How to Create a Vision for Your Team
It’s important to keep your vision simple and easy enough for everyone to articulate and remember.
■ contacted at Mark@Leadership.com.fj
If you examine any successful team, you will find that in every case, there’s one thing they all have in common.
At their very core, they all have a vision of what success looks like. ‘
The vision may vary from team to team but they all have an inspirational description of what the team is aiming to achieve, why they want to achieve it, and in some cases, how the team is going to achieve success.
Often mentioned but rarely understood, creating a vision is one of the most challenging tasks a leader will face so in this week’s article I want to share with you some practical tips on how to create a vision for your team.
What is a vision?
In simple terms, a team’s vision is an inspirational statement that summarises what direction the team wants to take and it acts as a foundation on which all the team’s efforts are built upon.
Here are a few examples of the vision of some of the world’s top organisations.
■Tes●a (motor car manufacturer) To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
■Facebook(socia● media platform) Connect with friends and the world around you on Facebook
■Nike (sportswear manufacturer) To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.
Why have a vision?
The short answer is having a vision that the team can share unites the team, increases levels of engagement and inspires the team to become their best.
John P Kotter and James L Heskett wrote a book called Corporate Cul
ture and Performance.
In the book they conducted a comprehensive study on companies that had a very strong core ideology and a vision which was communicated over and over again to their team and they compared the achievements of these companies to ones that didn’t have such a strong vision and the differences were remarkable .
Visionary companies had on average:
■Four times revenue growth
■Seve■ times more jobs created
■750 per cent more profitable
Having a vision for your team isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also the most profitable thing to do but how can a leader create a vision?
How to create a vision?
The first thing you need to ask yourself is why does your team exist?
It’s important to go beyond the obvious output of your team.
So don’t say that the team exists to sell a product or offer a service.
It has to go beyond that.
Think about who is impacted by your team’s success.
Remember no one buys a product or service instead they buy what the service or product can give them.
It’s important to keep your vision simple and easy enough for everyone to articulate and remember.
Stay away from including any metrics.
For example “we will sell x number of items.”
Numbers don’t inspire people. Instead what inspires people is the belief that they are a part of something that is greater than themselves. Your vision has to be something that not only people can strive towards but they will have a sense of pride when they do.
Be honest about how good team is
your
The most common reason why a team fails is that they overestimate how good the team currently is.
They believe they are better than they actually are. S
so what happens is that they fail to put in place the necessary steps to reach that higher level of performance because they believe they are already there.
The reality is that they are not so they end up disappointed and surprised when they fail to reach their goals. What the leader needs to do is to identify the standards of performance required and have an honest conversation about just how far away the team is from these standards.
When Sir Clive Woodward took over the English Rugby team, he had a vision of winning the World Cup and knew that the team had to have players who could operate under extreme levels of pressure but he didn’t know what this looked like so he took his team to spend time with the Royal Marines.
A group of people who are considered the best in their field and are experts on working under extreme levels of pressure.
This helped Sir Clive Woodward and his team gain an honest assessment of whether they were at the level they needed and when they found out that they weren’t they put in the necessary steps to make those improvements.
Four years later, they won the Rugby World Cup.
The American Author Warren G Bennis once wrote that “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”
It’s not the role of a Leader to motivate people.
Instead, leadership exists in order to create an environment in which people can motivate themselves and at the heart of every successful environment is a vision, a statement which articulates the essence of the team and its ambitions and dreams. Once created, the vision will act as a focal point of which all the teams values, culture and policies will stem from enabling people to believe in something greater than themselves and strive to become a better version of themselves.