Seth Dobbs (he/him): Does the vision for your team set clarity and purpose? Does it not only excite your team, but will it also drive consistent forward motion towards your organization’s goals? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, 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 teams and organizations, and in coaching others to become leaders 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 in 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 taking today involves understanding how when you get vision right, it brings clarity, confidence, and drives forward motion, but that getting it wrong can lead to confusion, dissatisfaction, and create further problems from that. For today, I want to use a made up story.

Let’s say you recently took over a toy company, a for-profit, private sector organization. Now this toy company is struggling, it’s losing revenue, profits are going down, and you want to turn things around. In fact, that’s why you were hired. So let’s run a few scenarios on your attempts to create a vision.

Take one. Let’s try stating the obvious so you take command of the organization and announce the new vision. “We’re gonna be the best toy company in the world.” This is great, right? Lots of applause. Everyone runs off and makes you and your organization the best it could be, or so you hope.

The product team sees this declaration as an opportunity to change. They’ve been wanting to shift to more electronic based toys, and clearly that’s what’s needed to be the best. So they put together their R&D budget, their multi-year timeline, and come back to the next meeting prepared and ready to move forward on your vision.

The manufacturing team sees your declaration as an opportunity to change moving towards a more repeatable, commodified approach to building their products so that people perceive them as the best and they return armed with a few recommendations on how to change the product designs to fit into a “better” manufacturing approach.

And then the sales team sees this as an opportunity to be the best by copying the competitors, but constructing the toys with cheaper materials so that they can outsell them and they come back together with their different ideas. And all of them argue with each other,

unproductively, uncertain on how to reach your vision. So take two. Let’s try and try again. You weren’t clear enough, you realize. So you try to get everyone back on track by saying what you really want is to have the most loved toys, because if people love our toys, they’re gonna buy more. Now the same cycle occurs.

They each go off with different ideas, different paths of execution, and when they come back together, no results. So take three. Let’s try again , in more desperate times. So you weren’t clear enough and things are getting worse. So now you announce “we’re going to be the most profitable toy company in the world.”

You have smart people, you know they can figure this out, except there are so many different ways to become profitable. You can increase top line income, you can reduce costs, you can do all sorts of different things that make you profitable. So still no one in your organization knows what to do to reach your vision.

There’s no consistent approach to moving forward because no one knows what forward looks like. And eventually you’re out of business.

It’s important to understand that it’s not just what the vision is, it’s what the vision does and the visions you’ve tried so far in this example of the toy company only serve to create confusion. And as trivial as these examples might seem, there are many organizations and companies that do similar things that use high level platitudes to try to guide large organizations. And sure with that approach you can generate some excitement around wanting to be the best, wanting to be the most loved and and so forth. But to a certain extent, it’s like empty calories. It might give your team a brief jolt, but it’s not enough to sustain them. And worse, it provides no clarity.

And, in the examples that we had, what does “the best” mean? . There were multiple interpretations, and that’s the thing. The problem with platitudes with simple concepts like “the best”, “the most loved”, is that no one actually knows what it means. If your company had 50 employees, you’d probably have 50 different definitions of what “the best” would mean.

And imagine if your company has 50,000 and that’s all that you’ve offered them. So the end result of that is low motivation, teams working at odds with each other’ and the company continuing to sink. And that’s the thing with vision statements. They are simplifications. They have their place and they can be very useful,

don’t get me wrong. But a vision statement, a single sentence is no substitute for a full vision. What a full vision needs to do is drive forward motion, ideally by providing purpose and clarity and so that your team can make decisions in your absence that move them in the right direction. This means you should focus less on finding the perfect words and more on imparting the ideas.

No matter how beautiful a statement you make, how perfect the wording, it’s useless if your vision doesn’t actually drive forward motion. So with that said, let’s try to make a, a better version of a vision for the toy company. This isn’t gonna be perfect, but I’m going to address a few key ingredients to give a sense of purpose and direction in the vision.

So let’s give it a try. “We want to be the best toy company. We want people to see our toys as the premium choice, innovative, engaging, and worth a high-end price tag because of how great they are in getting kids involved in play. And innovative means we’re not going to be followers. We want to introduce new forms of play, new forms of creativity in our toys.

And engaging means that our toys won’t just end up on the shelf after a kid plays with it a couple times, but that they’ll keep wanting to use it. And if we do those things right, we should be able to charge a premium price and differentiate ourselves from the competition. And ultimately our toys will become part of children’s lives.

Children that play with any of our toys will find so much joy from playing with them that they’ll eagerly await the next one we make. And when they grow up, they’ll look back fondly on the times they spent with our products.” Now, this isn’t perfect and more is probably needed, but what it does do is bring clarity to who my toy company is and what we’re trying to accomplish.

There’s a sense of purpose: becoming part of childhood memories. There’s clarity on how we want to do that: by being innovative and engaging, not just a commodity, not just a copycat. Successfully crafting a meaningful vision isn’t measured by having a big banner on your office walls. It’s measured by seeing the team assembling and moving towards creating the desired outcomes, to fulfilling the purpose.

it also means that your team can make decisions on their own that keeps propelling in the right direction. I’ll often use a page or two to document a vision, including purpose, key outcomes, guiding principles, and so forth to help clarify direction and enable aligned decision making. But regardless of the length of your vision, the key measure is whether or not your vision is clear enough to drive forward motion.

So the next few episodes this season will help fill in more details. Understanding that the vision sets the bar, it sets the target and provides high level guidance by which progress should be measured. Clarity of what and why will do that. This often takes more than just a simple statement to accomplish.

So I’ll explore aspects of communicating your vision to ensure you have a truly motivated team. In my experience, I find that clarity of vision and purpose always makes a difference.

Now, after spending several decades in the private sector, I recently moved into the public sector leading a nonprofit organization, and to prepare for this, I did a bit of reading on managing a nonprofit to make sure I understood legal, financial, and other implications of being in a nonprofit. But what was interesting is that several authors of books around nonprofit management made statements along the lines of, ” well, while the private sector has the simple purpose of making money” and things like “in a traditional corporation, you can just tell people what to do,”

they contrasted that with, “in the nonprofit world, you need to have a sense of purpose.” Based on my own experience, I believe that for-profits also need a sense of purpose to succeed, to align people. I’ll also say that nonprofits absolutely need money and need to be focused on that.

So without purpose, without a real vision, companies are just going through the motions regardless of their industry, regardless of whether they’re for profit, public good, or whatever their purpose might be. A lack of, it just brings a lack of clarity and a lot of spinning. So again, in the next few episodes, I’m gonna provide some enabling principles to help make this concept more real and more easy to execute on.

I’ll close with asking you to think about, do you have a vision or only a vision statement? Are you clear on your purpose and the desired outcomes? Or do you just have a to-do list? And what can you do today to start refining and clarifying your vision with your team? Thanks so much for joining me.

Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend. If you liked it, you can send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. And join me next episode where I’ll talk about how to view progress by outcomes, not just completed tasks.