The vision for your organization is clear and now it's time to implement it. It may sound straightforward, but both Danish and international research shows that vision management is a difficult discipline.
Vision leadership is fundamentally about setting a meaningful direction for your organization through a vision. And when it succeeds, it has a huge impact on key factors such as motivation and performance. Vision management places great demands on you as a leader. It's important to be aware of the key elements of this form of leadership and the pitfalls you need to be aware of.
Four key elements
When leaders succeed in vision leadership, it has a positive impact on the organization:
- It creates a clear picture of the desired future and direction
- It provides a clear benchmark to prioritize by
- It contributes to meaningful and motivating work
- It provides a clear yardstick to evaluate the organization's performance against
Vision management places high demands on your imagination and translation skills. Without meaning-making and translation, a phrase such as "customer/citizen-centric" is just empty words. Therefore, you need to be able to clarify and communicate the desirable future for the organization (the vision) and make it meaningful to employees.
When the vision is successfully and meaningfully translated into everyday organizational life, it becomes a common foundation and guiding light for employees and management.
Management in private companies
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Pitfalls in working with vision management
Vision management has great potential, but is still a difficult management discipline. It requires a sense of where your employees are and how the vision makes a difference to their everyday lives and tasks.
If the desired positive effects of vision management fail to materialize, it could be due to one of the following pitfalls.
1. The vision doesn't have the right focus
The vision should be oriented towards the difference your organization wants to make for customers/citizens and society as a whole. In other words, the vision should focus on the organization's core mission.
The organization's leaders and employees must be able to clearly see a concrete difference they are passionate about in the vision. If, on the other hand, the vision has a distinctly internal focus on, for example, motivation, well-being or professionalism, which can rather be seen as the means to succeed with the core task, the vision may risk losing its impact.
2. The leader does not translate the vision into the everyday life of the employees
Be careful that the vision doesn't just become a "cheering paper animal" that only lives in the boardroom, managers' heads and desk drawers. The vision needs to be translated so that employees understand what it means for their daily work, task performance and organizational practices.
Unfortunately, visions often remain vague and fluffy, making it difficult for employees to take concrete action. A key tool for clarifying the "lived vision" is examples that demonstrate the desired behavior.
3. Leadership is forgotten and the professional comfort zone is preferred
As a manager, you carry with you organizational and professional experiences that influence leadership. In particular, the professionalism of the individual leader has a significant impact on leadership behavior. This is both a gift and a challenge.
Professional insight can qualify the work and management of employees, but at the same time, professionalism can prevent the manager from fully stepping into the leadership role.
The pitfall is that the manager digs into their professional comfort zone and consequently loses sight of the bigger picture of the organization and the vision.
Difficult discipline with great potential
If you as a leader focus on the key elements and know how to navigate around the pitfalls, vision management has great potential.
It's a difficult leadership discipline that requires imagination, communication skills and a sense of where employees are and how the vision affects their work.
In turn, vision leadership can provide the organization with a common driving force that can boost both motivation and performance.
