Creating Corporate Vision
- 02
- Mar
- 2016
- Posted Byadmin
- InBlog, PsyPerform - Leadership Coaching
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Creating corporate vision –
an essential skill for any leader.
For millennia great leaders have known the power of a few well-chosen words. To the cynical, that’s all a corporate vision is: words.
To the informed, almost every major organisational achievement started in the mind of one person, and was expressed in a few well-chosen words, which then inspired the realisation of the vision. One person creating corporate vision can and does set in train something that changes many lives.
Those leaders capable of giving birth to an inspiring corporate vision find their lives and achievements outstripping their peers.
Achievement comes in many forms. You’re reading this article; that means you are an achievement focused, organisational leader, so you know this to be true: Management and leadership (whether at work, home, or leisure) are about getting others to want to perform well. A key skill to create willing advocates is creating corporate vision. Those who have developed and use that ability rise to the top.
Experience has probably taught you that most companies fail to unite or align their staff behind a single inspiring vision.
Yet, some leaders have a 100% success record: all of their visions produce the required results.
How? Why? How can they possibly be so skilled at creating corporate vision time after time, when most, the overwhelming majority of leaders, either fail to produce ANY vision, or one so poor that it has the opposite effect to that intended?
What are those inspirational leaders doing right? What are they doing that is different? How can you do it, too?
Firstly, they know and really understand the techniques involved in creating corporate vision.
Secondly, they understand the characteristics of an effective corporate vision.
Thirdly, they know what kinds of visions to form, and how to craft them for the desired effect.
If your vision can secure just 1% better performance per day from your staff than your competitors can from theirs, how long will it be before YOU are clearly in the lead? Not long! That is the power in creating corporate vision.
Creating Corporate Vision
Have you noticed the odd wording: “creating corporate vision,” as opposed to “creating a corporate vision”?
Many companies create a corporate vision. It is publicised and lives on the wall, perhaps in the HQ reception area. They have created ‘a’ corporate vision: singular. They have not created corporate vision.
Creating corporate vision is about getting the whole company to the see the future; to act as though the corporation has sight, and is focused on what future it will create. Don’t get hung up on the term, just be aware that ‘a’ corporate vision is a warning signal to what could be going wrong in an organisation with poor leadership.
The Compound Effect
If you create corporate vision around a single inspiring goal you can quickly harness a well-known psychological performance phenomenon, the compound effect. A small shared difference in performance today, boosts morale and builds on the tiny advantage of yesterday, which boosts morale and productivity tomorrow. Before long your shared vision has created the massive, cumulatively acquired, advantage that all leaders dream of for their tomorrows.
Make sure that your vision gives YOU a growing performance edge over your competitors. How?
By learning the techniques (documented in ‘The Perfect Vision’ – available only to PsyPerform coaching clients) to fulfill, possibly, your most important leadership responsibility: creating corporate vision; aligning, uniting, empowering and inspiring your staff.
What makes most vision formations so poor?
You’ve no doubt seen many organisations set visions that are less than… ehm… crafted. Why do so many leaders get vision formation so wrong? There are three main reasons expressed in one phrase: the techniques for creating a corporate vision.
The Techniques for Creating a Corporate Vision
Only the best leaders understand the techniques for creating a corporate vision, what vision is, in this sense, and what it takes to create vision that all staff find inspiring. Few leaders have studied vision formation, as an art and skill, at all, let alone, in depth.
Even the most motivated leaders find there is (until now) almost no effective or reliable guidance on creating corporate vision. You will be pleased to know, that once you have mastered a few principles, creating corporate vision is well within your grasp.
You know from your own experience what it feels like to be striving towards an inspirational goal. You bounce out of bed in the morning, with your head full of ideas to achieve your dream. When you encounter problems you have a strong sense of ‘we can find a way around this’. Your bond with those on your shared vision journey is strong. Petty politics fade away. It feels great!
You can imagine what it would have been like working in the NASA of the 1960s, where everyone was focused on one goal: to put mankind on the moon. You can feel the thrill. That level of excitement and drive comes from creating corporate vision. Leaders who can unite people behind shared vision are promoted to higher and higher positions.
No amount of leadership effort can overcome the wrong vision, or a bad vision, or no vision. By contrast, much less management is needed when shared vision is in place: you can save effort, and make better use of that effort; save time, make better use of that time.
In organisations without clear and inspiring vision, leaders have to put in place tight command and control mechanisms. You’ve seen the effect of that; highly motivated people with exceptional levels of initiative resign, in droves, and that leaves the people who wont do anything until they are specifically directed to do so, and even then, when they encounter a difficulty (as is inevitable) they stop in their tracks until they get their next piece of direction.
Leaders who operate such command and control systems spend most of their time doing things that, frankly, leaders ought not to be doing. If you’ve ever suffered such an organisation you will know how self-defeating and wasteful they become, and what their self-established vicious cycle eventually holds for them. Once the cycle has begun it takes on a destructive life of its own.
Contrast that with an organisation headed by a leader who can create corporate vision. Staff come to work with total clarity. They are motivated and when they encounter problems, (as is inevitable) they have the crystal clarity of vision to give them the guidance that they need, all without any input required from any manager. That frees managers to achieve the multitude of more important things that they should be attending to, which of course, in turn, means that the organisation, overall, performs better, which, in turn, means you can attract more high performing, high initiative staff… a virtuous cycle. Once the cycle has begun it takes on a life of its own, and such organisations rise to the top, taking their leaders with them
By applying the principles required to creating corporate vision you set in train a sequence of events, which are massively out of proportion to the effort involved.
If you want to create corporate vision, if you want to lead at a higher standard than ever before contact Dr Nigel MacLennan to discuss how.
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