What thought have you put into setting the azimuth for your company or organization?
In this Two-Minute Leadership video blog, I’ll discuss the Leadership Principle of the Azimuth. Before you can properly set your azimuth, however, understanding what an azimuth means in a leadership context is necessary.
Your company’s azimuth is its true north, the guiding light towards which you aim yourself and your team.
So, if someone on your team asked “What’s our azimuth?” – how would you respond?
You can watch the video here to learn more:
Click here if you have difficulty playing the video. It will open the video for you in a new tab.
To give some additional context: as you may remember that Set The Azimuth is one of our Big Six Leadership Principles®.
In our current world of digital-only leadership, virtual meetings, and the like, we might need to adapt the process of setting the azimuth to fit our current environment.
But, it is important to realize that the underlying ideas are sound… part of what led to the creation of The Big Six Leadership Principles® was a belief that these concepts are, essentially, universal and unchangeable.
Indeed, perhaps now more than ever, your team can use your azimuth as a constantly available reminder of where you want your company or organization to go, to accomplish.
Put simply, setting the azimuth for your company means having a direction you plan to aim your team towards — and making sure everyone on the team knows about it.
As detailed in the video above, setting the Azimuth can be broken down into four components: Mission, Intent, Values, and Culture.
Mission — “Who are we? What do we do? Why do we do it?” (See an example of a mission statement here.)
Intent — “What’s our end-state, or goal, in the next period of time (two to three years)? What key tasks must we perform to get to that end-state? What are the purposes of each task?”
Values — “What are our beliefs and ideals as a team, an organization, a company?”
Culture — “What kind of behaviors do we expect out of our team members on a daily basis to bring our values to life?” (I’ve shared some additional thoughts about culture here.)
Take the time needed to set the azimuth for your organization, and to ensure that your team is on the same page. By making certain everyone knows where the organization is headed, you’ll be that much more likely to get there with fewer problems along the way.
If you have questions or could use some guidance in getting started with setting your team’s azimuth, feel free to contact me.
Enjoy the journey!
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