How To Live Out Your Company’s Vision

I wanted to piggyback some of my thoughts today off ML Hubbard’s post last week on Vision, Passion, and Purpose: A View From the Middle, a feature from our “Emerging Leaders” series.

This young leader expressed something that should be very important to all of us: the power of vision.

What is your company’s vision? Can you state it without looking it up in your employee handbook? Is it alive and active, or is it something that is only talked about? You see, the power of vision is at its best when it comes alive in the people of the organization.

So what can you do if you are a leader in the middle of your organization who’s trying to live out the vision of the company? Here are some suggestions.

• Find out specifically what the vision is from your leader. Your job is to support and live out the vision, so you must know what it is.
• Picture how your vision impacts others. Make a list of this impact.
• What will not happen if your vision is not lived out? Thinking about this will help you exemplify its importance.
• What are the actions that support your vision becoming reality? Create hit goals from these identified actions.
• Watch for small success steps that illustrate the vision in action and point them out to your team.

Rely on Your Strengths

Let your strengths work for you. For example, I am both blessed and cursed with my strengths and values. We all are! My top five identified strengths are futuristic, strategic, activator, maximizer, and belief. So when it comes to the topic of vision these strengths play a huge role in my thinking and delivery.

• Futuristic: I’m constantly thinking about how today’s short-term actions fulfill our long-term succession, so vision is crucial to my day to day.
• Strategic – Having vision isn’t enough. There must be a plan that addresses how we will strategically move toward the vision.
• Activator – Let’s move on the plan and start checking off our action steps and achieving our hit goals.
• Maximizer – I’d rather take what’s already alive and kicking and make it thrive then to start from scratch.
• Belief – There’s no stopping me if I believe in it. If I don’t, then I’ll struggle.

As a leader, how do your strengths complement and sustain the focus on your company’s vision? And how can you use your strengths to buy into and move the vision forward for your leader and team?

Just as ML Hubbard pointed out courtesy of Nancy Zimpher, “Vision trumps everything.” It is our job to know the vision and then put the vision into action.

For more thoughts on vision, check out my past posts on Knowing Where We’re Going (And Why) and Four Actions for Creating a Passionate Team.