Vision: Five Fundamentals for Keeping it Clear

We’re moving.  It’s a bit of a daunting task, preparing a home, especially when you’ve lived somewhere for nine years now.  There are all these little things that need to get done. Things we’ve lived with and hoped to get to one day, but now one day is today and we must prepare our home for the market.  To achieve the goals we desire, maximum value for our home, we must have a vision for what could be.

Last month I wrote about 4 Influencer Imperatives in Small Group Leadership.This month I will look more at keeping the vision clear.  Clarity of vision is one of the hardest aspects of leadership, because as is often said, and intuition affirms, vision leaks. One minute everyone is onboard and the path looks clear, the next you find yourself going completely the wrong direction.  A clear vision keeps focus on what’s important and helps to abate the distractions. Without a clear vision of my home selling, and selling for top dollar, there are plenty of competing ideas that would distract my wife and I from reaching that future.

1. Own the Vision:  You must own vision.  If you don’t buy in you can’t create buy in.  To achieve a high vision it must start with the leader, we can’t lead where we’re not going.
2. Share the Vision:  Allow others to own it as if it was theirs.  Weak and ineffective leaders get hung up on who’s idea something is or where an idea originates.  In order to achieve what could be everyone on the team must be a stake holder, which means every team member must own it for themselves.  That won’t happen if the leader isn’t willing to share the vision.
3. Communicate the Vision:  Vision leaks.  We may own the vision, we may have shared the vision, but we must continue to keep the vision in front of the people, the team, the organization. Because vision leaks.
4. Kill Competition to Vision:  Vision is one preferred future, but there may be many potential preferred futures.  Realizing a big vision requires a ruthless drive to kill good, but competing ideas.  If an idea doesn’t help in accomplishing the vision it may be competition to the vision that needs to be killed.
5. Reevaluate the Vision:  If you own, share, communicate, and kill competition, you will likely get to a point where you realize the vision was too small.  Vision must be reevaluated at strategic points.

Keep the Vision is one of the four imperatives from Bill Hybels’s 2005 Global Leadership Summit address “These Things We Must Do” and is crucial in accomplishing that preferred future.