This is an extremely interesting and extremely important subject…

I thought about all of this more last night and this morning. And then I just read the “What Happened to Vision? Your Thoughts?” and “Manage the Mid-Space or Your Vision Will Fail” posts along with the comments in all three posts.

I’ll include my thoughts below, but the way I see it was basically covered in your “Manage the Mid-Space” post, your response to Alan Kay’s comment in this post, Daniel Honeywell’s comment in the “What Happened to Vision?” post, and in the comments of a couple of others.

With that in mind, here are my thoughts…

One thing that really fired me up was reading about Frank’s situation in the “Manage the Mid-Space” post. He are a couple of things he said:

“Our company had a big meeting a few weeks ago where the president laid out his vision…

“I’m in charge of the eastern sales force. Part of this vision requires moving our sales force away from the corporate headquarters and closer to the properties we own so they can be close to our customer base. We have major properties in eight cities in my region, so my sales folks will relocate there.”

Honestly, when I read this, I thought to myself “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

It sounds like the president pretty much came up with this vision on his own without getting much or any feedback from Frank and the members of the sales force that he manages. I’m going to assume this is what happened.

If this is what happened, this means that all of these people were going to have to uproot their families and move to new cities. And none of them had any say in the move. Even if moving the sales force to these cities to be closer to the customers is the right move, I can pretty much guarantee that a large percentage of the sales force will not be happy about this simply because they weren’t consulted about it. And this will create problems for the organization. At a minimum, morale will probably be significantly lower.

The word I immediately noticed when I started reading this post was the word “his” (from “the president laid out his vision…”). It wasn’t THEIR vision, it was HIS.

I think the proper move would have been for the president to first meet with Frank and the sales force and get feedback from them about moving the sales force closer to the customers. He could have said, “Here are the reasons I think this might be a good idea. But I want to get your thoughts first, because I value your feedback and you all will be greatly affected by this decision.”

My point is that unless lower-level employees buy into the vision, it will not have a significant impact. I’m amazed at how many executives think they can be successful by just announcing an initiative to the employees in the company without first getting their feedback.

If executives would take more of an interest in lower-level employees and value their feedback more, I think a powerful vision could be created where everybody buys into it.

However, if you don’t care about what your employees think, they are probably not going to care very much about the vision.

Two things come to mind. I wonder if your team has clarified goals, roles and how you will work together. If not, creating aTeam Charter will be helpful. Check out “Set Up Your Team For Success”

Also, it might be helpful to read about what issues tend to emerge during Stage 2 of team development (which is where you team currently is on their journey to becoming a high performing team). See “What team members can do to help their team.” This post was written for team members. You might want to share this with your team and have a team discussion to figure out together how to proceed.

Hope these ideas are helpful. Glad you liked my post.

I agree we need to do a better job of helping people understand how to translate the lofty view at 30,000 feet to the on-the-ground realities. (Check out the blog post I recommended in my comment to Greg). And I agree that those of us who support leaders need to do a better job of helping them understand not only the importance of vision, but also the importance of involving people in its creation, of setting up communication, reward, accountability and development systems and work processes that are aligned with the vision, the importance of modeling it, of helping leaders at all levels understand their role and responsibility for translating it, and of keeping it alive by integrating it into daily life.

Thanks for sharing the great example of how an organization can use the vision to guide setting strategy and evaluating priorities. Too often, with the constant changes we face, we stay focused on strategies and goals that no longer are aligned with the vision and consequently lose sight of the vision.

I am not as optimistic as you are that we are past the stage of simply posting them on the wall (or the internet). Way too often there is a complete a mismatch between what I find on websites and what I experience as a consumer. And even more often, the vision statements I read, are so lofty, so generic, they could have been generated by a computer program – which was the motivation behind this particular post.

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts and excellent suggestions, Alan.

The issue / opportunity with vision is have it climb down from it’s lofty perch in the clouds.

It’s time for vision to be viewed as a piece of overall strategy and that a conscious effort be made to both implement it and measure it’s effectiveness in helping people live the strategy.

I’ve done work with an organization on implementing the vision in order to live it. Their recently refreshed vision was reviewed by the management team for a 1/2 day. It proved challenging for some of the team because they were not living the vision (until then politics mostly prevailed). It brought the weaker parts of their culture out of the closet and it helped a more conscious effort to deliver the vision came to the fore.

One of the ways I have seen an organization manage the conflict between vision and constantly changing tactics is to provide a regularly updated list of ‘current priorities’ that accompany the vision. I saw this at the worker’s entrance to a successful manufacturing plant. When I asked if the large poster on the wall was discussed very often the answer was, ‘all the time’.

In response to Greg’s question above, I appreciate your acknowledgement of the space between the high level view of the vision and the day-to-day realities.

Whether because of a lack of vision or short-term financial and/or political pressures, people and organizations get caught up in the urgent, versus the important, often losing the ability to differentiate between the two, forever operating in a short-term, reactive mindset, instead of taking the longer term view that comes with a larger strategic vision for the organization. Ironically, however, it’s the longer term, values aligned vision that invigorates employees to go the distance, increasing the odds for success.

Question: How do you teach vision to those leaders who are linear and tactical in their leadership; who do not see or understand the value of vision?

Thank you, as always, for sharing your wisdom and experience with each of us.

-Sharon