Management and Leadership Best Practice 4 – Communicate and Explain the Vision

From birth, we as human beings have an insatiable desire to understand our surroundings. Regardless of one’s background, we tend to group and categorize things so to help establish order in our personal world. Such is the case in our business lives as well. There, like everywhere else, we attempt to assign a reason for why decisions are made, for why people act as they do, for why things are the way they are. Consequently, in the absence of a leader communicated vision, employees will individually create their own.

When leaders do not clearly communicate a vision or when their decisions and actions contradict the communicated vision, employees individually attempt to make sense of it all by creating their own mental model of a vision fitting their perceived reality. And while to each employee his or her contrived vision fits their circumstances and observations, these visions are limited by the individual’s experiences, backgrounds, and biases, necessarily lacking organizational inclusiveness – the big picture. Acting on these individual visions, well-intentioned employees believe they are doing what management desires when, in fact, they may be acting in a manner counter productive to the achievement of the organization’s goals. Therefore, it is incumbent on leaders to do two things. First communicate a vision for the future that is aligned with the organization’s mission and goals; translated with line of site clarity into the actions of all organization members. Secondly, the leader must be ever vigilant to ensure his or her decisions and actions are in strong alignment with the communicated vision such that they reinforce the vision and employees’ commitment to it.

Additional Resources…

StrategyDriven provides numerous articles, models, and podcasts focused on defining and then translating an organization’s vision into the day-to-day activities of employees. These include:

Definition

• Make the Mission Measurable    (article)
• Make the Mission Measurable    (podcast)
• Prioritize the Mission Measurable    (article)
• Prioritize the Mission, part 1 of 2    (podcast)
• Prioritize the Mission, part 2 of 2    (podcast)

Translation

• Strategic Organizational Alignment    (model)
• Vertically Cascading Organizational Performance Measures    (article)
• Vertically Cascading Organizational Performance Measures, part 1 of 3    (podcast)
• Vertically Cascading Organizational Performance Measures, part 2 of 3    (podcast)
• Vertically Cascading Organizational Performance Measures, part 3 of 3    (podcast)