When a leader shares their vision to the team, it becomes the team’s vision. The reason the team follow the leader is because they have that vision that leads to a team goal or purpose. The leader must inspire their team to take on the vision and purpose as their own, both as individuals and as a team.
In my previous articles and other resources, I have discussed how you can communicate your vision and purpose to your team, and that was through sharing my articles and resources. For example, a book study must be led by you as you are the leader.
1. Communicating Your Vision
However, you can go beyond you and your team. My books can be shared with the other leaders within your organisation because the vision that you have could spread across all teams.
When this happens, you will start to see the culture within your organisation change into a highly effective leadership culture, that started with you.
So, my recommendation to you is, read this article yourself first, know and understand the content, then carry out a book study with your team.
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Then, do the same with the other leaders within your organisation, and encourage them to get their own copy of my one of my books so they can lead their own book studies.
If you don’t act on my recommendation, then it will be just yourself and your team with the knowledge of how a highly effective team works. It will just be you and your team that share your team’s vision.
Share your vision and the new knowledge you have with your fellow leaders and grow your vision into a highly effective leadership culture.
2. Culture
The reason I write my books was to help leaders like yourself to understand what a journey the change of culture is like. I want to help you prepare well for this journey as you start to share your vision with your team, as you start to gain their buy-in and raise their awareness.
When you start to work on gaining buy-in, you will need to ensure you don’t share any confusing messages that will force your team to resist. Using my books as help is a great start, but you will need help from the other leaders within your organisation too.
Before you carry out any leadership development with your team and others, it is my recommendation that you share my books with the other leaders and carry out a book study with them. These leaders can then become your highly effective leadership culture team.
Your highly effective leadership culture team will help you in sharing your vision and gaining the buy-in from others. There are going to be questions from all sides of the organisation, from other teams, supervisors, and managers.
Your highly effective leadership culture team will help you in answering those questions. They will know your vision because you will have inspired them to take this on as their own, both as individuals and as a highly effective leadership culture team.
3. Your Team’s Buy-In
You will have introduced them to my books, shared your vision with them, gained their buy-in first and then showed them how to gain the buy-in from the rest of the organisation. It will be such a challenge, but when you start to see this work it will bring a lot of joy to you.
It is your responsibility to set the direction for the mission, and share the vision with your team, and now your highly effective leadership culture team filled with other leaders.
Your message must be very clear to avoid your team becoming confused in any way, and that they fully understand your reasoning behind your mission and vision.
The best way to avoid any confusion is through what you do and how you behave. Not only through what you say. As I say have discussed a lot, you must talk the talk, but more importantly you must walk the walk.
But, as you are talking the talk and walking the walk, you must help your team to talk the same talk and walk the same walk as you. If your team are not behaving or communicating in the same way as you, then there is going to be a problem.
Your vision must be the thread throughout the team, if it is not then you will be the problem that you will need to provide a solution for.
That is why this article is named “The Team’s Vision” because we all need to know, understand, buy-in and take on the vision as our own, both individually and as a team.
What you and the team must do is hold each other to account on this vision. You and the team are in this together as a whole. It is not an “Us and Them” situation. It is one team, one mission, one vision.
I have discussed in my earlier articles about sharing the content in my books and bringing people up to speed as early as possible. When you bring people up to speed as early as possible, they can become aligned with the mission and vision straight away.
4. Increasing Your Influence
This will also be your opportunity to increase your influence and lead other leaders who are higher than you within your organisation. The way to do that is to share my books with them and explain the reasons why you want to share it.
My recommendation would be to read this article first and work on exactly how you are going to share it with the higher leaders. This is only if you are not already the highest rank leader within the organisation of course.
The reason I say this is because the highest rank leader must share the same vision as you do, they must buy-in to your vision and they must take on your vision as their own. When they do this, their influence in sharing your vision with the organisation will be a lot more powerful.
Always remember, you don’t have to be in a leadership, management, or supervisory position to change the culture within an organisation. Especially if you want to change it to a highly effective leadership culture. But, to achieve this culture, it must come from the very top first.
As an example, in 2021 I joined an engineering railway project in the UK as their Chief Engineer. The project was fitting a new train control system to freight locomotives that were owned by a number of different UK freight operators.
The train control system had been fitted on locomotives within mainland Europe, and it was now time to fit it in the UK. The project consisted of approximately 700 locomotives, so you can imagine it was huge.
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By the time I joined as Chief Engineer, not one locomotive had been fitted with this system, and the project had been running for at least four years. So, after a few months of being on the project, I had the vision of fitting the first vehicle within 2022.
I shared this vision with the project director, Michael. We were both very excited about making this vision happen, so we started to share it with the UK wide project.
Every meeting we attended we shared our vision, and the other teams that we worked alongside bought into this vision and took it as their own.
Then with all the work necessary to make our vision come true, before 2022 was out, we had declared which freight operator, which fitment partner and which locomotive was going to make our vision a reality. Fitment started and the project had achieved a huge milestone that it hadn’t yet seen.
As a leader when sharing our vision, we are asking our people to follow us to a place that they can only see in their minds. By taking this vision on as their own takes courage. It is up to us as leaders to acknowledge that and ensure that when our vision becomes a reality, it is exactly what we visualised.
I welcome hearing how this post has influenced the way you think, the way you lead, or the results you have achieved because of what you’ve learned in it. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me by commenting below.
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All the best,
