2023.06.04

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Whether you are involved in setting the vision at the leadership-team level or are responsible for your team’s application of it, managing vision is a critical skill to hone.

Assuming a coherent vision has been set - one that is big enough to be inspiring but narrow enough to guide the everyday decisions and activities of the staff …

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… Which of the following skills and actions are done well by leaders and managers in your organization (including you)?

• Inspires and motivates people to achieve the vision.

• Clearly articulates the strategy for achieving the vision.

• Creates mileposts that everyone can understand and rally behind.

• Displays patience with how long it takes to shift the day-to-day activities to be in alignment with a new vision.

• Eliminates roadblocks that would hinder progress toward the vision.

• Avoids vision-creep by saying no to opportunities that aren’t aligned with the vision.

• Discerns which activities are mission-critical for the vision and which are “nice-to-do” activities.

• Effectively communicates the vision to others as evidenced by them being able to explain it themselves succinctly and know what it means for their day-to-day work.

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Sadly, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could only point to a few of the above as being done well in your organization.

In their defense, few leaders/managers receive formal training in how to manage vision. They often think their role stops at “inspires and motivates people to achieve the vision”.

Perhaps the lack of training arises because managing vision isn’t conceptually hard to learn.

“Creates mileposts that everyone can understand and rally behind” is fairly self-explanatory.

The hard part of that action is stepping back to do the work of thoughtfully articulating the intermediate steps toward a strategic goal, and figuring out how that relates to the organization’s or team’s existing work.

Similarly, everyone understands what it means to discern between mission-critical activities and those that are nice to do.

The hard part is the discipline it takes to say no to awesome opportunities because you need to prioritize.

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Moving Forward

Now that you can identify the practical activities that make up vision management, what can you do to move forward in your organization?

Questions to Consider

• Which of the above would have the most impact on your organization if senior leadership did it better?
• Which of the above would have the most impact on your team if you did it better?
• What is one concrete thing you will do to better manage vision at your organization, from where you are in the org chart? (E.g., It could be being brave enough to raise the question to senior leadership. It could be sharing this email with your team or a coworker and discussing.)

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