When your employees know which direction to follow, you can create much better results.
Rani Hørlyck turned a school in crisis into a success by sticking to her vision and demanding everyone follow.
Maybe you've heard it before, and maybe it sounds silly? As fancy words with no real meaning, or as something a management team and some consultants have come up with without employees being able to use it for anything?
If so, it's because the work on the vision hasn't been good enough. A well-articulated vision that everyone understands and subscribes to can be the key to success for both you and your business.
But how do you do it? School principal Rani Hørlyck can certainly speak to that.
In 2008, she took over Søndervangskolen in Aarhus, which was threatened with closure. Student well-being and parental satisfaction were at rock bottom, and absenteeism was sky-high. More and more people were opting out of the school, which had children of 23 different nationalities and only about a tenth of ethnic Danish children. And nicknames like 'ghetto school', 'troublemaker school' and 'mini-Beirut'.
"It was a troubled school and there were many perceptions of what our job was. So the starting point for me was that if we were to succeed in the task we were created for, we needed to make a significant change," says Rani Hørlyck.
She saw a clear need to set a vision to create a shared understanding of what tasks were important to prioritize and how students and teachers should interact on a daily basis.
"As a manager, I made a clear offer instead of putting it up for discussion, so I was quite uncompromising. There was a need for a clear vision that could provide a common understanding of what kind of task we should prioritize," says Rani Hørlyck.
The article continues in the next section.
Management in private companies
Choosing the right words
Articulating vision and values clearly enough can be a challenge. But the recipe for a successful vision is provided in the book Vision Leadership by Christian Nyvang Qvick, management consultant at LEAD - enter next level.
He believes the most important thing is to communicate what a vision is, as many people are unclear about it and how it differs from, for example, strategy. A vision is the organization's picture of a desirable, long-term future. The vision is about the end goal, while the strategy is more about the initiatives, initiatives and actions that support the realization of the vision.
Christian Nyvang Qvick encourages you as a manager to engage in a dialogue with your employees about vision and strategy - so that it becomes clear what the organization is particularly concerned with succeeding with and how the vision will contribute to this.
Be careful that the vision doesn't just become something that happens inside your own head. Communicate it so that it doesn't become a management solo project, because it needs to be a joint process," he says.
