Getting lost in the detail is a risk for many business leaders. It can often impede performance, and remains a familiar and easy mistake.
Leaders tend to be promoted into a senior role after showing themselves to be brilliant at the details of their previous role. Former sales leaders become MDs who still love sales and selling. CFOs get promoted to CEO but may not stop thinking in the language of numbers.
This is like a violinist being promoted to conductor and focusing on the string section instead of the whole orchestra. The problem with this is obvious. Rather than getting mired in the detail, the new role demands that the leader broadens their view across the bigger picture and allows their team to work out the steps required to make that big picture goal a reality.
What is a big picture and why is it important?
A big picture is a compelling vision for the whole team. It might be a bold statement, a vision, a feeling or a dream of where an organisation wishes to be in the future.
The end game is the same: it is a shared hope for everyone to work towards. Everything a team does is in the context of and with reference to the big picture, moving the organisation forwards.
As an example, think of John F Kennedy’s speech to the US Congress in May 1961, when he said:
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
While the gendered language has not aged well, the point here is that he didn’t focus on the details, but the vision of the future. JFK invited others to join him in making something seemingly impossible come true and his ambition was so compelling that it continued to inspire action even though he was not alive to see it happen.
The benefits of a compelling big picture
This ability to inspire is one of the chief virtues of a strong big picture. Teams thrive on clarity and focus, on working towards interesting and measurable goals, and on having clear timelines for achieving them.
Once you have a Big-Picture goal, you and your team can get into the detail and plan what needs to be done, and the various steps that must be taken on a day-to-day basis to achieve it.
