This week’s Sunday Story is inspired by a leader I get to work with every day, an exceptional human whose care for those she leads is clear in every conversation and meeting. In a conversation, she told me about this story, and it's a great reminder of the power of having a shared vision. It may be apocryphal, but this story from the 1960s resonates all the same. The source of the story is varied, but the broad strokes are consistent and it’s an anecdote that’s been shared by leaders in business, the public service, and broader society many times - and for good reason.
It was 1961, and the United States had been, up to that point, beaten in the space race by their greatest rivals: the Soviet Union. Some readers will remember this time; The Soviets had launched Sputnik and later, sent Yuri Gagarin to space before the United States could achieve a similar goal with their Mercury program. Kennedy was convinced that the United States needed an achievement to show they were still in the race in the face of the juggernaut that was the Soviet Space Program. Kennedy went before Congress and told them that the United States should commit to a vision - of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely before the end of the decade.
What followed was an entire nation getting behind this bold vision, right?
No, not even close. In the late 1940s, after the war ended and the technological marvels of flight and the splitting of the atom were the front of everyone’s mind, the American public didn’t think mankind would ever land on the moon or refused to even hazard a guess. According to that same source, in 1955 51% of Americans didn’t think a rocket would be able to even reach the moon, let alone land on it. These stats show that sentiment towards even the possibility of a moon landing was cool at best and that was the context in which Kennedy set his vision; remember, less than 60 years earlier humanity had achieved flight for the first time - a feat that was regarded as requiring the combined efforts of humanity millions of years by the New York Times just a few weeks before the Wright brothers made it happen. To go from a glide on a dune in Kitty Hawk to walking on a celestial body is no small feat, and here was the plucky Irish Catholic President Kennedy, saying “We need to get this done”. No one would doubt he had a vision - but that wasn’t shared. A gallup poll at the time showed that 58% of Americans were actually firmly against the idea of a moon landing, and time was ticking as the Russians were working actively towards this goal.
Later, in 1962 Kennedy gave another speech, this time to about 40,000 people at Rice university. This is one of the most familiar quotes on this topic, and I’ll let Kennedy’s words stand for themselves:
But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.
In this speech, Kennedy tapped into something fundamentally human - we rise to challenges. We always have. We tend to respond well to a contest where we get to show the best of our skills and abilities; the lack of challenge results in languishing, and the excess of it results in being overwhelmed, so there’s a happy balance to achieve. Mr. Kennedy, in his Rice speech, tapped into that balance, and soon the polls started changing but more importantly, the people at NASA embraced his vision.
One day in the early 1960s, Kennedy was visiting NASA to get a bit of a tour and understand the progress being made towards the moon landing. He met with mission controllers, astronauts, and others during this tour, all of whom were working tirelessly on bringing Kennedy’s vision to life. Eventually he saw a man with a mop - a janitor. Kennedy walked up to the janitor and asked him - “What do you do here?”
“I help put people on the moon” was his response.
That’s a shared vision. Sure enough, we all know how this story ends - in 1969, Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind, and inspired a generation of scientists, explorers, and adventurers to push the bounds of what’s possible. The “impossible to do” became the “done”, in less than a decade. It took monumental effort and a massive transformation in technology, engineering, science, and even bureaucracy - and all of these transformations were made possible because of a shared vision inspired by Kennedy. Over the decade the tides on Kennedy’s vision were turning - by 1965, nearly 40% of Americans thought that they should do everything possible to reach the moon - a significant departure from the majority feeling it wasn’t possible. Kennedy set the vision, he got NASA to share it, and eventually the people followed.
Kennedy wouldn’t live to see the success of his vision; he was killed in 1963 (a story with its own leadership lessons for another day). But this too speaks to the power of a shared vision - it lasts longer than we do. Long after we’ve turned from ashes to ashes and dust to dust, a shared vision allows our leadership to live on and have a positive impact on the world around us.
As a leader, sharing a vision is essential to supporting transformation. Why are you doing what you are doing? Why are your people doing what they are doing? In a lot of organizations, if you ask that question, you’ll get a lot of different answers, and that difference gets in the way of transformation. Transformation requires collaboration; if your people have completely different priorities, they will have different ideas on what the most important things are, and if there’s persistent and unresolved disagreement on what the most important things are, there will be strong opinions on where to spend finite and limited resources - time, money, and energy. This conflict means collaboration will break down, and it will be incredibly difficult to get anything of substance done - let alone transform an organization to meet the challenges of the future.
But when people have a shared vision, it allows them to centre themselves around that vision, and even though they may have disparate roles - like the mission controller and the janitor - they see their role as contributing to that shared vision; their work becomes centred around that most important thing, and they are much more willing to compromise and collaborate towards that goal.
With a shared vision, leaders can inspire transformation and achieve the impossible - even after they’re gone.
What is your vision for your leadership role? How are you making sure it’s shared with everyone? Something to think about - and please let us know what your answers are, we’re always grateful to hear from our readers. Until then, thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
Comments