I’ve always understood the expression “Can’t see the forest for the trees.” It wasn’t till I moved to northern Wisconsin that I realized not everyone does understand it. It’s easy, in this land of wonderful woods, to miss the beautiful expanse as you focus on one scruffy pine—wondering why someone hasn’t pruned it. The same thing happens at work.

People get caught in the daily cycle of “Write the to-do list, work on the to-do list,” and get frustrated by how many things remain on the to-do list at the end of the day. It would be silly to expect that cycle to be anything but a permanent part of our work life. There will always be more tasks than there is time. There will always be interruptions that usually end up dumping more tasks on our desks. Fast isn’t fast enough. Remember when you could blame things on the post office? Overnight delivery services, fax machines, and e-mail technologies have changed forever what we mean when we say, “I’ll do it right away.” More than ever, we need someone to help us break the cycle of tasks and encourage us to see beyond the day-to-day. Leaders are those people.

Most employees don’t have the opportunity to attend trade association meetings or have access to and the time to read industry forecasts, but they need the information obtained by doing both. That’s where you come in. As a leader it is your job to understand the bigger picture. How does your organization fit into your industry? How do you rank against your competition? What changes are affecting the way you and your competition will do business in the future? You need to know these things in order to make wise decisions and chart a course into the future. The people at all levels of your organization need to know these things, too. They need to know so they have a better context for understanding management decisions. So they can help customers understand changes in policies and practices. So they can think about their own future. So they have hope.

People get so focused on the task in front of them (the next deadline, the next round of budget cuts) that they seldom lift their heads to look at the big picture. It is in the bigger picture that we can find the hope that will lift us out of daily despair. If you want to call yourself a leader, you should know about the bigger picture, so talk about it.

If it can go wrong, it will. If you speak routinely, it’s simply a matter of time until you must deal with some disaster. The lights go out and plunge the entire room in total darkness for half an hour. The screen for showing the sales figures stands lopsided so that all your visuals look as though somebody wrote them lying down.

Plumbers are next door pumping the water from the burst pipes. The carpenters are tearing out the wall at the back of the room. The lighting flickers, causing migraines for the people seated in the center of the room. The meeting next door scheduled simultaneously with yours boasts six sopranos singing the Amway “fight” song.

The only answer to these disasters is to check out every possible glitch beforehand. If you have disasters over which you have absolutely no control or no warning—such as a power failure or improperly working equipment—simply stop your speech and locate someone who can help.

If the distraction is outside noise, call an unscheduled break and see if you can deal with it yourself. If not, make a joke of it and continue. Continually referring to the noise and showing irritation increases the distraction. If you ignore it, your audience will generally follow your lead.

Being human, you’ll find hecklers much more difficult to ignore. Keep in mind, however, that hecklers generally create audience sympathy for you and create hostility for themselves. If you can ignore them without showing irritation yourself, continue your speech and your audience will listen all the more carefully to what you say and sometimes “handle” the hecklers for you.

If hecklers do gain attention so that the audience can’t listen to you, you can always ask them to give their name and their company before they state their objections. Hecklers are much braver when they can hide behind anonymity. But put on the spot to give a name and associate their organization or company with the disturbance, they seem to give their behavior second thoughts.

If the hecklers begin their harassment before your speech, try to make them see you as a person rather than a “company representative.” Physically move toward them and make eye contact. Courteously ask why they are protesting. Your sincere approach sometimes defuses their hostility, regardless of whether it changes their views, and gives you peace during the speech. Remember that only you control the microphone.

When you find yourself in front of an out-of-control audience for any reason—freak accident, power failure, malfunctioning fire alarm—you simply have to let the air clear before you regain control. After the situation is again under control, tell a personal experience or joke related to what just happened. Or simply acknowledge the interruption, and then begin again. The audience will empathize with you and give you their attention all over again.