The year is coming to an end – thank goodness! It’s been a wild ride through 2020, and we’re all ready to say goodbye. But for the leaders of businesses and other organizations, now is not the time to get complacent! The end of the year is prime time for strategic planning and setting your teams’ goals in 2021 and beyond. Before you dive into the granular details, there is a crucial first step that you must take: establishing a vision.
What is a Vision?
So, what is a vision, exactly? A vision is simply a unifying focus for organizational efforts; it’s a painted picture of what an organization hopes to accomplish. It’s a focal point, something to inspire your team members’ minds, that clearly demonstrates the intentions of your organization. A vision emulates the very reason why your organization exists.
Leaders are essential, but they can’t accomplish anything on their own! A good leader engages others, bringing them together and channeling their various passions and commitments into one concentrated power to achieve set goals. The best, most effective way to align your team with one another is to cast the vision for your organization. They need to share a common vision as a link or bond to join together as a unit.
What is Visioning?
Casting a vision, or “visioning,” takes many forms, but the goal is the same: to align the energy of a team for a common cause. You could practice visioning to manifest your personal growth. Perhaps you need to cast a vision for a department or specific team within your business to help them align with other groups. Maybe you need to forge a vision for an upcoming project or campaign to focus your whole employee base on how they can help it succeed. Or maybe you have an existing vision that needs updated and refreshed; visioning is a constant, evolving process! And the foundation of a resilient, healthy organization is consistent, collaborative visioning from multiple team members.
Is Visioning Important to My Business?
In short: YES! Visioning isn’t just important; it’s essential.
Some leaders see visioning as an intriguing-but-supplementary practice or don’t think it has a tangible impact on their bottom line. Or they may see their vision clear as day, but they don’t realize that others on their team have a fuzzy image at best! Many leaders tend to skip visioning in strategic planning and get into the gritty details. But when we are invited into strategic planning meetings with those kinds of leaders and boards, we often find that the organization is so misaligned that they can’t plan effectively. It’s like trying to build walls and a roof on an uneven, misaligned foundation!
From large-scale strategic challenges to interpersonal problems, many organizational issues are symptoms of a lack of alignment on the business’ direction. All of these problems, every single one of them, can be solved through collaborative visioning between an organization’s leaders. It takes time, it takes action, but most of all, it takes a clear vision to achieve business success.
