How to Create and Set a Vision for Your Organization

February 25, 2018 Change Management, Management & Leadership, Productivity, The Manager's Resource Handbook

How To Create and Implement Organizational Vision

Last week, my friend Charlie was telling me about his job. He described how he felt directionless and was not sure how he fit into the big picture. High up in his organization, Charlie has been a tremendous asset to his organization over the years. I found it strange: how can someone with such an important role say he had no direction? Often times, when someone talks about their company’s ‘direction,’ they are really referring to both the organization’s leadership as well as the its plans for the future. Was there really no vision for Charlie’s organization? How can someone so high up say he was not sure where the organization was going? From the story that follows, we can learn what an organizational vision is, and how to make one for your team.

Lack of Direction Signals a Weak Vision

As we continued our discussion, I sought to understand better. I asked Charlie if his organization – or at least his manager – had ever shared some sort of vision for where they were going. It turns out that a new vision was shared just the day before “for the first time in a long time,” he said. He read it to me and it went something like this:

“To be a globally aligned company with a talented work force, that produces the best products in our market, and exceeds our customer’s expectations.”

Interesting as it was, my next question to Charlie was rather simple: “What does that mean to you?”

Charlie replied “Its sounds nice, but I have no idea what we plan to do in order to make that a reality. Our customer’s aren’t happy with us, I’m not sure what a globally aligned company really means, and I thought we already had a pretty talented organization.”

If someone at Charlie’s level in his company could not explain or understand the vision, it suggested that a number of things that were wrong with his company. My conversation with Charlie got me thinking about what an organization’s vision should be, and when done correctly, why every organization should have one.

Why Establish a Vision For Your Organization?

Why should you set a vision for your organization in the first place? Isn’t it just a bunch of words? Well, for starters, organizational vision is a picture of the future state. It’s not where you are today, but rather it’s where you want to be and that to which you aspire. Your organization’s vision is like looking at yourself in a mirror at some point in the future. In short, your stated vision is what you want your culture and organization to become, summarized in a sentence or two.

While a vision may seem like a bunch of buzz words strung together, the reason a vision is important to your organization is because it paints a picture of the direction the organization needs to go, and it gives employees something to rally behind as they go about their duties on a daily basis. It is essentially the top-level of the company pointing and steering the organization in a certain direction.

An organizational vision should:

Be short, clear and to the point
Touch on every aspect of your business – employees, customers, products
Define what the future state of the organization will look like
Highlight the key areas of focus for employees

In the case of my friend, Charlie, even if well-overdue, his organization did share a vision for the future. It was a good start. But an equally important question emerged when he struggled to explain how they were going to get there.

Every Vision Needs A Definition of Success

While the vision statement itself is just a single, bold statement, along with it you must have a definition of what that actually looks like. That is, you need to accompany your vision with a tangible definition of success.

In the case of Charlie’s company, what did it mean to be a globally aligned company? No further details were provided as to whether this meant his company’s distribution in terms of their customers, emerging economies, or simply shipping products around the world from a single factory.

Additionally, how did the proposed ‘talented workforce’ compare to today’s staff? From Charlie’s standpoint, it was not clear what was missing from his organization today, or what needed to change. How could Charlie act in support of the vision statement if he did not understand what it really meant?

Because your organization’s vision defines the future state, you must include what that future state really looks like, and how you will know when you’ve arrived. Doing so lets employees know what to expect and helps them anticipate some of the near-term changes needed to get there.

An Organizational Vision Must Include a Strategy

Again, your vision statement is just an image of your future self. It defines the goal of where you want to be, but that is it.

Someone once told me that a strategy ‘should not tell you what you could have had; it should tell you what you will have.”

It was clear from my conversation with Charlie that while there was a vision shared with the organization, the company’s leadership provided no strategy to accompany the vision. A vision without a strategy is like saying you will run a marathon in 6 months, without defining the training and conditioning regiment you will follow. A vision that lacks a strategy outlining the steps to achieve that vision will in fact, remain a bunch of words.

Your strategy should include:

Incremental steps of how you will achieve goals
Key activities that outline how you will achieve your goals and vision
Identify and drive focus around key priorities
Clearly identify what is not important
Serve as the basis for decision-making within the organization

Communicate the Plans

A vision, the definition of success, and the strategy are only as good as how well they are communicated. While Charlie’s organization had shared a vision, its next step would be to communicate details about the strategy, as well as what the future state looked like, in detail.

Communicating your vision and related plans – from the top of the organization down to the first level employees – is essential in harmonizing your workforce around them.

When communicating a vision and strategy:

Share the vision statement
Explain why the vision is written the way it is
Explain what each element of it really means
Describe what’s lacking or missing today so change is recognized
Highlight the key steps or initiatives that realign towards the future

Involve People in The Process

While the vision for an organization is often a top-down flow of where the organization’s leaders want to take the business, the individuals whose efforts are needed to get there must be part of defining the future. It’s the individuals, after all, who deal with customers, who work through the organizational challenges to get results, and who are tasked with meeting deadlines everyday.

So, while the top of the organization may be best suited to know what your shareholders and board of directors seek, it’s the individuals, managers and foremen within the company that are a tremendous source for ideas and input that can shape the definition of success and the pieces of your strategy.

Once the vision and basic frame of the future has been communicated, gather input, ideas and suggestions from within the organization to help make that vision a reality. Employee surveys, skip-level meetings, and executive roundtable sessions are great ways to gather information from various levels of your organization. Involving employees in the process of shaping the strategy and details also helps you reinforce the direction you are going to every level of your company.

Final Points

Setting a vision for your organization is essential when you want to align your workforce behind something. More than a bunch of words, your vision is a picture of where you want to be. Along with it, you need to communicate what your vision translates to in real terms, as well as outline the strategy that will get you there.