Last month’s blog explored the importance of purpose in all happenings within a company. With a strong purpose, companies can create a clear vision and goals for what they want to achieve. 

Communicating and ensuring everyone within an organization is focused on the company vision is another story (and one that calls for another blog post!). A vision should be clear, purpose-driven, and easily understood, but if the rest of the enterprise is not focused on the same vision, it might as well serve as propaganda. Ensuring employees and leadership at all levels are focused on a clear company vision is crucial to making that vision a reality.

In this blog, we’ll cover effective tactics for how to get everyone focused on achieving a clear company vision. When everyone works toward the same goal, with the same vision in mind, the company creates synergy and alignment that makes the vision much more achievable and worthwhile. 

Perform Regular Vision Audits

If purpose is what drives a company forward, a vision is what gives a company direction. Put in metaphorical terms, purpose is the gas, and vision is the steering wheel.

While purpose is mostly unchanging and pushes the company in one direction (forward!) with a “WHY’ you exist, the vision, or steering wheel, determines the best way of reaching a goal or destination. A vision is the “Where” and will create the “How”.

A regular vision audit keeps team members focused, in the loop, fresh-minded, and always thinking about what is next for the company.

Each year, consider your company’s vision and decide whether it still aligns with the company’s purpose, provides a clear and forward-thinking direction, challenges the company to grow, and is relevant to the current macro environment. Once you decide on a clear and updated company vision, you can do the work of sharing it with the rest of your teams.

Soft Launch with Leadership

Typically, updated visions are hard launched with a company-wide town hall or all-hands meeting. But, before you reserve the office auditorium, start with an intimate conference room and invite your trusted advisors or senior leadership to soft-launch the big vision.

This achieves two purposes—one, communicating the vision to the sentinels of its execution and two, practicing the delivery of the vision with the opportunity for feedback from the most trusted executives in your company. With a soft launch to leadership first, you can fine-tune the presentation of the vision before it’s revealed to the masses while also ensuring those in leadership roles have a thorough understanding from hearing it multiple times. Buy-in from leaders and managers will be fundamental to communicating and implementing your vision to the rest of the organization.

Workshop with Teams

After the soft-launch comes the hard-launch. Start with a town hall or an all-hands meeting as the big reveal. From your work auditing your vision and fine-tuning during the soft launch, the vision should be clear, concise, marketable, and easily understood. It should summarize the ideal reality for the company in the near future, but not so soon that it is unrealistic or failing to dream big. 

After presenting the vision, the next step is ensuring every team member is focused on achieving the company’s goals for the near future. This is a critical part of the process, but also when things can get lost in translation. Each and every person in the organization needs to understand how they and their roles fit into the bigger picture. They need to make the connection of how their job can help the company achieve its goals.

This is when focus groups or workshops come into play. Soon after presenting your vision, have each team dedicate time to discussing the importance of their role to the vision and what actions they will take to align with the vision. For example, if part of a company’s vision is to become more sustainable or eco-friendly, the sourcing team might resolve to find more sustainable materials, the financial planning team might allocate more funds to green initiatives, and the administrators might agree to digitize all reports going forward. With clear, achievable action items, every member of your company will be focused on and working toward the big picture you have envisioned for your company.

Create Your Vision With EOS

To learn more about building a vision, presenting your vision, and creating direction for your company, book a call with me so we can create a more joy-filled, entrepreneurial life. Together, we’ll use the EOS framework and help you get everyone focused on achieving your goals.