Inspiring vision – inspiring people

This article is written by Shawn Gibson P.Eng, PCC for Incito Executive & Leadership Development .

What kind of impact does your vision have on the people around you? I’m often in leadership discussions about the future of an organization where the topics start out around an ambitious goal – to be the leader in… or achieve a revenue target of X. Recently, one leader of a small business explained, “I would like to have 5x our current revenue in 2-3 years so that I can have flexibility when and where I work.” This falls short when it comes to inspiring your customers, shareholders, employees and everyone else that supports your organization.

Visions of the future should be ambitious.

Your organization has an important contribution to make, and your vision should offer insight into the kind of ambition you seek. Inspiring others require the ambition to reflect the uniqueness of your organization, and when left out, it can sound like a tired catchphrase. Imagine an organization in the agriculture industry having a vision “...to feed the world”. It is, of course, ambitious however lots of great organizations play an important role in that cause. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN has a vision to “achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives.” It brings context into a highly ambitious cause.

Your vision should be a call to a greater purpose.

It’s much easier to build a strong and inspiring vision by looking at your organization’s purpose from the perspective of multiple stakeholders. As Simon Sinek explains, “the words that you choose should be an invitation to those who want to contribute to what you believe.” In my small business example, the vision lacks purpose and is particularly relevant to the founder. What about to employees on the front lines, what about the customers? HP is often used as an inspirational reference for management practices. Think about the purpose and multiple perspectives HP captures in their vision, “to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere — every person, every organization, and every community around the globe. This motivates us — inspires us — to do what we do. To make what we make. To invent, and to reinvent. To engineer experiences that amaze. We won’t stop pushing ahead, because you won’t stop pushing ahead. You’re reinventing how you work. How you play. How you live. With our technology, you’ll reinvent your world.” I can buy into the HP vision.

Core values and vision inspire the right actions.

A vision inspires those around us to make decisions and take the right actions even when no one is looking. This means we need to reference our core values in our vision. Netflix is known for its attention to culture and values. At Netflix, “we value integrity, excellence, respect, inclusion, and collaboration. What is special about Netflix, though, is how much we: 1) encourage independent decision-making by employees, 2) share information openly, broadly and deliberately, 3) are extraordinarily candid with each other, 4) keep only our highly effective people, 5) avoid rules”. I appreciate how the values are translated into actions that are easy to understand and observe.

Bringing it all together

The strongest examples of inspiring visions are ambitious, purposeful and reflect your organizational core values. They should evoke rich, exciting and emotional images in our minds that are relevant to those who want to contribute.

When you reflect on your own organization’s vision, is it having the impact you want?

The original version of this article is on the Incito blog , where you'll find more insights on trending leadership topics.