Where do you lead? How to make your mission and vision your most profitable investment! – PART 3
With four examples I show you how vision creates clarity & effectiveness!
05. Less confusion – more clarity and orientation (Clarity & Effectiveness)
Problem
Why does everyone on your team explain your future strategy differently?
- Many of your colleagues and employees understand your strategy and business model differently than you do?
- Just about everyone uses different terms, which always leads to misunderstandings?
- If you ask ten team members about the right strategy for the future, do you get what feels like ten different answers?
- Do you often wonder about the priorities set by your managers?
Solution
Which alignment candidates did you evaluate and which one did you clearly choose?
- Initially develop not one, but at least three to eight alignment candidates. This is the only way to ensure that you have illuminated your future opportunities.
- Determine the criteria you will use to evaluate candidates, such as future viability, risk level, strength fit, unique selling proposition, earnings potential, and also desire.
- Have your alignment candidates compete in pairs against each other in the individual disciplines – i.e. the criteria – as in a tournament.
- Determine the winner as the core of your alignment and work the candidate into a clear mission, positioning and vision.
Benefit
Everyone in the team knows the “North Star” and thus sees your common future clearly in front of your eyes!
- Everyone on the team can confidently distinguish between what is right and wrong for the future good of your company.
- Everyone is also familiar with the candidates for alignment who failed in the “tournament” and can say goodbye to them, albeit often painfully.
- They use the same terms and speak a common language.
- Their strategy statements sound like a through-composed symphony.
06. Less conflicts – more unity and alignment (clarity & effectiveness)
Problem
Why do you discuss and argue so much?
- Are you having the same time-consuming discussions over and over again?
- Do you, your managers and your employees disagree on your strategic direction, vision, strategy and the right priorities?
- Some of your discussions even escalate into arguments and intractable conflicts?
- Are your meetings sometimes characterized by low mutual appreciation and rude behavior?
Solution
What is your image of the future of your company?
- Clarify intensively with your management team all the big questions that finally need to be answered and decided:
- Your mission (M): what is really your business and what is not.
- Your positioning (P): what is truly unique about your company.
- Your vision (V): Where you want your company to go and where you don’t want it to go.
- Mission, positioning and vision are not three sentences for your website, but a well-founded, well-formulated and consistent set of existential decisions.
- Your vision of the future will only be effective if it is understood and powerfully supported by a good proportion of your employees.
Benefit
You enjoy the unity and alignment of your team!
- You have a common “mental map” in the minds of your managers and employees, and thus a cover of perceptions, assumptions and decisions.
- With your common “mental map” of mission, positioning and vision, you enjoy the greatest possible unity and alignment. From the management team to each individual employee.
- Disclosed assumptions, arguments, and rationales ensure that unity does not lead to blindness.
- You will have to conduct significantly less strenuous and time-consuming discussions.
07. Less distraction – more focus and power (clarity & effectiveness)
Problem
Why are you fighting on so many fronts?
- Do you feel like you are pursuing multiple alignments at the same time?
- You can’t really focus your personal effort on essential tasks?
- You always work on different fronts only with divided power?
- Your best people need to constantly jump between different topics?
- You can’t invest enough in all your business fields to stay competitive?
Solution
What do you focus and concentrate on?
- Together with your core team, determine the big convincing picture of the future, consisting of mission, positioning and vision, towards which all your activities, projects and processes should run. Without a picture of the future, you always have too many business areas, projects and processes.
- Focus and permanent concentration of forces (mind, time, money) are undisputed success factors. Focus requires saying no and literally “cutting away.” Make as many decisions against options as possible.
- Focus is the sum of the few choices for a particular alignment and the many choices against other possible alignments.
Benefit
You have more focus and therefore more power!
- If a 50 kg lady with a spiked heel is standing on your foot, it hurts more than if a 100 kg man is standing on your foot. Through focus, you gain penetrating power.
- You yourself enjoy clarity and focus and can easily and convincingly communicate your vision of the future to your team.
- A clear picture of the future smooths out, concentrates and harmonizes activities, from the management team to the individual employee.
- You can use your future image from mission, positioning and vision in all workshops, meetings, presentations and conversations. Until practically every employee knows it by heart and has understood it correctly.
08. Less effort and stress – higher effectiveness of leadership (clarity & effectiveness).
Problem
Why do you work so hard so much?
- You know all about leading with goals, but it’s not working in your practice?
- Do you have a master plan with a roadmap of all projects and initiatives, but it keeps falling apart?
- Have you become the busiest foreman and hopelessly overworked instructor?
Solution
Where are you taking your employees?
- Without a picture of the future, you are not leading, you are managing. Leadership is not possible without a picture of the future. You can only lead your team from today into tomorrow more effectively than before if you yourself have a picture of this future and if you can communicate it effectively, both emotionally and rationally.
- Break the vicious cycle of “no time for a future picture” and massive overload. Force yourself to develop the big picture of mission, positioning and vision for once.
- Make your master plan robust and convergent with a prefaced future picture of mission, positioning and vision. Otherwise, not only you, but everyone will work too much, too hard and too expensive.
Benefit
You lead more easily and more effectively at the same time!
- You equip yourself with the most powerful leadership tool of all, a future picture of robust mission, differentiating positioning and motivating vision.
- In a way, your picture of the future is the prerequisite for you to hand over responsibilities for projects and tasks and to relieve yourself.
- The projects and processes are moving toward a common vision of the future even without your intervention. They lead far more effectively, with less effort and much more with joy.
- They gain strongly in terms of content and personal authority.
- You are recognized as the sensible visionary you have always been.
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Follow these links as well:
► The Future Strategy Program for SMEs
► Free video crash course THE FUTURE OF YOUR BUSINESS
► BUSINESS WARGAMING for robust business and future opportunities
► KEYNOTES by Pero Mićić for your employees and customers
Have a bright future!
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