7 Steps to Create and Cascade Down Your Company Vision
“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”
Jonathan Swift
Creating a vision and then working towards achieving it is probably one of the most powerful pathways to success and yet, sadly, many organisations either don’t have a clear vision or haven’t communicated it clearly to their employees.
So, what is a vision?
A vision is a positive imagined future, setting out how you want things to be. More than the words on the page, it engages your heart and mind. It guides everything you do; all of your decision-making, plans, activities and goals – in fact, all of your efforts.
Without a clear vision, you’re like a ship bobbing around aimlessly in the water. There’s no agreed destination or direction of travel. This can lead to you going around in circles and this can lead to stagnation. People don’t know what they should be working on or what their priorities are. Staff become de-motivated and disengaged. There is nothing holding things together and sooner or later, this starts to significantly affect performance and results.
Luckily, there are some simple steps you can take to make sure you have a vision and that its clear, understood and shared by everyone. By taking the time to craft a clear, concise and inspiring vision, you can ensure that you have an exciting direction of travel and a clear purpose and everyone in your organisation is on the same page.
Imagine getting out there and asking ANYONE in your organisation what the company vision is. Just imagine having them answer in such a way that says, “I know what the vision is” and furthermore, “I know the part I play in making the vision a reality’
It’s possible!
Here are 7 simple tips for how to create your company vision:
1. Craft a clear and concise vision statement
First of all, work as a leadership team to craft a clear and concise vision statement. Where would you like to be in 3 to 5 years’ time? What would you like to achieve? How will you know that you’re there? You might want to consider using the Everything DiSC Work of Leaders model to help you do this. Work of Leaders is built on the foundation of Everything DiSC® and applies best practice behaviours to the process of leadership. These are drawn from the ‘best of the best’ leaders and allow us to ‘model their excellence’!
This isn’t a quick job. Set aside some time to either review your existing vision statement or if it’s out of date, start from scratch. Make sure that everyone in the team is involved and engaged in the process. The Work of Leaders model will help you understand how to do this and will enable you to bring out the best in everyone in the team.
2. Engage your next tier of leaders
Once you have your shared and agreed vision and have captured it in a clear and understandable statement, next you need to involve and engage your next tier of leaders. You need to start ‘cascading’ the vision. This means prioritising time to share and communicate the vision very clearly to your next tier of leaders. This needs to be done in a way that involves, listens, engages and inspires. Again, Work of Leaders shows the way with the best practice behaviours for doing this.
3. What does the main vision look like for each department?
Each department, team, section then needs to take the content and aspirations from the ‘big’ vision from step one and start to craft a vision that is aligned and relevant to their area of responsibility. The question they need to be asking themselves here is ‘what does this vision mean for our team/department/function? Again, this needs to be done in a way that involves, engages listens and inspires their people.
4. Smaller visions
Ultimately, each section/team/department will have crafted their own vision and vision statement that sits nicely and clearly underneath the ‘big’ vision and can be communicated to other relevant stakeholders.
5. Plan for success
Each leader, whatever their role of level, needs to fully understand the vision they are responsible for achieving and have clear goals and plans for realising it.
6. Accountability measures
Always make sure that there are clear accountability measures in place. In other words, who is going to do what, how and by when.
7. Follow up
Follow up and review regularly to ensure that everyone is still on board. Makes sure that review processes are part of the overall plan. Tweak the vision as and when internal and external factors require it.
By following these steps, you can be sure that your vision will be clear, understood executed and by everyone in your organisation.
Interested?
If you need help to create and cascade your vision, please contact us and we can take you through the options. If you feel that you have the training capacity ‘in-house’, we can support you with the Everything DiSC profiles. You can simply purchase the Everything Work of Leaders profiles from us with two options here:
Option 1: We do all of the DiSC profiling admin for you
Option 2: We create an EPIC account for you and you do the admin yourselves
We can come into your organisation and deliver leadership training working with your leadership teams and using the Everything DiSC profiles. We will facilitate you to create or review your vision, adopting the best practice behaviours from the Everything DiSC Work of Leaders profiles. We can help you work to your strengths and develop in the areas that have been challenging you.
We can train you to deliver the leadership training in-house. By attending one of our DiSC Certification training courses, we can teach you (or people from your learning and development teams), how to make the most out of the Everything DiSC profiles and models in your organisation and then you can deliver the leadership training yourselves.