How to Communicate the Vision of the Company so Your Team Cares

If you’re a people leader you likely know the disconnect between the vision of the company and what your team is actually working on. At the end of the day, its likely aligned to a degree but if we don’t communicate the vision with our teams it will certainly feel disconnected. When you don’t communicate the vision and keep it connected to the work that you and your team does, that is when it lives as a statement painted on a wall or a pretty note on the ‘About’ section of the website. For the company’s vision and values to truly guide the work that is done, it is up to you to communicate it, live it with integrity, and inspire your team to do the same.

Do we need to communicate the vision?

Why do we care if they care about the vision? This could be a blog article all on its own. Caring about the vision impacts engagement, retention, accuracy, innovation, willingness to change, on and on. For the purpose of today I’m going to focus on two reasons. First, it engages employees in their work because they better understand how they are impacting the big picture. It is hard to make widgets every day. It is hard to be on the phone with customers all day. When you don’t see how widgets and phone calls support the whole process it’s easy to back off on the goal. Or in some cases, leave the goal out of mind all together.

This leads to my next point, strategic decision making. When you don’t understand what the vision and the values of the organization are you aren’t able to make decisions that support them. Sure, you might get lucky now and then. Overall though, you’re just creating a world where you work every day on projects that in some ways are leading you further away from the vision because you’re not focused on it. That sounds a little doom and gloom. I explain this point more in my YouTube video this week. Click here to learn more on how communicating the vision impacts strategic decision making.

My team couldn’t draw the line from vision to daily work

Years ago our organization was moving to an updated vision and value system for the company. It wasn’t a huge shift and it was more in depth than it was previously. As with so many companies, it was very easy to see how the vision and each value applied to Sales and Customer Care. There is always a clear line between the focus of the company and its revenue and customers. My teams, which comprised more than 50 people, didn’t touch either side of that critical coin. I know every goal and metric is somehow tied to this vision. Still, it was hard to see how any of it directly impacted my team. I didn’t want to lose out on the benefits of them understanding the impact of the values. I needed to communicate the vision often and strategically.

How did I start communicating the vision?

First and foremost, I updated my huddle board. The basics of the vision and values were reflected there and visible for every team member for each huddle. I also positioned the board so that people would happen to see it multiple times per day on their way to the cafeteria. During huddles we walked through every obstacle, lesson, suggestion, and achievement. With each I asked the team what value or part of the vision they saw it tied to. If no one came up with one, I’d ask if it needed to be done.

The first time I did that was with a problem in a functionally required project. Users weren’t adopting the functionality and using it to its capability. The team couldn’t see how it was connected with technology advancements, customer experience, etc. This was a people issue they determined. We are not lazy, and we adopt change weren’t part of the vision statement after all. Their jaws dropped when I asked if it needed to be fixed. I doubled down saying, well, if it doesn’t support our mission, vision, or values at all don’t you think we should ignore the problem or scrap the project?

After a moment of looking at me like I had two heads (this was a company initiative that I had no authority to scrap) I got a few responses. One person said that without this project customer service representatives wouldn’t be able to help customers quickly. Another chimed in that the problem was actually a tech issue that people were avoiding by going back to the old process. Fixing the glitch supported our tech value. As it turned out, the problem and project that no one could connect actually supported 3 of the 5 values and, of course, the vision.

What’s the impact of connecting the vision to the work?

There were very few leaders who focused on vision and values in this practical sense. I know that sounds like I’m patting myself on the back (note I didn’t say I was the only one). This was made pretty clear in an all hands meeting a few months later.

An executive stood at the front of the room presenting on different opportunities and challenges we’d seen in the past 6 months. He asked the group of hundreds why these were important and why the issues might keep him up at night. For a moment the room was pretty quiet. Then, a member of my team stood up and explained how the problem impacted the vision. Anything else? he asked. Another person stood and connected an opportunity to a value. This continued and in all, 10 people stood up and shared. All of them but 1 was from one of my teams. These people who were arguably the least impacted by the values and vision had developed the best insight on its impact.

That executive started asking me to share my approach with other leaders. This is the same approach I’m sharing with you below.

Communicate the vision frequently.

Organizations posting their mission and values gets a bad rap. It is a good thing to have your vision and mission statement in plain view. It is a good thing to have them discussed at the beginning of meetings or referenced in emails. All of that is good, it just isn’t enough. Sharing the mission, the vision, and the values frequently keeps them at the forefront of people’s minds. It helps everyone be on the lookout for examples. I want to be very clear on this, I encourage you to go deeper, but simply sharing and posting these critical pieces of the business so people encounter them frequently is a great place to start.

Consistent supportive examples show the vision.

First step, see the examples for yourself. If you aren’t connecting work to the vision, you won’t be able to communicate the vision well. Then, share examples with your team. Make the examples relevant, and aspirational. Aspirational examples help communicate the vision because they are still at arm’s reach. Without all of the details it’s easier to draw clean clear lines. Marketing supported our inclusivity goal by including pictures of differently abled people and those of different races in ads. This might be a great example for Accounting in the beginning. They don’t have to deal with all of the frustrating details and long, drawn-out projects that Marketing knows occurred. They just get the benefit of clean, clear lines.

As the group matures in their understanding of the vision and values, use more concrete and personal examples. Linda worked overtime and cleared out the whole queue before the holiday. That means customer experience will be at its best during a busy post-holiday rush. This type of example gives credit to the hard work and demonstrates why the hard or painful part was valuable. Linda probably didn’t want to work overtime just before a holiday. Giving her credit in this way acknowledges her sacrifice and points it directly at the benefit to the vision for customer experience. There will be examples you can use every single day. Your challenge is to find them. Feel free to enlist your team to be on the lookout too. See the next step.

Get the team involved.

You might have to start out by talking at the team. Your team may need you to actually draw the lines for them for a little while. I would literally point at the achievement or obstacle and physically slide my hand up to the value it was connected to. This helped people literally connect the dots in their head. But eventually they need to be drawing the connections. It can be figuratively rather than literally if you want. Get them to the point that they are critically thinking through the work they are doing. Get them to the point that when things are hard they understand why the hard times are valuable. You can sing the bunny song while you tie their shoes for a while but eventually you need to sit on your hands and let them go around the tree.

Communicate the vision with your teams. Like now.

Sadly, of those first groups of leaders I shared how I engaged my teams in the vision, only a few took and ran with it. That is because simply agreeing that sharing the vision and understanding how to do it isn’t enough. To see results you need to take action. Hearing, seeing, and knowing only make up about a third of the process, the rest is doing. So, go out and do this with your teams. If you’re not a people leader, you still have the opportunity to coach up on this. Make a reference of the vision and values for your organization. Do these exercises for yourself and when you get stuck, ask that all important question to your boss. How is this connected to our values? If we can’t connect it, should we keep it as a priority?