Marc's Blog

As surprising as it may be, the business vision is one of the most unclear facets of most organizations, yet it is one of the most powerful performance-drivers a leader has access to.  A clear business vision increases the workforce’s performance and innovation, and has the potential to dramatically reduce operating costs.

Let’s review a few rules of thumb to evaluate how clear and explicit your business vision is (if you are an employee, use the same pointers to check how clear and explicit your organization’s vision is).

• Is your business vision documented (i.e. written in a document that can be distributed to your workforce)?
• Is your business vision more than one page long?
• Does your business vision include 3 to 5 characteristics your workforce should focus on and portray in everything they do?
• Does it include, for each characteristic, the result(s) that are expected by portraying each characteristic?
• Does it include a list of the actions that when carried-out will create the expected results?
• Does it include the mindsets that are needed in order to naturally carry out these actions?

If you answered “NO" to any of the points above, your vision is unclear, and has good chances of being unconscious and even misleading.

So what is a business vision anyway? 

Let’s start by defining what it is NOT.  A business vision is NOT a mission statement, the key objectives of the organization, or the business model of the organization. An organization exists to fulfill a purpose (also defined as mission).  The purpose is fulfilled by meeting specific key business objectives.  These objectives are met following a defined business model, and the business model is deployed following a specific business vision.

A business vision is the explicit description of the focus the workforce should have
in the fulfillment of the key business objectives.

It is composed of the 3 to 5 main characteristics that the workforce should demonstrate in all they do, such as: accountability, result oriented, etc.   It should include:

• The expected results of portraying each of the characteristics
• The actions that when carried out will generate the expected results
• The mindsets that will naturally lead the workforce to take these actions. 

These “explicit" details offer the workforce all it needs to gain a clear understanding of the business vision, start internalizing it, be led by it, and start acting on it.

The purpose of the business vision
An explicit business vision channels the workforce’s performance and innovation. It creates alignment, congruence and consistent customer experience (both internal and external customers).  It eliminates the Performance-Drains related to confusion, mistakes and misunderstandings.

When the workforce has internalized the “explicit" business vision, it naturally and effortlessly starts taking actions, innovating and making decisions in alignment with the business vision.  At this point, the workforce needs less monitoring, makes fewer mistakes, and starts streamlining operations.  The workforce has started to move from being process-driven, to becoming results-driven.

Most business visions are unclear, because they come out of the leader’s experience and natural way of leading
A leader’s business vision is part of the realm of “unconscious competence —when something becomes second nature and you don’t have to think about it anymore in order to execute it.  The business vision comes out of the leader’s leadership style, experience and expertise, three things that are second nature to him or her.  As human beings, when something is second nature to us, we tend to assume that everyone else has a complete understanding of what we are talking about.  This leads leaders to define unclear business visions—visions that most often mislead employees by sending double messages.

A business vision is the personal touch that the leader brings to his/her organization
A business vision is specific to the leader, as well as the business unit.  This means that if your predecessor has set the vision, or if the organizational structures have changed, your business vision most probably needs to be reviewed. 

The business vision is based on the leader’s personal performance and success measures in relation to the product or service that the organization offers.  It defines how the leader expects the workforce to think and behave in the fulfillment of the organization’s key business objectives. 
 
As a leader, a clear and explicit vision is your best ally. 
The consequence of an unclear vision is that everyone in the company may use the same language to describe the vision, everyone may know it by heart, but everyone will attach a personal and thus different meaning to the vision.  This results in everyone using different success measures, which leads to inconsistent results and to the continuous generation of problems and crisis to be taken care of.

Take a minute to look at your schedule. How much of it is defined by the incessant and unpredictable operational demands?  Chances are it is mostly directed (or at the very best over-ridden) by those demands. 

By defining a clear and explicit business vision, a lot of the time and energy that you are spending putting-out fires or correcting mistakes will come back to you.  It will allow your schedule to move out of being event-driven to becoming strategy-driven.

The next step
Set some time aside to define and clarify your business vision.  With the right methodology and tools, defining the framework (the characteristics) of your business vision will take less than ½ a day, and the expansion of your business vision with your leadership team to include the actions and mindsets will take less than a day. 

You will find that the outcome of this process is the complete alignment of your leadership team. 

Please send me your questions or comments at efactor@strategy-driven.com  

Next week, the subject of the article will be: "How Leaders Prevent Superior Business Execution they Strive to Create."  Stay tuned!