My last day of summer school - a 4-week crash course on some intricacies of Spanish grammar, 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. Hallelujah, it's over. (Relax for a little, you deserve it with this lovely gentleman, his secret book, and his wig.)
We had our final examination, a culminating exam consisting of oral and written parts, amounting to 60% of the final grade, and were at the University from 9:15 AM until 4:30 PM. The examination didn't take that long for each person, but with all the waiting time, and a 2.5 hour turn-around on the written portion, it rounded out to just about 7 hours.
While waiting for the oral portion to begin, I was sitting on the stairs outside the classroom, tweeting, texting, facebooking or emailing on my iTouch. There was a mountain of other students outside the classrooms waiting for their turn for the oral portion, so it was quite noisy. I just so happened to find myself right next to two students who apparently had gotten into a discussion earlier about goal-setting and the purpose of the like.
Not doing anything in particular, I turned my attention to their argument: one guy, one girl. We'll call them, Guy and Girl (Berenstain Bears-style).
Girl was irritated with what the "thick-headed" guy said about setting goals to eliminate poverty. To Girl, the guy declared, "if you want to end poverty or have world peace you have a messed up view of the world because it will never happen."
(There I was typing furiously on my iTouch in the little notes section. As you can see, the autocorrect didn't always get it right.)
Guy then said to Girl, "I've worked with poverty and seen it..." [I think he volunteered in Haiti after the earthquake] and he reasoned that it just was too lofty to have a goal to eliminate it. Girl however said that it is important to have goals that are higher than what you are able to achieve at the time - in ANYTHING. Guy retorted that if you have an unattainable goal, what is it for?* Finally Girl explodes and exclaims, "don't you ever think that you could help one person at a time?! You have to leave something for the successors to pick up with!"
MEANWHILE ON THE STAIR...
I'm thinking to myself, Visionary Leadership.
A vision, to me, is not the same thing as a goal. A goal can be attained, whether there is much difficulty or not in doing so. The difference between a vision and a goal is that a goal can be an achievement on the way working towards a vision: the overarching goal of an organization. I feel that Girl was talking about a vision, and having the vision pass along workers or an organization, building up the force to have everyone unified in a single motion to achieve perhaps the impossible; the ideal. In this case, ending world poverty.
*What if an organization didn't have an unattainable goal? What then. Would the world have to acclimate itself to being satisfied with desperation all around - as if we don't already live with the complacency that enough is being done? What if the world were run by Guys (I don't mean males, I mean people like "Guy"). What would happen, and what does this call us to change about our leadership style?
What is to be said about progress and the satisfaction that comes from reaching another milestone on the journey to realizing the mission of an organization? And does "realizing" the mission mean fulfilling it, period? What about the maintenance of said mission? How can you as a leader keep that culture that attained your goals thrive? What is your role.
#dontgiveupthevision
Angela
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