How often a Vision Statement of a Company is understood? Even the greatest mission and vision statements fall flat unless they are stated and shared effectively.
Solid research finds that people see you and I as a better leader, if we are able to communicate our organization’s vision effectively.
Vision impacts culture
Often senior executives or leaders of the company are blind to the reality that these guiding principles play a vital role in forming and taking the culture of the organization to its workforce, shareholders, and customers and to the society.
The current reality proves that they are neither aware of how well a vision is understood outside of their executive suite nor are seriously worried about it. The worst reality is that as they get engrossed with the day-to-day affairs of the organization, the vision and its core values (the organizational culture) take a back seat.
Employee and company’s Vision
If you and I asked the average employee, who passes through the lobby, eats in the cafeteria, or drinks form the mug, my guess is that they might not even know the mission, vision, and values, much less how to use them to inform their work.
As Leaders get serious about the company’s brand image and its future seriously in this changing market scenario and the society, it is highly important that senior leaders percolate the vision of to its grassroots.
Five ways leaders percolate a company’s Vision
Percolation demands that you and I live and breathe its core values first and exhibit the following five qualities in communicating our vision:
1. Inspiration
The way someone discusses the organization’s vision can be just as important as the content. Eye contact, facial expressions, hand gestures, tone of voice, and enthusiasm all contribute to the increased impact of the message.
You and I need to be inspired by it and describe it in a casual, upbeat, almost infectious way. Remember one thing, we all need inspiration.
2. Challenge
‘While simple works, easy does not.’ An element of challenge is critical. The Leadership Review study showed that vision discussions that were ambitious and difficult were actually perceived as a plus by employees.
If you and I talk about our vision as fiercely maintaining the status quo, we’re not being effective. You and I need to constantly challenge ourselves against the vision and the challenge our team to get the best.
3. Clarity
Making a vision easily understood is critical. Let us drop the buzzwords and corporate speak. Let us use terms that are easily understood, unambiguous, and as simple as possible.
There are a lot of clear mission statements out there, but how many of them are inspiring and clear. If a pond is clouded with mud, there is nothing you can do to make water clear. But when you allow the mud to settle, it will clear on its own, because clarity is water’s natural state. So too, Clarity is the mind’s natural state.
The more clear we are in our expression, the more effective the vision becomes.
4. Task–specific
At any level in the organization, the challenge for employees is to try to convert the vision into their day job. By mentioning specific tasks, actions, and behaviors that bring the vision to life, leaders help employees convert the concept into practice.
Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, in their Harvard Business Review article called “The Knowing Doing Gap” suggest “organizations use the act of creating and discussing mission/vision statements as one of the most common substitutes for actually taking action”
The trick is to create a solid vision statement that is easily translatable by everyone in the organization into actions on their day-to-day job.
5. Inclusion
Certain key words registered as more positive in the Leadership Review study. Inclusive language such as “we,” “us,” and “our,” (instead of “they”) tended to unify people to the vision. Leaders scored higher when they stated how they were personally living out the vision.
Where there is no vision, people fail, so do organisations. If the present day leaders don’t reinitiate and percolate the vision to the bottom of the workforce, complex times such as these, could become nightmare for organisations to create sustainability, forget sustainable returns.
For a vision to be a reality, it needs to be stated and shared effectively.
email: elias@manovsis.com, linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/eliasmoses