In last week’s blog post we took a closer look at how to effectively establish your company’s vision. A vision must be simple, expressed in a manner that is easy for people to understand, something that employees can support and make their own, and ideally it will solve a problem. If you’d like help defining and establishing your vision within your company, I am here to help with leadership coaching.
Effectively Maintain Your Vision
Keeping the corporate vision active and powerful takes effort, diligence, intentionality, and desire, all of which must be initiated by the top leader. With daily distractions, challenges, and opportunities that impact staff, you must remember that a casual approach to monitoring your vision is inadequate. Start by getting your leadership circle on board.
Keeping the vision on everyone’s mind requires a consistent focus (pointing activities and outcomes back to it). You benefit by establishing policies and procedures in ways that reflect your vision. For example, if your vision is to improve diabetic patients’ health with your extensive line of nutritious products, position all activities to deliver on this promise. Your decisions to partner with retailers must be based on helping diabetics live healthier lives. Your product development and testing should be aimed at helping diabetics stay healthy. All of your meetings, budgets, and plans must be designed to support consumers’ lives. Your vision becomes a mantra that no one can ignore.
Wise leaders boost their vision even further by eliminating any activities or projects that don’t support it. As tempting as new ventures may be, spreading yourself thin by chasing too many of them always weakens the focus on your primary vision and diminishes overall outcomes.
Maintaining this mindset requires your vision to be openly and continuously promoted long after its introduction. Update meetings, signage, posters, newsletters, and websites to keep your vision at the forefront of people’s experience. Some organizations state their vision on their letterhead and standard forms. Make sure it’s ingrained in the staff’s consciousness.
As advantageous as open reminders are for maintaining your vision, nothing is as compelling as a personal message from you. Direction and culture originate at the top, so your testimony carries more weight than all other promotional efforts combined. In staff meetings, periodically describe your passion for the vision. Send a video message to your employees through company email. Let them see how important the vision is to you and how their involvement is part of a greater cause. These strategies ensure your vision remains fresh and vibrant in people’s minds and, by extension, their work.
I hope this week’s blog post has given you further guidance in how to establish your vision within the company, as well as some concrete ideas for how to make this a reality. If you would like help establishing a robust plan to instill your vision within your company and all of its employees, I am here to help! As always, I would love to hear from you. I can be reached here or on LinkedIn.
