Sharing The Vision; Making Your Own Success

On our other blogs, we’ve been touching on the importance of having a corporate or brand “vision”, the process for developing it and realizing the successes that can come from internalizing it. But the most critical factor in making a “vision” valuable for a company is the way corporate leadership understands, supports and manifests it on a day-to-day basis.

The first thing a corporate leader needs to understand is that charisma alone won’t cut it when it comes to crafting a vision for the company. Your job is to lead, yes, but a vision must be shared to be understood. If your vision is “to be the largest widget maker in the United States” your team needs to understand what that means for them.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for ego and charisma. There certainly is. And, many times, that’s all small and mid-sized companies (generally the most entrepreneurially-driven companies) have going for them. But the leader in the room must be patient and wait to make sure his lieutenants have a common and clear understanding of his vision.

As the leader, it is your job to make sure the vision is broad enough and grand enough. There is, in a distinctly American sense, something romantic about a grand vision for the future. And, to a degree, you want people caught up in the excitement of the vision.

But being swept away by the romance of the vision won’t be enough when the management team gets back to work and has to explain this grand plan to the rank and file employees, their customers and their vendors. It’s in the heat of this day-to-day battle where “support” has to become “commitment” on the part of the management team. There are two ways to ensure this happens:

1) During the visioning process, it’s extremely helpful to define the corporate vision of success in terms that each manager can understand. Rather than saying something vague like “we will delight our customers” – get each manager to explain what they’re team could do that would be “delightful” from the customer’s perspective. After a while, managers will start thinking tactically about the vision and identifying the first, small steps that can be taken when they get back to
work;

2) Once everyone is back to work, the corporate leader needs to turn up the heat and over-communicate with both his managers and they’re direct reports. Make a point to catch people doing the right thing. Celebrate the little successes. Relate the little things back to the bigger goal and reinforce the goal in the process.

It takes more than just a shared vision and a commitment to that vision to make it work for you in the future. Managers have to become manifestations of that future vision. Only then will their employees believe that the change (whatever is required) is inevitable.

Manifesting the corporate vision means that managers need to consider the corporate vision every time they make a decision related to running their area. Personnel performance appraisals, vendor contracts, customer records, etc, all need to be viewed through the lens offered by the corporate vision.

Only by complete and clear adoption of the corporate vision can the consistency required to create real (measurable) brand value be achieved.

Technorati Tags: Brand, Branding, Corporate Vision, Strategic Planning, Market Research