Read time: 3.4 mins
How To Lead With Vision
The effectiveness of an organisation’s culture depends on the strength of its vision. An ambitious but realistic vision doesn’t only inspire teams to improve; it empowers them to succeed. In today’s dynamic and complex workplace, leaders need to align their personal purpose with their company’s goals and adopt effective strategies to drive high-performance teams.
Watch Phil Smith, Guest Expert on the Oxford Executive Leadership Programme, talk about leading with vision.
Transcript
Vision really overarches and, in some ways, underpins everything one does as a leader, because vision really is about showing the future, showing the way to go for people. And I think if you don’t have a vision, then it’s much too easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day. There’s always so much to do in day-to-day life and day-to-day business that without a vision and without the ability to bring that vision to the people you’re leading, then things can become very mundane, and in fact, you can lose your direction.
Be ambitious with your vision
Now, it’s important when you articulate a vision that that vision feels realistic; but it also can feel very ambitious. For example, when I joined Cisco 25 years ago, it was just at the inception of the web, and Cisco, a year or so after I joined, articulated its vision as changing the way we work, live, play, and learn. Okay, that’s a bit, you know, ambitious to do. I mean, how could we change that so fundamentally? But actually, if you look back now 25 years, or over the last 25 years, that’s exactly what has happened with the internet. Everything has changed. We work differently. We play differently. We learn differently.
So, I think sometimes visions that are as broad as that can be very powerful in aligning people, and, most importantly, in aligning the culture of an organisation. Because one thing I think is probably more important than anything in business is how you get a culture of an organisation to be effective, and I think the vision is right at the front of that.
Build a strong company culture
If you’re a company, again, like Cisco who sells technology that often sits inside a cupboard, you know, you could tell people, you know, “We want to be the best in any cupboard in any building”. Well, that’s not a great vision. But if you tell people you want to change the way that you work, live, play, and learn, when people work, they engage with that much more actively. They recognise that the things they do are about actually making a difference. And so, I think for you to build a culture where people become aspirational, want to really do things very differently, is incredibly powerful if you can articulate a vision well.
Bringing that kind of vision is a very strong first step to articulating and developing a culture inside an organisation. And when you start to develop a culture in an organisation, it becomes the thing that underpins the sorts of people you hire, the way your people behave, the way that you measure people, and so on. You can start to frame all of that inside this particular context.