Vision for Business: 5 Essentials to Make It Simple For Your Team (and Everyone)
The following is the transcript from a video published to the ResultMaps YouTube on Vision.
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When you think about the very best companies - the ones that grow and are resilient through ups and downs - they do great things year after year. I'm talking about Johnson & Johnson, Lego, Virgin, and all these great names. Even younger names like Veer, and even early-stage startups like Superhuman and Simplified, have one thing in common: they all have a great vision of the future they want to create. It's so clear that everyone in the company, including customers, wants to get on board and be part of that journey.
If you're like many leaders, you've had this problem: you have a clear idea in your head, but you may have trouble getting everyone on board with it. It may not seem quite as clear when it comes out, causing frustration and gaps. It may not be the exact picture you're seeing as your people take it on. If you're like many CEOs and leaders, you may have such a clear vision in your mind that it can be hard to fully unpack it in a way that's easy for your people, those around you, and even your customers to understand.
By the end of this, I'll give you the essentials to build a vision that's simple, clear, and easy to understand, so you can get everyone on your team on the same page, moving in the same direction. You can also tell that story to everyone involved in a way that makes sense to them and is easy for them to get on board.
Every founder, CEO, and leader within any company has a great vision within them for what the future can be. It's that great sense of possibility and optimism that propels us forward. The better you can get that vision out of your head and build it into a shared vision with your team, the more effective you'll be, and the faster we can all reach that thriving state of growth.
Why vision?
Step zero is to get clear on what we mean by a vision for your business. It's not a thick, old-school business plan. What I'm going to talk about is a simple form of vision that is user-friendly for the people who really have to use it and make decisions based on it. There are three things you need: one, spell out the future you want to create (the 'what'); two, make a list of why that matters to you (the 'why'); and three, have some guiding principles to use to make decisions and take action whenever gray areas and decision points come up.
Imagine you're at one end of the map, and where you want to go is on the other end. You have an idea it's there and the direction, but it's vague. What we're doing is creating a set of boundaries, focusing our direction, so we don't go off the map and always move in the right direction. That's what we're going to do with our vision, tightening it using other components to narrow our focus.
The three-year timeframe
We'll start by thinking about three years out. Imagine you've entered a time machine, and it's three years from now, where all your hopes and dreams for that intervening time have come through. I'll ask you a series of questions in categories like your numbers, people, customers, press/reputation, and products/services. The three-year time frame is powerful because it's far enough out to suspend disbelief but close enough to create urgency.
The five why’s
The next step is the 'five whys' exercise. Ask yourself why this vision is important to you, and do that five times. You'll end up with a bulleted list of the things you care about. You can then create a vision format like great companies use: "Here's the future I see..." (with details from your three-year exercise), and "Because we believe..." (listing your whys).
Creating a culture
The next step is outlining specific behaviors and actions to create a real culture - not fuzzy culture, but high-fiveable core values, as Patrick Lencioni calls them. These are actual behaviors you can encourage or discourage, so you're using behavioral science.
Once your core values are in place, you can make your vision easy to remember with a rallying cry that everyone can come back to - your mission statement, which is really just the title of your vision.
If you can get all these pieces in place and combine them with a scoreboard representing the health of your business, you'll have a great, easy-to-convey vision. Make that vision real so you, your people, and the world around you can be your inspired best, hit your numbers faster, and thrive no matter what comes up.