How to Create a Company Vision That Actually Inspires and Aligns Your Team | Leadership Guide

Your job as a leader is to convey with perfect clarity the vision. If you're not giving people the clarity, the way to make sense, people will make up their own explanations. I've helped leaders of Fortune 500, I've helped leaders of billion dollar companies, I've helped leaders of scrappy startups. And the challenge that comes up for them frequently is I know what we need to do. My team doesn't get it. We seem to get things up to the 20 yard line, up to the 10 yard line. We can't get it to the end zone, meaning we get close to our goal, but we just can't get it done. Unless I step in and I push and I raise hell and all those things for too many CEOs and too many leaders, a sense that if they aren't looking over every shoulder and checking everything in detail, it won't get done. Now, I'm not advocating that you don't pay attention, that's also a problem. But as a leader, you don't need to be in everybody's business all the time. You need to be creating clarity for everyone so that you don't have to be looking over their shoulder every single moment. What we really want is to know that our team gets it, that our team understands what's important, how to make decisions. We want to have confidence they're making great decisions and that when challenges arise, they can overcome them, they can surface them at the right time and the problems aren't hiding. We want to know that without us having to continually force people and micromanage people, they're engaging and they're leading things forward in their own way. Even if they're not in a quote unquote leadership position, they're behaving like leaders within their sphere of influence and they're moving things forward. The problem is human communication has been shown in study after study for even the best and brightest people. We overestimate our ability to communicate. We overestimate our memory's capability. And with those two overestimations, it puts us into the land of incompetence. Right? Incompetence is having so much confidence in a given thing that you don't work on it and you aren't intentional about it. You just think it takes care of itself. And I see too many leaders who are charismatic and are really great orders and persuaders confuse a few interactions with creating clarity for their team. I always love the Steve Jobs quote. He said, your job as a leader is to create a shared vision on the team and build consensus around that shared vision. And the mistake I see leaders make is instead of the simple essentials of communicating a clear vision, they go read a book, they go, oh, I'm going to follow this and it's all going to work. And sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Another mistake people make is that they use the fluffy, well marketed versions of vision, but they can take so much time to come up with and you can invest so much time in them and then not really have what people need to lean in quickly. People get turned off by all the hype around vision and all the writings from the 1900s and the recycled blog posts. It just turns them off so much. They feel like vision is a corporate thing, I'm not going to do it. So they ignore creating the clarity for their team. They confuse micromanagement with clarity. Micromanagement is, hey, don't worry about our vision. You go do this thing right now, here's your responsibility. You go do it. That's all we need. It's not helpful, doesn't allow people to make decisions, and it makes everyone on your team dependent on you so that you become the bottleneck. So the big idea is that your job as a leader is to convey with perfect clarity the vision. It has to be clear, it has to be simple, it has to, it has to be easy to understand. And then you have to keep reinforcing it because that creates the culture you need and that creates the alignment you need. And it's what people need in order to lean into those things. If you're not giving people the clarity the way to make sense, people will make up their own explanations. Objective Studies find that 75% of the workforce doesn't understand their leader's direction. As the leader of the company, it is your job to provide that clarity. And so how do we provide that clarity? We do it with a very crisp form of vision statement. And that vision statement really doesn't need to be an elaborate process and a 10 page document. It really requires you to answer about 12 questions and then use those questions to reflect on a few things. It needs to have a clear statement of the future you're trying to create. It needs to have a clear statement of your beliefs in terms of what's driving you to create that future. That's your why. And those are very concise. They do not need to be long. With those two things in place, you have the vision portion of your vision. You then need to set up the guardrails that are important to you. How are you going to behave to Bring that future to life. How are you going to behave as a team? Those guardrails are going to give you even more specificity so that you can be crystal clear what are the behaviors we expect from our team and what are the behaviors we want them to avoid. That's the definition of culture. And we're going to become intentional about that by laying out actionable core values. And our test is, can you high five them when you see them? So you're going to create six, maybe 12 of those. And with that you've created this vision. Now you've created some guardrails around it and that's the first step to having your vision. Now to reduce that to what this means for our company in the next three years. The big broad future vision can give us a sense of why, but it's not going to motivate us. Core values tell us how to behave, but they won't align us enough because we could all just be moving west instead of going to LA or Santa Fe or wherever we're trying to get to. It provides you enough of a driver that people have to get off their behinds to get moving because you feel the immediacy of that goal. But it's not so close that people will shut down and feel like it's not achievable. You have enough that you can at least have a dialog around, if not start to create accountability around. So remember, if you want to lean into your job as a leader, a business owner or CEO, create that clarity of vision. Take the time to lay out the vision. Answer these 12 simple questions. Lay out your core values and the behaviors you expect from everyone. Distill that to a set of measurable outcomes. Your metrics, your measurables, whatever the system you want to use calls them, and use that to construct a picture of your company in three years. All it takes is going to resultmaps.com Go to our AI powered vision template. Answer the 12 questions in five to 10 minutes. You'll have a world class draft of your vision statement that you can then edit or accept and just hit the button and boom. Your vision statements and result maps. From there you work on your three year picture and even that suggested by our AI tools. So you can get these things very, very quickly and very, very easily.