How to craft a vision for your organisation

In my last blog 7 Steps to Create and Cascade Down Your Company Vision, we looked at how to create and cascade your vision in your organisation.

Now let’s dig deeper into how to craft your vision using the best practice behaviours from the Work of Leaders.

It’s essential for leaders to have a clear vision for their team or organisation. Everything DiSC Work of Leaders can help you craft your vision and set you, your team and your organisation up for success.

Work of Leaders is based on leadership best practice behaviours. Knowing these can help you adopt the right approaches to crafting a vision and avoid common pitfalls.

Here’s how to create your vision using Everything DiSC and Work of Leaders.

First set aside a chunk of time to do this. This isn’t something that can be done by shoehorning it in to one of your leadership meetings. You will need the time and space to properly explore where you want to be heading.

Before you get together with your leadership team, have everyone in the team take their Work of Leaders Assessment. This 20-to-25-minute questionnaire will produce your own 23-page individual DiSC profile report. The profile report will help you to understand your own preferred leadership style as well as your own strengths and development areas when it comes to the process of leadership. 

Interestingly, there is no ‘best’ leadership style. All the styles are equally valuable. Whatever your preferred DiSC style, you’re going to find some parts of the process of leadership (Vision, Alignment, Execution) easier than others. It’s a level playing field. Everyone in the leadership team will have three leadership strengths and three leadership development areas and these will be highlighted and described in the profile report.

Knowing these will help each team members to adjust their behaviour as you work through the process of crafting your vision.

When you get together as a team, you can share and discuss your DiSC styles, the content of your profile reports as well as the implications of the blend of styles in the team. When you look at all the DiSC styles, you can consider how well your blend of styles is supporting your overall performance and what might need to be addressed personally and as a team when it comes to collectively crafting your vision.

Crafting a vision – Exploration

Work of Leaders shows us that there needs to be an ‘exploration’ stage when crafting a vision. The process can’t be rushed. It’s about engaging your imagination. This might challenge faster paced (Dominance style) team members who just want to ‘get it done’ and therefore might press for closure too soon. It might challenge more detail oriented (Conscientiousness style) team members too as this stage is about avoiding getting bogged down in the detail.

Work of Leaders best practice behaviours here are about ‘Remaining Open’ and ‘Prioritising Big Picture’.

Start to consider:

• If anything was possible, what ideally do you want?
• What could you be doing that you are not doing?
• What would your customers like/love from you?
• What kind of legacy do you want to leave?

Crafting a vision – Boldness

Are you playing it too safe? Some DiSC styles might find it harder to consider anything that seems risky (typically the Steadiness style and the Conscientiousness style) Their bias is towards being cautious and reflective and so starting to consider more bold directions and approaches could present as a stretch too far.

Work of Leaders best practice behaviours here are about ‘Being adventurous’ and ‘Speaking out’:

• What if you were to start to be more adventurous? Where might this take you?
• What would be the boldest thing you could include in your vision?
• Are you holding back from presenting an idea because you don’t want to appear stupid?
• What if you were to speak out more? What would you say?

Crafting a vision – Testing Assumptions

You’ve considered the big picture and dreamed big and bold. Now it’s time to start to ground your vision in reality and think about the practicalities. This is where the faster paced styles (The Dominance style and the influence style) might struggle.

Work of Leaders best practice behaviours here are about ‘Seeking counsel’ and ‘Exploring implications’

Some leaders just want to charge on ahead and are reluctant to seek other views on the basis it will slow things down and muddy the waters. However, this is the time to get some fresh perspectives and angles on your ideas. This is the time to get the facts and do some more homework

• Who could provide some valuable input here?
• Who else could you involve at this stage?
• What further information do you need to move forwards?
• What might you be missing here?

By adopting these behaviours and working through this process, you’ll be closer to crafting a clear vision statement that you can start to communicate and cascade.  

It will probably need tweaking. It will probably need honing. It will definitely need reviewing and revising as circumstances change.

And it will be so worth putting the time and effort into!

By taking the time to create a well-crafted vision statement, you’ll be setting yourself up for success. Everything DiSC and Work of Leaders can help you get there.

With a clear vision, you can now start gaining alignment.