Leadership Framing and Achieving Goals
Leadership, whether you’re with a team or by yourself, is an important ingredient to nearly every recipe for achieving your goals; such as cooking breakfast, writing a paper or when creating a physical or digital product, service, or experience.
An important element of leadership is framing. Framing is the process of explaining a concept, situation, or idea (e.g. a goal) with such clarity that others can paint a mental picture of it and deliver against it. To frame properly perspective and organization are needed. Perspective helps you and those you are leading evaluate and form various points of view. It will help you focus on your goal, to give it height, width, depth, and position in relation to everything else you and those around you are trying to accomplish. Applying framing to your organization’s efforts will help you structure the work that needs to be done.
I find that when I am most successful, not just with achieving my goal but also with maintaining a positive emotional state while doing it, I’m able to develop and maintain multiple perspectives and organizational layers with every effort. In other words, I’m able to look at what I’m doing from many angles, depths, and positions. And, depending on the size of my goal, I find it helpful to organize my effort into three discrete layers: tasks, projects, and programs. Tasks are all the activities that need to be performed to achieve my goal. If my goal is “big”, i.e. it is made up of so many tasks that it is hard for me to maintain perspective, I’ll combine tasks into discrete groups of effort, i.e. projects. And, if my goal is “really big,” i.e. it is made up of so many projects that it is hard for me to maintain perspective, I’ll combine projects into discrete groups of effort, i.e. programs.
Michael Becker is an intentionally recognized identity & personal information management solutions strategic advisor, speaker, entrepreneur, and academic. He advises companies on personal information economy business strategy, product development, business development, and sales & marketing strategies. He also represents them at leading trade groups, including the Mobile Ecosystem Forum. Michael is an advisor to Assurant, Predii, Privowny, and Phoji. He is the co-author of Mobile Marketing for Dummies and a number of other books and articles related to mobile marketing, identity, and personal information management. He is on the faculty of marketing of the Association of National Advertisers and National University. A serial entrepreneur, Michael founded Identity Praxis, co-founded mCordis and The Connected Marketer Institute, was a founding member of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), and was on the MMA board of directors for ten years and was MMA’s North American Managing Director for three years. In 2004, Michael co-founded iLoop Mobile, a leading messaging solutions provider. In 2014, Michael was awarded the 2014 Marketing EDGE Edward Mayer Education Leadership Award for his commitment to marketing education.