From the course: Jeff Weiner on Leading like a CEO

Vision to values: Vision

From the course: Jeff Weiner on Leading like a CEO

Vision to values: Vision

- Following the pillar of awareness, we're going to cover synthesis, and in our last course, we're going to do inspiration. So the key to synthesis in terms of this framework is understanding, recognizing that if you are truly aware, you're going to start to become potentially inundated with information, with knowledge, with data, with all kinds of viscera, all things that are kind of fighting for your attention. And as an effective leader, it's really important that you're able to separate the signal from the noise and you're able to focus on the stuff that matters most. And in addition to focusing on what matters most, it's then incumbent upon you to connect the dots so that you can actually create a sense of purpose, a plan, a road map, measurable objectives, and you can evaluate the team's performance as they're achieving and executing against that plan. And using your awareness, you can course correct. You can coach effectively. You can make sure that people are meeting or beating the expectations and that they're scaling. They're not only learning for themselves, but they're able to then in turn coach others. So that's the power of synthesis. So today we're going to talk about synthesis in the context of three areas, vision to values, focus, And that's not the word focus. It's actually an acronym, FCS, which some of you may be familiar with. And then we're going to talk about tools that you can leverage to help synthesize all this information that's coming your way. So when it comes to vision to values, we're talking about the framework that we use to operate the company. And this is a wonderful forcing mechanism for synthesis. It's a wonderful mechanism to ensure that you're taking the time to pay attention to all of the information and to distill it down into a plan that can be easily communicated, internalized, and acted upon by the folks that are working for you, working with you, that you work with. And this idea of vision to values is really about, in part, being able to capture everything that the company is trying to accomplish at the highest level in one place, and ideally on one page. And that's always been something that we've used as a really important parameter when finding vision to values is that we can get it down and distill it down to one page. And the thinking is that if you can distill down onto one page what the company is trying to accomplish, that every person on every functional team responsible for every product and business in the organization can do similarly for what they're responsible for. So let's start with vision. The way we define vision is the dream. It's a company's true north, and it's designed to inspire. It's designed to ensure that people understand the sense of purpose of an organization, to bring them together, to create esprit de corps. And it's interesting, you know, we were just looking through some data in preparation for a keynote, and it turns out that I think a lot of people anecdotally recognize that in particular, the youngest generation amongst us millennials are increasingly purpose-driven. Vision matters deeply to them. And just to put some data behind that, 88% of millennials, according to a recent survey, said that they believe their company should be responsible for helping to solve some of the world's biggest problems. And they cited the income gap. They cited global warming, They cited hunger as examples of that. 88% of millennials believe their companies need to be focused on these big, important problems. Purpose matters a lot to this younger generation, but it's not just the youngest generation. LinkedIn did a proprietary survey, and it turned out when we surveyed our members, 71% of all professionals that we surveyed said that they would actually prioritize purpose over compensation. It's that important to them that they'd be willing to take a pay cut to join a company whose purpose and values were aligned with their own. So it matters. It matters deeply to people. They want to know what their company is trying to accomplish. They want to make sure that what they want to accomplish in the world is aligned with the dream and true north for their organizations. And at LinkedIn, our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. This began as a dream. It was futuristic. It was supposed to inspire in terms of what's possible. And about five or six years ago, we recognized that we had been making so much progress on the path towards realizing our mission, which I'll get to in a second, that we actually revisited the concept of a vision and decided to operationalize this vision. So now this is measurable, as well. And you've seen examples of that when we talked about the progress we're making against the economic graph. This opportunity we have in front of us to digitally map the global economy across six different dimensions. So that's the vision.

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