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.