insight magazine

Leadership Matters | Fall 2024

Build Your Leadership on a Strong Personal Foundation

Your capacity for growth as a leader requires a strong foundation—start building it by answering these four questions.
Jon Lokhorst, CPA, CSP, PCC Leadership Coach, Your Best Leadership LLC


At the end of a recent leadership program, a newly appointed supervisor (who we’ll call Jayden for confidentiality) approached me with a question: “What can I do to advance quickly as a leader in my company?” Jayden was surprised when I responded, “Start by building a strong personal foundation.”

As I explained to Jayden, you can’t build a skyscraper on a foundation meant for a garage—the foundation will crumble, and the building will collapse. The same is true for your career. Your capacity for growth and advancement is only sustainable if you build on a solid foundation. Another way to look at it is to think of your leadership career as a business and yourself as its CEO. How will you position it and yourself for success?

Consider these four questions as you build your foundation for long-term leadership growth.

1. VISION: WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

The late baseball hall-of-famer Yogi Berra was as famous for his misuse of the English language as he was for his coaching career. One of my favorite Yogi-isms is: “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” Yogi was right. Without a clear vision, you can’t define your goals, and your accomplishments may lead you “someplace else.”

Your vision statement describes the destination you want to reach at a point in time in the future. Most of you probably already have a vision statement within you but haven’t taken the time to write it down and literally visualize it. Do this! Take time for exploration and discovery and start writing down where you want to go.

A great way to discover your vision is to look five, 10, or even more years into the future. Where do you see yourself? What do you envision doing? What will your life be like at that time?

Additionally, it’s important to make your vision statement aspirational to create energy and compel you to action. In my book, “Mission-Critical Leadership: How Smart Managers Lead Well in All Directions,” I use a sentence from President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 moon shot speech, “We Choose to Go to the Moon,” as an example: “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.” In my book, I refer to this example as a vision with a deadline—a simple but powerful statement that galvanized the entire nation to achieve this vision.

2. PURPOSE: WHY IS THIS DESTINATION IMPORTANT?

Now that you’ve clarified your vision, it’s time to articulate the purpose behind it. Purpose reveals motivation and offers meaning.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and neurologist who survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, once said, “Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.” His message is sad but true. Most people go through the motions from day to day, lacking purpose. Though, the best leaders rise above the daily grind and seek to make a profound impact on those they lead. They’ve come to grips with their “big why,” their reason for getting up every morning to do the hard work of leadership.

Admittedly, the road to your vision will be full of twists and turns, not to mention potholes at inopportune places—there are countless detours and ways to veer off course, and it’s tempting to give up. At times like these, you’ll need to lean on your purpose to keep going. What gets you up in the morning and makes it worthwhile to keep pursuing your vision? I recommend finding or creating an image that serves as a visual reminder of your purpose. In my case, it’s the background picture on my computer screen, showing my “four adorable littles,” as I call my grandchildren.

3. MISSION: WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO GET THERE?

Laurie Beth Jones, author of “The Path: Creating Your Mission Statement for Work and for Life,” says “The mission statement is centered on the process of what you need to be doing.” Therefore, your mission statement should include powerful verbs that reflect your vocation and the people you serve.

In a popular February 2014 Fast Company article featuring the personal mission statements of five famous CEOs, Amanda Steinberg, the founder of the personal finance site DailyWorth, stated hers was: “To use my gifts of intelligence, charisma, and serial optimism to cultivate the self-worth and net worth of women around the world.” Her statement is powerful and compelling, giving her something to work for and aspire to.

My mission statement boils down to these three elements: 1) develop leaders everyone wants to follow, 2) build teams no one wants to leave, and 3) deliver exceptional results. So, what’s your mission statement?

4. VALUES: HOW WILL YOU ACT ALONG THE WAY?

Self-leadership authors Andrew Bryant and Ana Kazan define values as “personal or shared enduring beliefs or ideals about what is good and desirable and what is not.” In short, they’re the principles that guide your actions, filters through which you make decisions, and virtues you use in evaluating behaviors.

I encourage you to reflect on your values regularly, and ask whether your actions, attitudes, and words reflect your values. To help with this, choose words or phrases that resonate with you and hold you to a higher standard. Also, limit yourself to five or six bullet points that reflect your top priorities rather than trying to cover everything. As an example, my values are:

  • Holistic excellence.
  • Growth mindset.
  • Bias for action.
  • Desire over fear.
  • Legacy thinking.

Each of my bulleted values include an additional sentence that expands on the meaning of it. If you need help coming up with the right words for your values, Bryant and Kazan include an extensive list of idea prompts in their book, “Self-Leadership: How to Become a More Successful, Efficient, and Effective Leader From the Inside Out.”

Overall, building a strong personal foundation won’t happen overnight—you’ll need to do your homework. Using these four questions, schedule time alone to brainstorm ideas and organize your thoughts into a brief paragraph or bulleted list for each area. If you come up with catchy sayings, great, but don’t get hung up on wordsmithing. What’s more important is just starting the process of building the strong personal foundation you’ll need to expand your leadership capacity. This, of course, will only help position yourself to achieve your vision and realize greater success and impact in the future.

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