Creating a Vision for Your Team
It’s a fundamental truth in business that hard work alone doesn’t equal success. To achieve success, that work needs to be focused and clearly directed towards to a desirable result. Creating a vision for your team that defines and encapsulates that result will sharpen minds and foster consciously targeted behaviours — the kind of behaviours that ultimately make success more likely.
The Role of Management
The role of management in creating a team vision is vital. While it’s reasonable to expect team members to work towards a vision, it’s rare to see those team members defining that vision.
As a manager (or team leader), you’re best placed to understand ‘what success looks like’ — an understanding that’s vital when formulating a compelling vision. You are also best placed to reward — and thereby incentivise — behaviours that work towards that vision.
Goals vs Vision
Even those in leadership positions can sometimes struggle to define the difference between a goal and a vision. If we think of your team’s vision as the shining uplands in the far distance, then we might define your goals as stepping stones along the way. Reaching each goal should deliver a discernible benefit in its own right, but should also progress you further along the path to your destination — the vision you’ve set out.
At this stage, you may be tempted to reject goal setting as a short-term approach, and focus single-mindedly on your long-term vision — but doing so is almost always a mistake. Setting goals not only allows us to focus more keenly on urgent priorities, but it also creates the chance for a series of rewards that make the long road less arduous.
Those rewards may be psychological — the innate satisfaction of a goal achieved, or they may be financial — perhaps in the form of a results-linked bonus. As team leader, you may or may not be able to establish financial rewards, but by fostering a positive and supportive team culture you can certainly enhance the psychological rewards of success.
Defining Your Team’s Vision
If goal setting is straightforward — a ‘left-brain’ activity where we objectively set out our immediate aims — then defining our vision calls for more creativity of thought. You’ll need to project your mind forward and have the confidence to set out ambitions that might (initially) seem overly optimistic. Provided that your vision is supported by a series of small, manageable goals (which can be added to as you progress) then optimism is a virtue, and provides a potent catalyst for success.
One of the most striking real-world examples of visionary leadership was Bill Gates’ determination to put ‘a computer on every desk, and in every home’. Anyone questioning the value of optimism should consider just how far-fetched that concept seemed in 1980.
Finally, it’s worth stressing that your team’s vision must align closely with your company’s vision. In the context of a small business, your team and your company may be one and the same thing, but if your team forms a department within a larger company, then the visions of both should be sufficiently compatible to function synergistically.
