Communicating Vision

The great manager is a great leader. After all, leadership is influence, so, if you have people working for you, it is important that you influence them – positively, of course. While I suspect that there are some managers who have no responsibility for people, with few exceptions, most do.

One of the critical skills for a leader is the ability to develop a vision for the company/department/team AND to communicate that vision adequately. Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, widely considered to be one of the premier authorities on leadership and change management, wrote the following:

“Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices. Employees will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are never captured.”

The key phrase above is “and a lot of it“. Managers often are stunned to discover that they fare poorly in the area of communication – particularly in communicating vision – when they actually believe they do so quite well! I have certainly been one of those people. Communicating was always a priority for me as a manager, but despite what I considered to be great effort, I was often disappointed to learn that some felt that I had not communicated adequately.

I think there is a critical managerial principle to learn here (with apologies to Glengarry, Glen Ross) - Always Be Communicating. A manager should ALWAYS be thinking in terms of communicating the vision of the company and reinforcing the guiding principles of that vision.

In my estimation, one of the key skills for any great manager – for any great leader – is the ability to show the team or the company what it CAN be, where it CAN go, and what it CAN accomplish. With the vision clearly established in the minds of the team members, everyone can work towards a common set of objectives.

In lay terms – it is hard to win a game if you don’t know the objective(s) of the game. Further, a team might achieve its objective, but still lose if it has little understanding of what standards define excellence in the game. Finally, team identity is often critical in motivating individual team members to achieve more than they ever thought possible. In other words, some teams just EXPECT to win because of who they are!

Focus on communicating a vision for your team: your objectives, your standards, and the team’s identity.