Creating A Shared Vision For Your Team

Why communicate a vision for your team? Communicating a clear and focused vision for the future gives employees a sense of purpose and direction to their everyday work. Additionally, when describing future plans or ideas, team members should understand how changes around them fit into the end goal.

Vividly describe the end goal. By allowing employees to visualize a future state in their minds, leaders should generate excitement and interest around working towards a shared vision. When having your next strategic planning retreat, includes employees at all levels of the company so that they can clearly identify how their work contributes towards the overarching plan of the organization.

Describing a clear vision eliminates considerable uncertainty about the future. When employees feel like they are working towards a clear picture of the future, they may align their work or suggest ideas that will help the organization get to that future state. Team members will also feel a sense of security knowing that the team is all moving towards an agreed upon future state.

Inspire employees to work towards a common ground. Employees generally want to contribute to projects and ideas that will be personally fulfilling but also to bring them a sense of purpose of their contributions towards the organization. As team members see that others around them are also working towards similar goals, the team can support each other through successes and/or challenges that arise.

Encourage a mindset of “create the course”. As team members invest time and effort in charting the path ahead, they will be more likely to be invested staying the course that they helped create. Creating a future vision includes identifying things that the team should not take on. This blog includes many questions you should ask employees when creating a shared vision such as:

• What is working well?
• What is holding us back?
• What can we do better?

Having the team take a deep dive into these questions will allow for the creation of a shared vision that will move the group forward on an agreed upon path.

Tackle roadblocks as a team. What are the barriers that are preventing your team from reaching the vision? What resources are needed? Who is accountable? Can that person or team be successful with the resources they have? Many questions can explain why particular barriers exists. Additionally, when barriers are identified, help the team brainstorm potential solutions to those barriers.

If your team doesn’t know where they are going, then the road to get there will not be clear. Once that end goal becomes clear, then the action steps to get to that end point will be much easier to identify and accomplish.