Hi Do Differently,

Congratulations! Your question puts you way ahead of many people in leadership positions who are instead unhelpfully wondering why they have the wrong team. Awareness of your own contribution to the confusion is the first step toward lasting improvement.

Translating dreams into reality is a challenge shared by leaders around the world. Especially when you want other people to be involved.

Based on our experience, many leaders feel they must provide some big guiding hallelujah to inspire and rally everyone for decades to come. A more practical expectation is to create a picture of the future everyone can stretch themselves to achieve over the next few years.

Last month, we shared how start a vision with what you’ve achieved and what you want to do next. Your question encouraged us to share a more detailed process including specifics on how you, as leader, can invite people to own a shared, longer-range vision.

While the checklist below is simple, it’s not easy. You’ll need to invest effort and focus to work your way through the following steps:

1. Make sure your vision isn’t just in your head

Grab a piece of paper or commandeer a big whiteboard and write down your answers to some questions about the future:

In the future, what does good look and feel like to you?
What difference are you making in the world?
What would you and others be proud of?
What do you not want to happen? What would the opposite of that look and feel like?
How would you and everyone else know when you get there?

While your answers may include numbers, you can evoke more passion for yourself and others by including feelings and qualities. Some people even mentally project themselves forward and describe what it’s like walking into the office. With this method, imagine what people are talking about, what they are feeling proud of and celebrating, and what they are looking forward to accomplishing.

Your vision doesn’t need to be at the rock-the-world level to work for you and your team. Ambitious? Yes. Inspirational? Yes! Achievable in the next three to five years? Ideally YES! Small visioning creates big ripples.

Edit your thoughts for clarity - yet don’t polish too much. You’ll want a decent yet rough draft, because your next step is to...

2. Get other people’s fingerprints on it

While it’s tempting to get everyone’s perspective on your vision, viewer discretion is advised.

Why?

Leaders who get the best input at this stage seek out people they trust to be pragmatic, supportive, and ideally could play a part in the vision’s success. At this point you need encouragement and support more than you need ‘I-love-you-so-I’m-telling-you’ criticism.

Another tip: having a “healthy detachment” from the vision will help you get better results and not get sucked into defending what you’ve created so far.

Sit across a corner of a table or desk and review a single copy of your draft together. To get the best perspective, start by asking the other person to imagine we’re already there - in the future - and that everything in this draft is happening or happened. Then, ask a few questions:

What is inspiring you, now that it’s 20__?
What are you excited about?
What are you proud of?
What are you glad you avoided?
What work have you done and helped make happen to get us here?
What are you looking forward to next?

Seek the sweet spot between amazing and doable and modify your draft as needed. Repeat with your trusted group of selected folks. Remember, take whatever advice you get as input to your vision, not indictment of it.

You probably know the old joke about how to eat an elephant? An elephant-sized vision is most achievable if you...

3. Break it into bite-sized pieces

Great ideas are wonderful. Great, achievable ideas are even better. And just about any idea is achievable if broken down into small enough parts.

Most visions can be divided by themes - usually areas of focus around improving the team, gaining customers, serving employees, developing product, expanding geography, etc.

Ideally your themes are simple phrases about the desired outcome, like “We’re the preferred provider for forward-looking companies along Colorado’s Front Range.”

Starting with yourself and involving others as needed, ask questions like:

How will we know we’ve achieved this piece of the vision? What metrics would we track?
What steps will we have to take to get there? When can we do them?
How does this piece of the vision fit in with other pieces? How is this piece dependent on the other pieces?
What could get in the way of us achieving this piece? What could we do to ensure we successfully achieve this piece?

We write the answers to these questions on square 3 inch by 3 inch Post-It™ sticky notes with black Sharpie™ pens, which allows us to turn our whiteboard into a giant planning grid. We write the major themes down the left side, the timeframes (quarters, years) across the top, and put the stickies covering important steps in the appropriate intersections. Once everything is up, the entire team can see what needs to get done by when and how the work connects and supports achievement of the different themes over time.

Once everyone is agreed - ok, doesn’t strongly disagree - you have the right parts in your plan, your next step is to work with your team members to...

4. Get clear commitment

You know how it goes; few things will happen until someone commits to make it so.

You can stay with the big sticky note planning grid and have people “sign up” for specific tasks, or you can convert all the info to a shared spreadsheet and have an extra column or row for people to sign up to be responsible for the tasks and strategy. (Send us an email and we’ll give you an example template you can use)

Companies who are most successful with this step do two things:

They look at the regular workload plus these new additions for each time period, and make decisions to shift resources, people, or activities to make overall accomplishment of the plan possible. There’s nothing like figuring out a plan requires 2.3 of someone in a single quarter to trigger exploring alternatives!
They formalize the work committed to within each person’s work plan. The key here is making the tasks needed to accomplish the vision a key and measured part of each person’s role.

We’re not done yet! The last step to make the vision happen is to provide an environment for ongoing success where everyone is encouraged to ...

5. Supportively follow up

Meetings take time - we all want them to be effective and useful.

Here are a couple tips to avoid public shaming and torture and shift to helpful support and accountability:

Review the agenda at the start of each meeting and share how the topics align with the outcomes you need for the team. Get clear about what you and everyone else thinks the organization needs from the pending conversation.
In 3-5 minutes each, discuss what’s going well before diving into what could be better. We’re not talking cotton-candy praise that makes you hungrier after you get it - shoot for honest and accurate appraisals of what’s going well and why that matters.
Get everyone literally looking in the same direction as you discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of progress being made. Use a projector or monitor of your dashboard to display live metrics of your key indicators. Remember those themes you created? Allow those responsible for their key areas to share their updates and give them the con. You know, pass around the control to the mouse and keyboard. Or use a whiteboard and hand the marker to the person sharing.

Use a color-coding system - green means good, yellow means risk is present yet back-up plan is in place, and red means need help (not “I’m failing”). Celebrate the greens and ask what is challenging with the reds. Provide help as needed.

In summary...

Our culture conditions us to believe the person at the top is solely responsible for creating vision. The approach outlined above can release the pressure-valve. While you have vision, you are better off not trying to accomplish it on your own. We hope these steps bring a boost to your confidence as you set out to do great things with the talented and passionate people around you.

We know there’s a lot here - let’s talk about the parts that excite you and create a plan for the work that doesn’t feel as clear. Go far, go together. This is your year.