a very clear vision and his vision had to do with the culture that he wanted in the company, evidenced by the way we treated each other and more importantly, the way we treated our customers.

Even though we were a technology company, we worked on voicemail rather than email and Bruce took advantage of this. The practice in the company was to dial into voicemail at least twice a day - once in the morning and once near the end of the day and ideally, at lunchtime as well. Bruce would send at least one global voicemail a week.

As John Kotter and many others talk about, in leadership positions we need to communicate more than we think and this very regular communication really helped. It wasn't the process that made the real difference though - it was what Bruce said to us that did.

Even though the voicemails were always different - the pattern was the same. Bruce would be made aware of someone in the organisation that had behaved in a way that exemplified the culture he wanted to instil - they would have gone the extra mile for a customer, they would have shown initiative and self belief, they would have sacrificed themselves in some way for their fellow team members.

Bruce would recognise an individual and use their behaviour as an exemplar of what it meant to be 'Chipper' - upholding Chipcom values. What was so effective about these voicemails was not only the motivational nature of the recognition given, but the real and concrete examples of the behaviours that exemplified his vision in action.

We weren't left with vague abstractions of what it meant to 'act in the best interests of our customers'.... we had numerous real life examples. Someone once said that to truly understand something you have to be able to articulate it. We could all articulate the vision and believe in it because we had seen and heard it in action, repeatedly, and with passion.

So here's my tip, inspired by Bruce Cohen on how to make sure your vision has a much higher chance of becoming a reality:

1. Be very clear what your vision is and the values needed in your team to make that vision a reality
2. Get clarity on the behaviours you will observe that demonstrate your people are living those values
3. Communicate incessantly - regularly - more often than you think necessary
4. Demonstrate your vision with real, concrete examples involving real people - not abstract concepts or hypothetical situations
5. Be on the constant look out for your desired behaviours - rewarding and recognising those that demonstrate them at every opportunity.
6. Do this by a medium other than email if at all possible - according to Daniel Goleman "we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended"

Why the Picasso quote at the beginning? I believe Bruce inspired because he worked hard at it!

Tags: leadership, inspiring, inspiration, vision