you talk about creating a vision you say the concept of a leader providing a vision to an organization they lead is at least 2 000 years old in the kings james version of the bible proverbs 29 18 reads where there is no vision the people perish an early point in my experience leading people i became aware that providing a vision of the future was one of the most important things a leader can do the whole concept of leadership is about taking people to a place where they could not reach on their own i have found that when i provide a vision of the future to a group i lead it motivates and inspires them to work toward achieving a desired end state that is why i believe creating a shared vision and communicating it consistently are important roles of a leader visualizing achievement is essential if you are to gain success a vision must be a simple unique ideal image of the future ideally the vision a leader develops should be a shared vision a shared vision not only does not only mean everyone in the organization believes in the vision but also that representat representative members of the organization have provided input to create the vision occasionally i’ll get i talk about decentralized command all the time with all the companies i work with and occasionally i’ll get someone saying hey you know i i i feel like that the team doesn’t really know where we’re going and i’m trying to lead him in the right direction but i don’t want to impose it on him and and i say listen it is okay for a leader sometime to say hey everyone this is where we’re going because not everyone has the visibility that you have from your leadership perspective you know if you’re in charge of a project not everyone can see all the moving pieces so they might not see hey this is where we need to go this is what we’re doing is it good to get input for that collective vision absolutely absolutely but you may be in a situation where other members of the team don’t have the vision that you have because just because of where you’re sitting or where you’re standing you can see a little bit more you have a little bit more visibility on things so sometimes you do have to make the vision and as soon as you make that vision your vision doesn’t isn’t uh written in stone or you shouldn’t write your vision in stone if you write your vision in stone you’re probably making a mistake and some people might think that that sounds weak well you know what are you going to change your vision actually i may change the vision if we get to a point where we need to do something just like when you’re in ramadi you say hey wait a second we’ve been doing things like this we’re not getting any progress with the shakes the shakes are telling us oh guess what we’re going to do adjust our vision so there’s nothing wrong with adjusting your vision and there’s nothing wrong with if you’re not getting feedback it’s okay cool watch this here’s the vision here’s what we’re gonna do start moving that direction adapt as needed yeah yeah you know uh totally agree uh one one thing i learned when got this is back uh around late 90s around the year 2000 was before 9 11 uh when i took command of 55th brigade uh you know national guard brigade so you know about 3 000 soldiers distributed across northeastern pennsylvania down toward the philadelphia area and you know 85 percent of them had full-time civilian jobs so like man i got to develop a vision for this organization in order for us to show some you know to move forward here and what i did is i went around uh to representative uh samplings of soldiers who were part of that brigade i would talk to a pfc that had like a year in the army you know i would talk to a major who had you know maybe 16 17 years in the army and and every in a few folks in between there i mean 3 000 soldiers you can’t talk to all of them and say hey where do you want to see this brigade go and and uh the question i would ask them i would say hey you know if you fell asleep for five years and woke up five years from now what would you want to see this brigade look like then you know and uh the funny thing is whether it was a soldier low rank one-year experience or higher ranking officer with 17 years experience everybody kind of wanted the same thing they wanted to be well trained so if we had to deploy we’d be able to do our job successfully and that ended up essentially what what what the vision was so what it taught me uh and this goes for any business leader out there trying to develop a vision for their organization and and many organizations are working distributed now you know with the pandemic and everything else it’s try to get it you know when i say shared vision try to get a representative sample if you could of where people would like to see it go and ultimately you as the leader like you said you you’ve got a broader view of everything so yeah it’s you’ve finally got to put a stake in the ground and say yeah this is going to be our vision but i think it’s a good idea to get a representative um sampling of those in your organization and uh and then you know when you get it out there you know you you’ve got to you’ve got to share it in a in a multitude of ways you know when you’re speaking to people one-on-one you’ve got to communicate that vision when you’re speaking to a group of 500 you’ve got to communicate the vision through email through your website through whatever you know social media means you you might uh want to use but the division then has to be consistent you know it can’t be a a new flavor of the month or a new vision of the quarter you know like you said visions could change but it shouldn’t it shouldn’t be changing on a very very frequent basis so that that’s what i learned about developing a vision you know over 20 years ago yeah and it’s it’s it’s always interesting like that’s alignment right no matter who you talk to you talk to a frontline individual that’s been in the army for six months you talk to someone that’s been in the army for 20 years enlisted officer on both ends of that spectrum and they all say oh well i’d like that if we get deployed we’re ready to do our job you can make so many decisions based on that just knowing that right there hey is it going to help us do our job if we spend time you know clowning around at work on our drill weekend is it going to help us be ready to do our job no it’s not so let’s do something else and that goes up and down the chain of command and now that we have that shared aligned vision now we can all make a bunch of decisions just based on the fact that we know that when we deploy we want to be ready to do our job we want to be effective okay does this help us be effective or not and we can make a decision so that’s important stuff
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