Communicating your vision is a pretty important part of your role as a leader. Yet it's something a lot of people have great difficulty with. It was discussed a lot on a recent leadership development programme I worked on, both in the main room and in the smaller coaching group I was leading, and during these discussions I noticed something which I think is significant and which might help in this area.
When people were specifically asked to explain their vision, a few things typically seemed to happen. They got a little anxious, they started to think about what "should" be in a vision, and they started to look for inspiration from corporate strategy or other vision statements they had read. In other words it was a pretty cognitive (left brain) process. And the end result was usually pretty impersonal and uninspiring - it didn't create much emotional connection.
When they were asked to talk about something apparently purely personal, eg why they still stayed with the organisation, or the story of their ideal future with the orgnaisation, something completely different happened. They usually spoke straight from the heart, they didn't talk about business strategy but painted a picture of what it will be like in the future (how it feels, what is seen as important in the organisation, how others see it etc). It was usually truly inspiring - engaging me emotionally and raising their and my energy.
And it struck me this is just another application of my principle that business is always personal. Their personal answers were their business visions. If the purpose of your vision is to inspire the people you lead, you have to engage their emotions not their rationality. And the place to start is with what truly inspires you, ie where you, as the leader, want to go.
