Vision and leadership are inseparable. By definition, a leader has a vision for where he wants the group he leads to go. Otherwise, why lead, if not to a destination — a preconceived destination.

A case in point: Governor Mark Sanford is an elected leader but instead of setting out a vision for South Carolina that would inspire and motivate citizens to pitch in and help achieve goals, he has been focused on promulgating his own narrow (libertarian) political agenda. If he could have shown how smaller government and private school vouchers (to cite a couple of examples) at the expense of the public education system could advance our state, maybe the result of his failed administration would have been different. More about these two examples later. Our legislators address issues without any reference to a bigger picture. The City of Columbia operates on a "project of the month" basis without long term goals that advance the city and its citizens. Without a "destination" we lurch from one controversial or costly program to another without any way to determine if it is taking us where we want to go.

A vision is a target — a destination. A vision developed as a result of consensus building- a shared vision is an even more powerful direction and good leaders enlist as many voices as possible in the development of long term goals. If a populous engages in shared goal setting, the goals are theirs and they will work for their accomplishment. If the goals are set only by the leader (as in the Sanford administration) the goals belong only to that leader and there is no emotional connection to the constituency. And, there is little interest in working for their achievement.

A vision provides a framework for allocating resources, for making daily decisions and for receiving feedback on whether or not you are making progress. In the case of allocating resources, you only have to ask the question, "Will this allocation take us toward our vision or does it move us in another direction. If every decision made by a deliberative body fails to advance them toward a long term goal that is connected to a grand scheme, they are likely to be wrong much of the time.

If you know where you want to go, then you are in a better position to figure out how to get there. Example: if a vision for our state included a statement that, "South Carolina will lead the nation in providing a relevant 21^st century education to every child" then we could debate about how to accomplish that important task. (Maybe smaller government and private school vouchers are appropriate strategies for reaching that vision — at least it provides context in having those discussions). Contrast that with our de-facto vision for education in South Carolina as defined in our 1895 state constitution: "to provide a minimally adequate education." No wonder we rank so low in measures of effectiveness of our education system when compared to other states.

Someone needs to step forward and help us understand the consequences of these appalling realities and propose a new vision for education in South Carolina and elucidate the benefits such an achievement would bring to all of us. This is just one example of where we need visionary leadership.

There are many definitions of leadership. For our purposes, we will define it as Jack Welch did, former CEO of General Electric: "good leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive to its completion."

Effective leaders share certain characteristics including, but not limited to:

Integrity is the integration of outward actions and inner values. Such a leader can be trusted and trust is vital to building a consensus and motivating others to pursue a goal.

Dedication means spending whatever time it takes to accomplish the task. A leader inspires dedication by example.

Openness means being a good listener and the ability to suspend judgement while listening to others ideas and a willingness to accept new ways of doing things.

Humility is the ability to recognize they are no better than other members of the group. Leaders with humility strive to elevate other members of the group.

Fairness means dealing with others consistently and justly.

A sense of humor relieves tension and deflects hostility. Humor fosters camaraderie and gets the group past rough spots.

There are any number of other characteristics that can be ascribed to an effective leader, but this is not a textbook. This is a reminder for all of us to think about vision and leadership the next time we go into a voting booth.

Or else, we may be experiencing another Yogi Berra quote, "It's déjà vu all over again."