Leadership Team Development – Creating an Emotive Vision

10 Top Reasons that stops the average leader from becoming a Great Leader. We’re focusing 10 articles on each one of these reasons. Today’s article focuses on not having an emotive vision for the team to buy into. I have been an Executive Coach for over 10 years and whether its CEO development or senior executive development, the same key issue often arises. That is that when I ask the team what their team vision is, they either don’t know, or each have a different answer. In Leadership development and Leadership Team development we all know that we need a vision, but what exactly is it? How do we know when our teams have it? And why is it so important? What is A Vision? A vision – in its pure form is an imagined picture of what the world will look like when we reach our goals. Mission Statement – is a verbal statement to describe the vision or goals. Bland and Confusing Vision/Mission Statements Often when start my Leadership Team Development programmes, the Senior Executives, or CEOs give me a paragraph of written words to describe their vision. These words are often high level business speak with a few comparative terms like ‘the best’ or ‘the biggest’ etc. When each person in the company reads this ‘statement of a vision’ they will make a different picture in their minds eye. So a company of 1000 people will have 1000 different pictures that represent their = vision. To become a great leader, you need to ensure that the vision is easily seen and felt and that that is expressed succinctly. (You might want your marketing team to help with this). Joint Vision = Motivated Leadership Team For a leadership team to feel motivated, they need to be able to visualise what it will be like to have already delivered their goals (whether that goal has an actual physical output like building a block of flats, or is more esoteric, like improving the way we interact with our customers). Once each person in the team has ‘time travelled’ into the imaginary future and experienced in their own imagination what it would feel like to be part of the team that has achieved this goal, then each team member will create their own motivation to gain this goal. How Far into the Future Should our Vision Be? • How rapidly is your organisation changing? • If your team set a three year vision is it likely to reach it? • How long can the team keep focused on a goal? Is 3 or 6 months a more realistic timeframe? Leadership Team Development Exercise for Creating an Emotive Vision – Allocate 2 hours • Ideally this should take place in a room with views and light to facilitate the brain to create future visions. • The energy in the team must be relaxed, calm and with no time pressures. People can’t easily connect to their creativity under stress or time pressures. • Once the time frame for the vision has been agreed e.g. One year out, ask ‘what is possible in a year’s time? What will your workplace look like? What will you have achieved? What will people be saying about this team? How will you feel when you walk into work and go through your day?. • Collate the thoughts and feeling on the whiteboard. Ensure no one is left out. • Once all the thoughts and pictures are recorded on the whiteboard, let the team discuss their ideas and ask questions of each other to ensure that they can understand the picture that is in other’s mind (this is obviously impossible in reality, but it is the nearest we can get through language, to a collective vision). • Summarise the team vision based on the part that the team felt most emotive and connected to – doubling profit will not be it!