Creating a Positive Vision

Recently an executive asked me “Is this vision thing overrated?” It’s a great question and many times in my career I’ve had managers and executives tell me that they really don’t see the power and emphasis placed on leadership and vision. What’s really neat about vision, is a simple definition. It’s a clear mental picture described in words. And what’s neat about vision is, all of us have a vision, everyone has a vision, even your most negative employee has a vision. And it’s one of three visions.

Vision number one is a positive vision. These leaders deeply believe that tomorrow is going to be even better than it was today and, “I’m helping to lead it.”

Vision number two is what we describe of a vision of the status quo. “I hope that sales are as good next quarter as they were this quarter.” Or, “I hope my budget for next year is the same as my budget this year because it worked.”

And vision number three, it’s a negative vision. These are the employees who walk around going, “You know how bad things are? Just wait, it’s going to get worse.” I’ve got some bad news for you. If you’ve got one of these negative visionaries on your team; they aren’t ever leaving you. They’re with you for a lifetime and you ask why? “If they’re not happy, they don’t like the company, and they don’t like me, why don’t they leave? I’d leave.”

They don’t leave because of their vision. They actually have a vision that the next place is going to be even worse than your team. And the second reason they don’t leave is everybody who’s ever worked with them and left is not taking them with them.

A great analogy for a vision, is a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t know many of you really enjoy building one of those 1000 or 2000 piece jigsaw puzzles, I hate them. And I hate them because I always work on them for two or three hours and I glance over at my five or my six pieces and then I glance over at the box top and I glance back at my five or six pieces and the only thought going through my, bottom line, results oriented mind is “why are you duplicating the effort? This is not going to be a huge surprise when you’re done, we got the end result staring at you right there.”

When you think about the job of a leader, it ties right in to a positive vision. The job of the leader is to continuously improve the condition of their team or of their organization. So, with this new information on vision, go do your job and continuously improve the condition of your team and your organization.