Seth Dobbs (he/him): How often do you think about where you and your team or organization is headed? Have you wondered why you have trouble getting your team to move forward in your absence? Do you have a clear sense of where you’re trying to take the people you lead and do they have that same clear sense themselves? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leaderships along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders, sometimes executives themselves.

And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re going to take today involves the first of the three core principles of leadership that leaders provide vision. And specifically I’m going to talk about the key reasons of why it’s so important to have a vision for everything that you do big or small.

But before I go too far, I want to make it clear. I’m not talking about just a vision statement. But a true full on vision. So to help set the stage, I want to share a quote from the ancient Stoic philosopher Seneca that I think really captures for me the importance of what a good vision does. And he said, “To the person who does not know where they want to go, There is no favorable wind.”

Have you ever experienced that? Being led with no clear direction so it seems like you and your team just can’t catch a break, you can’t find your way forward in doing something meaningful. So years ago I was working with a leader at a hospital system who wanted to create a mobile app for their hospital.

Now that’s a very reasonable idea. There’s a lot of good ones out there now. And the one I use, I actually have several things going on that have me visiting the hospital, a medical system, a little more frequently than an annual checkup. So I actually use one quite a bit. I like it a lot. I can communicate with the doctors, their offices.

I can schedule and cancel and reschedule. I can see test results and follow ups and all that kind of good stuff. But this was maybe six or seven years ago, and the idea here was more of an unreasonable idea. The main goal for this mobile app for a hospital was to create something that would pass the toothbrush test.

Now the toothbrush test is a concept that really hit a bit of notoriety back around 2014. And Larry Page was in an interview and was asked for a strategy for what he thinks about in making acquisitions for Google. And he basically said, I look for things that can pass the toothbrush test, meaning something that people use at least once or twice a day, if not more often than that.

So this made a lot of sense for Google, who’s part of our daily lives for many of us. And so acquiring. More things that sort of pass that test of being used a couple times a day made a lot of sense. It certainly is part of their business model, but going back, we’re actually talking about the goal for a mobile app for a hospital system.

And in this case, it’s a fairly poor vision. How does this notion of just wanting to drive people back to A couple of times a day, drive forward motion in developing the mobile app. What clarity does this concept provide? And you can think that, think about a team that starts wondering, well, how do we make this app pass the toothbrush test?

Can we include daily news feeds? Should we try to be like a social media copy of Facebook or a Twitter or something? Maybe we could include a daily crossword puzzle that might bring people back and help achieve the toothbrush test. So, not surprisingly, there really were no favorable winds for this concept.

We had to constantly ask if any idea made sense and would fit into this vision, but it was so broad, nonspecific, aside from the leader’s opinion. There was no way for us to know if something was really a good idea to put in the app. Ultimately, this vision was around doing, around building something that people might come back to, but it wasn’t about achieving something.

It wasn’t about fulfilling some purpose. And because of that, we were in a pretty rudderless state. We didn’t get very far. They were not a mobile app company. They were a hospital system in the business of caring for people. That business didn’t rely on getting high usage of a mobile app. They’d been providing high quality healthcare for decades without a mobile app.

So this brings us to the principle, Leaders Provide Vision. This is the core of your leadership skills. You don’t need to be perfect at crafting a vision. That takes time, it takes practice. But if you have none, you and the folks you lead are going to pay the price of unfavorable wins. Your team, your organization will struggle to be successful.

Vision is the influence principle. It’s how we motivate people into forward motion. A vision should encompass what you’re trying to achieve, not just do, but achieve, and why you’re trying to achieve it. This gives clarity and purpose. It helps drive forward motion, which you can think of as organizational energy towards achieving some end goal.

together. So this is not just a vision statement. Vision statements are useful as handles to the broader vision and help make it easier to remember, but by themselves can often fail to really accomplish what you need. And it’s because it’s, it’s difficult to put everything you might really want to communicate into a concise pithy statement.

And I think a vision statements often really are for marketing. They’re marketing to your customers. Your investors to current and future members of your organization. That’s not bad. That’s actually great. It’s just incomplete for driving the forward motion and providing clarity. You want your vision to make it clear what you’re trying to achieve and why.

And so to help with that, let me describe the three key ingredients that form a good vision. One, giving a strong sense of purpose to unite your people, your teams in making clear decisions. Two, is having enough information to provide clarity of the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. And three, by combining those first two, having the ability to inspire forward motion, meaning people making decisions and taking action in a way that gets you and your team closer to realizing your goals.

Now, you might hear this and think, well, purpose is actually a mission statement, not a vision statement. And again, I’ll just say, I’m not talking about those prescribed statements. I’m talking about having a full on vision. And I don’t think you can really talk about what you’re trying to achieve without the why behind it.

I think they go hand in hand and without the two together. You’ll still have no favorable winds. So going back to the hospital, I mentioned that was trying to build this mobile app. What if instead of just focusing on the toothbrush test, what if we had embraced the vision of the hospital system? Let’s just say, which is to provide the best medical care for the people in the area.

If we’re going to build a mobile app, It needs to support the vision of that hospital system, perhaps by thinking about how can a mobile app best support that care. So that gives us the why. We want to support providing the best medical care experience possible. We can think of a couple different things we might want to achieve in that context.

We might, might want to achieve creating a closer connection between patients and their doctors. Or maybe it’s all about easier, working through the experience from before you visit all the way until post visit follow up. So supporting all the paperwork, the transportation, getting around the facility, prep work, follow up tests, all that kind of great stuff.

So, this isn’t really about twice a day for a bunch of users. This is a vision of making the patient feel better and more confident in their experience if and when they need to engage. In some ways, the most important forward motion comes from being able to make decisions, from the people you lead being able to make decisions in your absence.

In this case, the team building the mobile app, as simple as this vision was, would still have much better guidance than just trying to pass the toothbrush test. They would be able to prioritize in far better alignment with the goals of the mobile app for the hospital than just a list of some things to do, and I know it when I see it from the leader.

And that’s exactly what you want. You want the people you lead to be able to drive forward motion without you having to constantly look over their shoulders. Vision is how we motivate and at our best even inspire our teams to embrace the future we’re trying to create. That’s whether you’re building a mobile app, a skyscraper, a marketing campaign, a financial plane, whatever it might be.

Arming them with what you are trying to achieve and why can help create autonomy in your team and forward motion. It works. When given a vision, people will work towards it. People typically want to work towards some kind of meaningful goals, but in the absence of a clear vision, they may not work towards the right goals, towards the goals you want them to reach.

And this will result in a lot of action and busyness, Without a lot to show for it. So if you can set a higher bar, if you can provide that strong sense of purpose, give the information, the clarity, and inspire that forward motion, you can channel that energy into really great things. So closing out, I want you to think about whether or not you are working with a vision that meets the criteria that I mentioned, which is one, a strong sense of purpose.

Two, giving enough information to provide clarity on the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. And three, inspiring forward motion. And if you’re not, what can you do differently today to start changing that? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and tell a friend if you liked it, and join me next time when I will talk about shifting your mindset to better center you and your team on achieving real results rather than just spinning wheels.