You may have heard the expression: “Vision without execution is hallucination!” Great execution requires everyone to be aligned on where your organization is going and how to get there.
The significance of a unified vision is often forgotten or neglected which leads to frustration and misalignment. It starts at the top.
What is “vision?”
Using 5 questions from the EOS process, I teach my clients how to define and share their company’s vision:
Core Values (who you are as a company)
Core Focus (why the company does what it does and what it does best)
Core Target (where the company is headed in the next 5 – 15 years)
Marketing Strategy (profile of your ideal clients and what will attract them to you)
3-Year Picture (the short-term snapshot of your company’s future)
Two things are extremely important to bring your vision alive:
First, not only must your team fully define the answers to these questions, but they must also agree to the answers. Really – this may take a good old fashioned debate and passionate disagreement to get to the “right” answers. Be willing to work through this.
Second, you must set up a process to share your company’s vision frequently and precisely throughout the entire organization. The old adage that you must communicate seven times before people hear it for the first time…is now more like thirteen times with so many distractions in front of us.
Making sure your vision is clearly explained is just as important as it being frequently shared. I had a client who lost two great people and later learned (after the exit interviews), that if they better understood the vision, they would have stayed. It’s the obvious that sometimes bite us in the backside!
Great ideas are just the start. You must passionately communicate/share…share/communicate to bring everyone into the mix and assure that your BIG Vision doesn’t regress to a hallucinatory state.
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703.278.CORE (2673)
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