Five
Creating a Vision of Greatness

Empowering ourselves comes from acting on our enlightened self-interest. Empowerment is inviting people at every level to follow this way of being. We define what our unit has to offer the organization that will truly make a difference. We want to build an organization that expresses all of our values about work, achievement, and community. Therefore, the first step in implementing an entrepreneurial organization is to create a vision of greatness for our group. This vision expresses our values and what we hope to contribute.

Claiming Our Autonomy by Creating a Vision

Autonomy is the decision we make to act on our own choice. Interdependence is the recognition that we cannot create anything alone. The most fundamental choice we make is to create a future of our own choosing. In some ways, the future is the cause of our current behavior.* We have a vision or an image of where we wish to head and the kind of organization we wish to create, and we act in ways that we believe are in pursuit of creating that future. The alternative is to act on a future of someone else's creation. We ask the organization to tell us its vision, its values, and how it wants us to operate, and then that becomes our guidepost.

The payoff for autonomy––call it freedom––is that we live our own life and have control over our own destiny. The payoff for dependency––call it compliance or loyalty––is that if we act on someone else's choice and it does not work out well, it is not our fault. Dependency is the wish not to be responsible and held accountable for our actions or our direction. It is the choice for innocence. Autonomy is the choice for guilt. When we act on our own choices, we define our own future. The good news is we have the sense of being in control of our lives. The bad news is that it's our fault and there's no one else to blame.

The initial step is to put into words the future we wish to create for our own unit. This is called a vision of greatness. We describe a preferred future that we are committing ourselves to and committing our unit to. The belief is that this vision will be good for the individual, good for the unit, and good for the organization. Creating this vision is an essential act of leadership.

The bureaucratic orientation involves asking people above us, top management, to define the future they wish for the organization. If there is no vision at the top of the organization, we are off the hook. Organizations are so complex and so large, it's often very difficult for a top management group to articulate an understandable vision of the future. Even if top management does create a vision, as many companies do, it is still up to each individual employee, in the context of the organization's vision, mission, and purpose, to create his or her own vision of the future.

What Is a Vision and Why Is It Important?

Creating a vision forces us to take a stand for a preferred future. It makes the entrepreneurial cycle work because it gives us something we are willing to risk for. The vision is also our way of discovering that serving the organization also serves our self-interest. It is an act of leadership when we create a vision that positions our unit in relation to the customer and our own colleagues. Our vision channels our deepest values into the workplace and becomes a word picture of how we want our values to be lived out in our unit.

Not just any vision will do. Because we choose to pursue our vision in the marketplace, it needs to be both strategic and lofty.The strategic element of a vision involves staying focused on our customers/users and expressing in the vision how we contribute to the mission of the organization. This helps connect each activity in our unit with something important, namely, the success of the institution.*

The vision needs to be lofty in order to capture our imagination and engage our spirit. Inspired performance is characterized by a lofty vision. When the vision for our unit is an expression of our own values, we stay aligned with the organization at a very personal level. Our enlightened self-interest is reinforced when we can commit ourselves to something that matters.

Our vision is our deepest expression of what we want. This declaration of a desired future creates the conditions for having an aligned team. The vision works because only if others know what we want can they support us. Our vision can, at times, be a source of conflict, but more often it is a source of connection. It is the dialogue about vision that helps us connect with each other in a way that matters.

Our vision is very different from our goals and objectives. Goals and objectives are basically a prediction of what is to come. Predictions of what we are going to do in the next week or month or quarter are basically an extension of what we have done the past week or month or quarter. As a result, goals and objectives tend to be rather limited and, in some ways, are rather depressing. Research by Ron Lippitt indicates that during the course of goal-setting meetings, participants become more and more depressed. This discouragement occurs in part because it reinforces the belief that the future will be no different from the past.

An antidote to the feeling that the future will be much like the past is to stop talking about objectives and begin to articulate a vision for our unit. A vision is the preferred future, a desirable state, an ideal state. It is an expression of optimism despite the bureaucratic surrounding or the evidence to the contrary. We dramatize the need for optimism by asking ourselves not only to create a vision but to make it great. The word greatness is in many ways a weird and threatening word. When you ask people to create a vision of greatness, they respond by saying, “Can't we create a vision of progress––a vision of excellence––a vision of next steps?”

The wish to hedge against the word greatness is to hedge against committing ourselves to something we may not be able to achieve. We fear that greatness is simply not in our story but only in the story of others. Greatness demands that we eliminate caution, that we eliminate our reservations, and that we have hope in the face of the history of our limitations—at least for the moment.

The dependent side of ourselves wishes to take a predictable path and to choose maintenance instead of greatness. This is the safe choice. If we choose to maintain what we now have, we know that is a goal that we can probably accomplish. The dependent side, or good child in us, feels that leadership essentially is in the hands of others. The act of leadership is one of initiating an alternative future. It is to articulate a vision and act in pursuit of that vision. If we basically believe that the leadership of our organization lies in the hands of others, then we are destined to have a maintenance orientation about our own unit. The belief that leadership lies in the hands of others and the future is for others to decide is our desire to stay away from the wilderness. The wilderness represents danger, unpredictability, and essential loss of control. Better to stay in the civilized world, with its developed cities, modern conveniences, and predictable environment, even if it's not to our satisfaction, than to head into uncharted territory and certain danger.

To take the safe path in an organization is to avoid the wilderness and to ask others to chart that territory for us. In our wish for safety, we surround ourselves with corporate insulation. We demand a lot of data before we make a decision; we act in the short run because it's more predictable and under our control. We do only those things that have extremely visible results because we can measure progress and defend ourselves against accusations that what we're doing is not working.

When we choose the wilderness, we're choosing an unmeasurable and unknowable future. This is a vulnerable choice because if we are forced to explain why we choose that future, how we're going to get there, or whether that future is possible, we have no solid response.

Moving toward the wilderness, creating a vision of greatness, also demands an act of faith. Faith, by its nature, is unmeasurable and indefensible through the use of data and external evidence. Moving toward a preferred future is a leap beyond what is now being experienced. Leadership and empowerment call us, in part, to act on faith rather than evidence. This act of faith is an act of courage demanded of each of us.

Faith in our ability to find meaning and be of service is expressed by our vision. Putting into words our own vision of greatness for the future has profound effects on us.

  • In an implicit way, it signifies our disappointment with what exists now. To articulate our vision of the future is to come out of the closet with our doubts about the organization and the way it operates, our doubts about the way our unit serves its customers, and our doubts about the way we deal with each other inside the organization. It may also call into doubt the path that has given us the success we have achieved.
  • The vision exposes the future that we wish for our unit and opens us up to potential conflict with the visions of other people. We know in our hearts that visions are not negotiable, and therefore we run the risk of conflicting visions when we put them into words with each other.
  • Articulating a vision of greatness also forces us to hold ourselves accountable for acting in a way that is congruent with that vision. The vision states how we want to work with customers and users, and also how we want to work with each other. It becomes a benchmark for evaluating all of our actions. This is an uneasy reality to live within. This accountability is also the power of a vision. If we are acting on someone else's vision, we can justify actions we don't believe in by claiming that we had no choice; they were demanded by the direction that someone else created. You hear this excuse all the time. If we are driven by a vision of our own creation, our excuses disappear. We can no longer make the claim that it's not our fault. We have to listen to the disquieting words of others about how we are not acting in the pursuit of that vision.

The hardest thing for any of us is to live by the rules that we ourselves create. It's difficult enough to live by the rules that others create. It is brutal and fierce to live by the ones we create ourselves.

To avoid creating a vision for ourselves is to protect ourselves from disappointment and failure. It is hard to comprehend how pervasive this wish for protection is. When we ask people to change, the first conversation is about the risks of changing. When we do training in workshops and try to give people new skills, their first question is, “Does top management support these new skills and behaviors?” A tremendous amount of literature and thinking says that every change program has to start at the top and has to be fully supported by top management before one can expect people in the middle and at the bottom to move in any direction. This belief in “top down” change is a wish to be protected.

To choose and create our own vision is to choose a risky path. It is to act on the belief that there is no safe path. Any future we move toward has hazards, and the fact that what we do has risks is a sign that we're headed in the right direction. When we choose protection and opt to maintain what we already have, we believe that what we have accomplished is enough. It's a willingness to stand on our laurels.

This violates the patriarchal contract most of us have with large organizations. We join large organizations because we think we'll be safe and “they” will provide for our future. Unfortunately, we discover that the “safe” path was not very safe at all.

What If We Don't have a Vision?

A vision statement is an expression of faith and freedom. Often when you ask individuals what their vision of greatness is, they say they don't have a vision of greatness. The response to that is to say, “Suppose you had a vision of greatness; what would it be?”

A vision exists within each of us, even if we have not put it into words. Our reluctance to articulate our vision is a measure of our despair and reluctance to take responsibility for our own lives, our own unit, and our own organization. A vision statement is an expression of hope, and if we have no hope, it is hard to create a vision.

The Difference between a Vision and a Mission Statement

A vision is really a dream created in our waking hours that describes how we would like the organization to be. It differs from a mission statement, which states what business we are in and sometimes our ranking in that business.

The mission statement names the game we are going to play. As an example, a large health care company's mission statement is “to market health care products that have a demonstrable health benefit to the customer, to be the leader in each product line, to return a fair profit to our stockholders, and to provide good opportunities to our employees.” This tells us something about the business the company is choosing. “Demonstrable health benefit” means no cosmetics or other personal care products. “Leader in each product line” means if the company can't grab a major market share it isn't going to try. “Fair profit” means certain margins and return on investment are required. This is more business focused than a vision. A vision is more a philosophy about how we are going to manage the business.

There is nothing new or unique about creating a vision statement. Many organizations have been doing it for many years. They may call it something different, such as a credo, set of core values, or guiding principles, but most every organization has a statement of values to articulate its culture.

What is unique here is the orientation that it is the task of each employee, not just top management, to create a vision of greatness. The common pattern is for top management to spend six months defining a vision and then to put great emphasis on communicating it downward throughout the organization. The conventional belief is that good management is to create a vision and then to enroll the rest of the organization in supporting it. A CEO might say, only half joking, “Let's rent Levi's Stadium and have all 43,000 of our employees marching in support of our vision.” A rewarding fantasy for the executive, but a dependency-creating process for the employees.

The act of creating and communicating a vision is an act of leadership, and each employee needs to do this. This includes the top group, but the additional step that is required is then to demand that each level beneath the top group do the same. It is the job of each manager to engage people in creating a vision for the unit. The vision of top management and the people above becomes input for the vision created by each lower level manager and employee.

All individuals who want to be entrepreneurial and to take ownership for the business have to create their own vision. Some guidelines for the process cover three basic steps: creating the vision, communicating our vision, and coaching others in creating their vision.

Creating the Vision

Here are some tips on how to begin to create your vision.

Tip No. 1: Forget about Being Number One

You can't watch sports these days without having someone stick an index finger in your face and shout, “We're number one, we're number one!” The wish to be on top, the desire for recognition, fame, fortune, profits, the bottom line, all reflect a myopic self-interest to get ahead. They don't belong in our vision statement. The vision statement expresses the contribution we want to make to the organization, not what the external world is going to bestow upon us. The choice for greatness is an act of service and an expression of our enlightened self-interest. If there is justice in the world, we will be rewarded for our good work. We claim our autonomy by focusing on doing good work, not on where we end up in the standings. The vision of greatness is a statement of what we offer our customers and each other, and we commit to the vision because the vision is worth pursuing for its own sake. If we get rewarded for making the vision happen, we will accept the recognition gracefully––but that is not why we pursue it.

Tip No. 2: Don't Be Practical

We live in a pragmatic culture in which we have been taught to set specific measurable objectives and to have a work plan or a chart on our wall that shows how we are going to meet them. Our desire to be practical works against the creation of a vision. A vision of greatness expresses the spiritual and idealistic side of our nature. It is a preferred future that comes from the heart, not from the head. Being practical too quickly acts as a restraint on the vision. Our purpose in creating the vision is to clarify the kind of unit we wish to create, knowing all along that we may never get there. The vision is a lighthouse giving us direction rather than a specific destination. The last thing we want to ask someone who is creating a vision is “How are you going to get there?”

Tip No. 3: Begin with Your Customers

The long-term survival of an organization is dependent upon how well the organization stays in touch with and serves its internal and external customers. In the short run it can sustain itself through price increases, cost control, or a friendly banker, but ultimately the reality of the marketplace determines the organization's future. This also applies to a department operating within a larger organization.

The mind-set required to be an entrepreneur for our unit is to view other units within the company as partners and to think of those partners as our customers or our suppliers. In other words, the group next in line receiving our product or service is a partner and customer of ours. Viewing this group in this way acts as a restraint on complaints about how it uses what we give it. Most of the fights and conflict in organizations occur between units and people at the same level. The rules are fairly clear about how we work with bosses and subordinates, but they are very unclear about how we work with those at the same level. We don't know how much power and control we have over our equals. In fact, sometimes we don't know whether we should be competing with them or collaborating with them.

The way through this competitive/collaborative ambivalence is for each function to ask itself who its internal customers/users are and to create a vision, a preferred future, of how it wants to work with them. Then we are ready to ask some additional useful questions:

  • If our internal customers/users were the only customers we had, how would we treat them? Suppose they were our partners?
  • How can we use their frustration and disappointment with us as a learning experience to teach us how to improve our way of doing business? We learn how to serve our marketplace mostly through dissatisfied customers. To learn from dissatisfied customers, we have to move toward them, treat them with respect, and listen to them very carefully, without being defensive.
  • How do we deliver bad news to our users? Sometimes we cannot fulfill our promises to them. How early do we tell them? When we let them down, do we blame it on someone else or take responsibility for our mistakes?
  • How do we handle situations in which our partners let us down? What do we do when they are inaccurate in defining their needs, or when they owe us information and we don't get it or get it so late that it undermines our schedules? We have the choice of whether to use this as an excuse, blame them, or have the orientation that we should help our partners become better at their own business. It is part of our function to respond to our interdependence in helping other units be more effective in their own way of operating. We are consultants to our customers, constantly showing them ways to better work with us.

Here are some examples from a variety of vision statements about what greatness looks like when we are dealing with customers:

  • We act as partners with our customers.
  • We are committed to our customers' success, and we encourage them to teach us how to do business with them.
  • Our customers leave us feeling understood.
  • The purpose of a sales call is to help the customer make a good decision.
  • We fulfill every promise, and meet every requirement.
  • We have the courage to say no.
  • We choose quality over speed.
  • We don't cover up bad news.
  • We don't want customers who care only about cost. We want customers who will pay a premium for quality service, being understood, and our commitment to their success.
  • We want everyone involved to express real feelings and stay engaged.
  • We want to understand the impact of our actions on others.
  • We offer and expect forgiveness from our customers.
  • We don't force solutions on our customers.
  • We are here to help, not to police.
  • Our dissatisfied customers teach us how to work with those who currently do not use our service or product.

All of these statements make sense. It is up to us to decide which ones are personally important to us and what similar additional statements we want to make for our own unit. The power of these statements is that they become the internally generated rules by which we hold ourselves accountable. If you want to take a taste of the meal instead of just continuing to read the menu, take a minute right now and write down some statements of your vision of greatness in working with your customers.

Tip No. 4: You Can't Treat Your Customers Any Better Than You Treat Each Other

Another vital element in a vision statement is how we treat each other within the unit. Each of our customers wants a unique and understanding response from us. If, within the unit, we are cautious, competitive, and judgmental with each other, we won't be able to give our customers the response they want. Sales people in a store treat us much the same as they are being treated. If we, as customers, are being ignored, they as employees are probably being ignored. If they are cold, indifferent, and unresponsive, we have some very good clues as to the management style of their supervisors. We have to manage our own people in a way that is absolutely aligned with the way we want our customers and users to be managed. We can't use fear and punishment to improve customer service. Our employees' ultimate revenge is to take out on our customers the resentment and frustration that should rightfully be aimed at us.

Our own unit is also our testing ground for discovering what is possible for organizations. One of our primary purposes is to create within our own unit a model of how we want the whole organization to function. Here are some useful questions for creating a vision for the internal operation of your unit:

  1. How do you want support to be expressed within the group? In most groups support is expressed by leaving people alone. As long as you do not make a mistake, I won't bother you. The alternative is to believe that people need to learn what they are doing right. Appreciation can be expressed directly, credit given freely, and celebrations held for successes.
  2. How do you want conflict and disagreement managed? Traditional methods are to avoid, smooth over, or arm wrestle under pressure. People go to an umpire when they get stuck. You may decide you want to value compassionate confronting and difficult conversations as vital to the unit.
  3. What is the balance you want between having a team operation and having a series of competent individuals with clearly separated areas of responsibility? Many groups talk about teamwork but really operate on a one-to-one basis with their boss.
  4. What stance do you want to take on internal competition? Competition within departments or between departments is a mixed motive situation. We know we are supposed to work together, yet almost all of the performance evaluation systems have people competing with each other. The president of a West Coast garment manufacturer decided he was going to evaluate his key executives according to how much they contributed to each other's success. Radical idea.

An endless number of values can get expressed in stating how we want people to work together. It is up to all of us to ask ourselves which are the values and beliefs we hold most dearly about human interaction. These very personal values drive our vision of greatness for the people within our group. Here are some more examples of vision statements people have made.

We want:

  • Consistency between our plans and actions.
  • A willingness to share.
  • To disagree without fear.
  • Commitment to a long-term strategy.
  • To create a safe workplace.
  • To live our values.
  • To have each person connected with the final product.
  • To treat each person in a unique way.
  • To overcome levels and hierarchy.
  • Our people to be the business.
  • A positive attitude, and less energy spent on bad situations.
  • To see caring and love in all our actions.
  • Every person to be responsible for building the business.
  • To work as a team.
  • Each person to have a place at the table.
  • Each person to feel valued and respected.
  • To provide meaningful work.
  • Managers to exist to serve their employees.
  • To eliminate nonproductive work.
  • Each person to have the right to say no.
  • Control of our own destiny.
  • The freedom to fail. People are shot only for not trying.
  • Honesty at all times.
  • Empathy for others' pain.
  • Each person to be heard and understood.

As with the vision statements about our customers, these declarations are compelling. It is up to us to know our own values and decide which ones we want expressed through our work. Take another minute here and think about your own vision of greatness for the people you work with.

Tip No. 5: If Your Vision Statement Sounds Like Motherhood and Apple Pie and Is Somewhat Embarrassing, You Are on the Right Track

A vision is an expression of hope and idealism. It oversimplifies the world and implies that anything is possible. The embarrassment we may feel is really our vulnerability at taking a stance of innocence in the midst of an environment that seems sophisticated, hard-nosed, and pragmatic. Surrounded by a preoccupation with safety, control, and approval, we stand naked and declare that there are certain deeper values, often spiritual ones, that we are giving top priority. We bet the farm on a set of values about customers and our own people and pray that the world will support us. Others tell us it is a jungle out there, and we say, “No it's not; that's only foliage.” The vulnerability we feel means we are moving against the culture or working to recreate the culture, and that is what makes a strong vision statement a positive political act. At the very moment we are identifying and communicating our vision, we are living the kind of organization we have wished all along to create.

We know we have created a great vision when it has three qualities:

  1. It comes from the heart. A vision is in some ways unreasonable. The heart knows no reason. When our vision asks too much of us, we should begin to trust it.
  2. We, alone, can make this statement. The statement needs to be recognizable as ours. It needs to be personal, and those who know us should be able to recognize who it came from.
  3. It is radical and compelling. A vision dramatizes our wishes. This makes it radical and demanding—radical in the best sense of service rather than rejection. Our willingness to take a unique stand is what empowers us.

Examples of the Choice for Greatness

These examples are almost 30 years old, yet they are still relevant. They show that a vision of greatness is timeless. Some of the examples are very short, some a little wordy; all are compelling.

Electrical and Electronics Division, Ford Motor Company

  • Have a directed destiny.
  • The customer is king.
  • People are our most important resources.
  • Treat suppliers as we wish to be treated.
  • Become the standard by which others are judged.

The Greenwich Workshop (Fine Art Dealer)

  • The collector comes first.
  • Quality is reputation.
  • Art demands originality.

Cliff Bolster, Vice President of Human Resources, Bath Iron Works

  • Treat every person with whom we come in contact with respect and dignity.
  • Deal with the divisions we service as if they are valued customers and, if they chose to, could find another source for the services we provide.
  • Demonstrate, by our actions, the way we want the whole company to operate.
  • Minimize discussing and writing and maximize acting and doing to achieve our objectives.
  • Take full responsibility for the quality of our departments' performance and don't blame others.
  • Never hear the phrase, “That's not my job.”
  • Give each other feedback on what we want from each other.
  • Recognize achievement and celebrate success.

The next vision statement was written years ago by Bob Haas, president and chief executive officer of Levi Strauss and Co. Time has passed, and Levi's has been on a bumpy road in recent years, but the intention is still relevant. What remains impressive about it is that it affirms a set of values with the belief that these are the values that will best serve the bottom line and the customer. What is also impressive is the commitment made by a group of top executives that their primary job is to be the ones who personally act on these values in their dealings with each other and the rest of the organization. That is never outdated.

Greatness for LS&Co.

I want LS&Co. to become and to be known as a great company. Our greatness will reflect a commitment to excellence in everything we do and with all constituents. We will achieve greatness through a commitment to the following goals and practices:

People

  • Establish a climate of openness, mutual respect, and teamwork.
  • Create a small-company environment.
  • Value each employee as an individual; profit from diversity.
  • Provide a safe, wholesome working environment that is stimulating, pleasant, and supports maximum personal effectiveness.
  • Create a caring, “family” environment.
  • Link company and employee interests.
  • Commitment to “ego-less” management; the welfare of the company and its people transcends individual goals and concerns.
  • Emphasize compassion and flexibility so that human needs (rather than rules and policies) are met.

Customers

  • Ensure that LS&Co. products are demonstrably superior and provide the highest performance (appearance, durability, comfort, style) and at the fairest price (value).
  • Make product innovation a hallmark of LS&Co.
  • Handle customer inquiries, concerns, and complaints in a prompt, fair, and courteous manner.
  • Advertise and promote LS&Co. products in a truthful, respectful, and engaging manner in association with wholesome non-exploitive media and programming.

Accounts (Retail Stores)

  • Assist each account in achieving maximum profitability and desired market position with our merchandise.
  • Provide superior service.
  • Be viewed as knowledgeable of each account's needs and a helpful source of support and business counsel.
  • Be valued for superior account relations (courtesy, integrity, responsiveness).

Suppliers

  • Encourage long-standing, mutually profitable business relationships.
  • Develop the highest component quality standards (fabric, sundries, etc.); clearly define expectations and assist suppliers in achieving satisfactory performance.
  • Involve suppliers in solving problems and developing innovative and superior products.
  • Be viewed as knowledgeable of each supplier's capabilities and needs and a helpful source of support and business counsel.
  • Be valued for superior supplier relations (courtesy, integrity, responsiveness).

The final vision statement is from my own consulting company. It is a little embarrassing to put this in here, and it sounds a little like motherhood and apple pie, but since this whole section is about creating a vision that is clearly one's own, I decided to include it.

Designed Learning

  1. We treat all people who come in contact with us as members of our organization. Each client, supplier, and member of the larger community that contacts us feels understood and cared for. They experience us as acting with integrity even when we choose not to give them what they want. They have the feeling that we are in business to serve and not to exploit others for financial gain. We treat all as family members, and we want each to experience something of value as a result of the contact with us.
  2. We are committed to providing the highest quality, people, learning designs, and materials that are within our capability. Quality means we are congruent with our deepest human values, we deal with underlying issues in our clients, not just the surface ones, and our services are practical and immediately usable. We are in the education business and believe quality education confronts the whole person, tells the truth, and aims right at the center of an issue. Quality means that we will not provide services where they are not needed, even if on occasion a client would be willing to hire us inappropriately.
  3. We market by giving clients as much as we have every moment we are with them. We don't want to tease, lure, or create unneeded dependency for the sake of generating more business.
  4. We treat our employees and suppliers as well as we treat our clients. Our economic philosophy is to pay our employees as much as we can and charge our clients as little as we can. We want our employees to feel that this is their business and when the business does well they will do well. We also want people to share in the downside risk. If some individuals are not valued highly, they need to know that and move on.

These examples are here simply to give an idea of the kind of focus a vision statement might have. The heart of a vision is not so much in the actual words but in the act of creating it and committing ourselves to it. When we create and communicate a vision, we are inviting others to let us know when we are fulfilling it and when we are falling short. That creates accountability for us and is the way we force ourselves to take responsibility for our unit. That's why it is not enough for just top management to create a vision. Every employee needs to go through the process. Once we have a vision, the next steps are to communicate it and to coach others in creating their own vision.

Communicating Our Vision

The essence of political skill is building support for our function and our projects. This takes place through dialogue, and one of the most compelling dialogues we can have is about our vision. Leadership is keeping ourselves focused on the vision, and this means that we have to get comfortable talking about it. We can talk about the vision statement in ways that help command others' interest.

Belief

We need to communicate our faith in the vision, even though we have doubts about how to reach it. If we have committed ourselves to reaching for our preferred future, talking about it with conviction will always be persuasive. Others will often support us simply because of how much we care. The more we talk about the vision, the more committed we become. Our doubts about whether others will support our vision are really a projection of our own doubts. Talking about the vision frequently reduces those doubts and moves us toward the vision.

Poetic Language

We need to feel free to use color and excitement in our language. Words like greatness, service, meaning, perfection, compassion, integrity, and love are emotionally charged words that we can get excited about. They may seem out of place in a work environment, but they are not literally “out of place”; they are just rare. Emotionally charged words may not belong in a goal-setting conversation, but they are the stuff that visions are made of. Perhaps our unique contribution to our unit is to keep us focused on a deeper set of values than simply costs and productivity. We have to believe that most people are searching for meaning, compassion, and integrity at work and that if we are willing to talk about those things, awkward as it may be, it increases our possibility of finding them.

Metaphors

Using metaphors, parables, and picture images is also helpful. We need an image that has meaning for us, an image that gives others a picture of our vision. People have likened their vision to a variety of things:

  • A tree, with a trunk, branches, leaves, seasons, changes, growth
  • The human body, with its different systems, kept going by fresh air and a supply of fresh blood
  • Machinery, cars, airplanes, gyroscopes, radar, submarines
  • A painting, a poem, a string quartet, jazz group, or orchestra
  • Ecosystems, planet Earth

The particular image we choose doesn't matter––only that it is something we care about.

Specific Picture of the Future

The more we can see what the future would look like, the easier it is for us to understand and communicate it to others. It helps sometimes to fantasize that we are in a time capsule, visiting our unit three years from now, and hovering above like a helicopter. Describe what we would see happening. How would we be working with customers and each other? What would meetings look like, what would the budget look like, what would be the nature of our projects, how would people be spending their time, and what would the product or service look like as it came out the door?

All of these qualities of a vision statement help us to communicate it. Talking about our vision in a vivid way also encourages other people to do the same.

Coaching Others in Creating Their Vision

An important part of our leadership role is to work with others to help them put into words their own vision of greatness for the future. Our goal is not simply to have others embody our vision but to support others in embodying their vision. It is an expression of our belief that there is more than one answer. Often when we ask people what their vision is, they say that they don't have a vision. Don't you believe it. Each of us has hopes for a preferred future; it is just that we get so used to responding to others' expectations of us that our own vision remains at an unconscious level. Saying that we don't have a vision can also be an expression of our pessimism. If the prospect of having any control over our own destiny seems like a remote possibility, it is hard to generate any energy for talking about a future of our own choosing. Don't be seduced by passivity or pessimism.

In coaching others there are three qualities we want to look for in their statements: depth, clarity, and responsibility.

  1. Depth. Since the vision statement comes from the heart, it should be as personal as possible.
  2. Clarity. We can help people to be specific by continually asking what they would see if greatness became a reality. Vagueness is a way of not making a commitment to the vision.
  3. Responsibility. A major obstacle to creating a vision is a feeling of helplessness. Victims generate boring vision statements. Asking people to create a vision statement is a way of confronting their feeling of helplessness. The primary reason we demand that people create a vision statement is to reinforce the belief that all of us are engaged in the process of creating this organization, whether we admit it or not. We keep urging people to talk about the unit as if it were theirs to transform in any way that they choose.

Here is a series of questions we have been using to help people discover and articulate their own vision.

  1. Pick an important project you are working on that you care about and are frustrated with. Describe the goals of the project and why you are frustrated.
  2. Next ask why you care so much about the project. Our frustration is an expression of our commitment. If we were not so committed to a project, we would not be so frustrated. We ask people why they care so much about the project as a way of getting at their deeper values about their work. We all have strong values about doing work that has meaning, being of real service to our customers, treating other people well, and maintaining some integrity in the way we work. Keep asking why, why, why until you hear some statements that seem to come from the heart.
  3. Ask what your ideal way of working with your customers looks like. If you revisited your unit three years from now and greatness had been achieved, what would you see happening with customers?
  4. Now ask the same questions about the future, focusing on how you think people should treat each other in the unit. What personal and even spiritual values would you like to see expressed in the way the group operates internally?

The coaching process takes patience. After people are first asked to create a vision, it often takes days or weeks before they are able to come up with a statement that they can get excited about. The patience and effort are worth it. The struggle to create a vision is the struggle with hope and whether our unit is in fact ours to create. The vision statement itself becomes an expression of our enlightened self-interest––namely, how our unit provides meaning, service, contribution, integrity, compassion, and mastery. The process of creating the vision serves to reinforce our intention for an entrepreneurial contract. Once we become clear about our vision of greatness, our task is to begin to act on the vision by creating structures, policies, and practices that support it. Actions grow from each of our specific visions and will be idiosyncratic to our own situation.

Visions of Empowerment

To add to the menu of possibilities, here are some specific steps several companies are taking to support their vision of creating an entrepreneurial and empowered culture. The goal is to have every aspect of organizational life be congruent with the vision. This takes us from policies and practices all the way to office location and decor. Listed below are brief statements of vision and some actions being taken to support these visions.

Vision: Serve the Customer above All Else

Action: (1) Adopt a philosophy that good selling is helping the customer/partner make a good decision. Our philosophy of selling is to help both parties make a good decision. This is different from the belief that the purpose of our selling effort is to convince someone to support our project. If we think of top management or other departments as our partners, then our goal is to maintain a high-quality, long-term relationship. We want partners for life. If we convince them to buy something that is not in their best interest, in the short run we get support for our projects; in the long run we have sacrificed our credibility. If through the use of successful persuasive techniques we gain support for a project that does not work or is not really needed, we have, in effect, mortgaged our future. The pressure is immense in each of us to generate budget support, increase sales, engage in innovative work, and contribute something of unique value to the organization. If we allow that pressure to lead us into making promises we can't keep, we are in trouble.

One more comment on selling. Traditional selling techniques emphasize overcoming objections and closing the deal. The best sales organizations don't worry too much about closing techniques but focus on helping the customer, inside the company or outside the company, feel understood and supported. People buy where they feel understood.

(2) Customer and partner contact. Everyone, in every department, is given the opportunity to spend time with customers and partners. The concept is that everyone is responsible for customer knowledge.

Vision: Operate as a Team in Which Everyone Feels Responsible for the Success of the Team

Action: (1) Performance criteria. Evaluate people according to what they have done to contribute to the success of their peers. Some managers believe that encouraging competition within the organization acts as a toughening motivational device. Sales people are publicly ranked according to sales performance. Different departments are given the same task to see who can come up with the best or quickest solution. Some individuals get publicly compared to others as a form of praise or motivation. These strategies serve to reinforce the belief that employees are here to advance their own career first and serve the organization second. They have it backwards.

(2) Peer recruitment. Teams interview new employees so that each person shares the responsibility for selecting coworkers. Any one team member, including the boss, has veto power over a candidate.

Vision: The Physical Space Reflects the Fact That We Are All Partners in the Business and We Want to Minimize Distance and Fears between Levels in the Organization and between Different Functions

Action: (1) Office location. Relationships across departments are the difficult ones to manage. Place people from different departments next to each other. Instead of grouping people by function, intermingle marketing, finance, government regulation, research and development, manufacturing, software development, and human resources. It's a physical reminder that employees are all part of the same organization.

(2) Office size and decor. All offices at every level are the same size and are equally attractive––comfortable but neither monastic nor luxurious.

(3) Dining rooms. Executive dining rooms disappear. Top management eats in the cafeteria as an antidote to isolation. Many places now have eating and kitchen facilities in the center of the work space. Food is a universal symbol of hospitality. Let it be front and center.

(4) Parking spaces. First come, first served––the reward for getting there early.

(5) Meeting rooms. The physical setting carries a symbolic statement of our intention of how we want people to communicate with each other. If our intent is that everybody has a piece of the action, then a circle is the form we should choose. When we meet in a circle, there is no head or foot of the table and each person can easily see every other person. Long narrow rooms and tables, which are typical boardroom and conference room arrangements, have the effect of reinforcing power differences. Narrow tables or even U-shaped tables inhibit dialogue because you literally cannot see those sitting on the same side of the table. You have to lean way forward or backward just to make eye contact.

For large management/employee meetings, stay away from the auditorium and use the cafeteria. Auditoriums, with unmovable seats and stages, are designed for a star system. The purpose of employee meetings is to reduce the distance between levels. Let the setting reflect that.

The cafeteria belongs to the employees. Meeting there is a way of management's coming to them. Cafeterias also lack the rigidity of an auditorium. Tables and chairs are movable, there is no stage, and there are no stars.

(6) Get the executives off the same, often the top, floor. If top management exists to support and serve the rest of the organization, put executives on the bottom floor. Spread them around. Let them be accessible. The intent is to reduce isolation. Executives don't need status symbols to be motivated and find meaning in their work. Creating physical symbols of status and power simply reinforces the message that we work to pursue our own narrow self-interest. Take away some of the trappings, and we should find out which executives are there to build a business and which are there to look good. We sometimes hear that elegant executive decor is really there to impress outsiders––customers, suppliers, bankers, the community. This is a fragile rationale. If you really need this effect, have a few special rooms set aside for it.

Of course we can get carried away with giving the physical setting too much importance. Sometimes a room is just a room. Architects and space planners, however, tend to have a rather traditional, patriarchal view of organization norms, status, and culture. The architecture and decor need to flow from our vision rather than dictate it.

Vision: People Should Feel Support

Actions: (1) Blame-free meetings. Create a ground rule forbidding any blaming statements. Be especially strict about blaming anyone not in the room. When we blame absent parties, what we don't realize is at the very instant we are blaming them, they are having the same conversation about us. If people in the room are so frustrated with each other that they have to express their negative feelings before they can get on with the business at hand, then allow 20 minutes of blaming statements. The ground rule for this discussion is that people in the room can only make blaming statements and may not defend themselves. After the 20-minute period of blame is over, take a 5-minute break and then reconvene and get on with the agenda.

(2) Give positive feedback. Most organizations are a wasteland of support. It is hard for us to know what we are doing right. Even when we get good results, we aren't sure which of the myriad things we tried made the difference. Specific, positive, personal feedback has a potential that is virtually untapped in most cultures. Close every meeting with a discussion of what gifts we have received from each other in this meeting. Forget about what we are going to do better next time. There is no next time.

(3) Reduce threat as a strategy. The fear of failure has been so internalized by most people that the organization need do nothing to reinforce it as a motivational device. Threats and even consistent “constructive” feedback, which is really negative feedback, increase caution and indirect strategies. There is already enough in work life to put us on shaky ground without management's using fear as a tool. Most of us are already certain that our sins will be punished and our good deeds go unnoticed.

Notes

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